In recent years the history of Sephardic Jews has emerged as a vibrant field of study. The two books by John Efron and Carsten Schapkow shed light on an earlier rediscovery of Sephardic history among German Jews during the Emancipation period. In the late eighteenth century German Jewish writers, scholars, and cultural consumers became interested in Sephardic life in medieval Spain. The “allure of the Sephardic” among German-speaking Jews lingered beyond full emancipation in the 1860s and early 1870s. One example is Theodor Herzl's careful creation of his public persona. The Zionist leader depicted himself repeatedly as descendant of a Sephardic family, even though his ancestors were Ashkenazim. Herzl told a friend that his paternal great-grandfather fled from Spain after his forced conversion to Catholicism. Perhaps not coincidentally, Herzl's imagined story resembles the plot lines of novels about Jewish exiles from Spain that were popular with Jewish readers in mid-nineteenth-century Germany.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, German Jewish authors and scholars produced a wide range of texts about Sephardic culture and history, ranging from fiction to scholarly works. Perceptions of Sephardic Jewish culture also influenced the neo-Moorish style of synagogue buildings and Jewish aesthetics in and beyond Germany. What drove the German Jewish curiosity in Sephardic history? The main cause, as John Efron succinctly points out in his introduction, was the lack of a usable past. As maskilim were debating a new Jewish culture in a rapidly transforming society, they turned to medieval Sephardic Jews, in Carsten Schapkow's words, as “role models.” German Jews began to see themselves as true successors of historic Sepharad. The identification with elements of Sephardic history was a key element of the process of Jewish Verbürgerlichung (embourgeoisment) and closely corresponded with the rise of the suggestive image of the traditional and Ashkenazic Ostjude as Jewish Other. While some German Jewish writers romanticized Sephardic culture, several scholars produced critical studies that are still relevant today. Writers and scholars did not inhabit separate spheres. When he worked on his novel Rabbi of Bacherach Heinrich Heine consulted with Wissenschaft des Judenthums scholar Leopold Zunz about Jewish history in Spain.

John Efron's brilliantly written study German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic is cultural history at its best. The range of topics and the detailed analysis are impressive, as is the breadth of works and sources consulted. Efron explicitly acknowledges recent contributions by younger scholars. The five chapters cover the reinvention of Hebrew as secular Jewish language, Jewish aesthetics, synagogue architecture, German Jewish literature, and historiography. Repeatedly, Efron looks beyond the German Jewish case. Unlike Schapkow, who concentrates on intellectual history, Efron ponders the wider cultural and scholarly repercussions of the German Jewish encounter with “the Sephardic,” not least in regard to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism.

In his introduction Efron refers to W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of a “double consciousness” to explain the “dilemma” (7) of minorities wanting to fully belong to mainstream society. Similar to African Americans, German Jews had to move cautiously as they positioned themselves in a newly forming society during the Emancipation era, facing much opposition and lingering discrimination. Efron stresses the importance of aesthetics for Jews who redefined themselves as modern Jews and Germans. Appearance, image, form, expression, and beauty greatly mattered to Jews, which betrayed a lingering insecurity and vulnerability to discrimination.

In a period of dramatic social and cultural transformation, a key question was which Jewish language would be appropriate, refined, and beautiful. The growing distance from, even aversion to Yiddish influenced a growing interest in Hebrew. Sephardic models shaped the reinvention of Hebrew as secular language. Maskilim such as Naphtali Herz Wessely deplored the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew words, arguing that Sephardic rules should be followed. Efron shows that the heightened Jewish sensibility regarding the correct and beautiful “sound” of Hebrew was closely related to the simultaneous fascination of the emerging bourgeoisie with music. German Jewish discourses about beauty, especially in regard to the Jewish body and appearance, reflect the importance of aesthetics. As antisemites popularized distorted images of Ashkenazic Jews, the image of the refined and beautiful Sephardic Jew emerged as idealized “countertype” (84). Even maskilim who were overly critical of traditional Jews in eastern Europe understood that the dichotomy was problematic. Jews living in eastern Europe after 1648 faced very different social and political conditions than their counterparts in Protestant Amsterdam or in medieval Al-Andalus.

Synagogue architecture is seemingly the most obvious example of the Sephardic influence on German Jewish culture during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Even though most architects were not Jewish, Efron emphasizes that the neo-Moorish Oriental style for synagogues originated in Germany. Especially for Reform Jews, the Oriental style expressed a link to an older “authentic” period of Jewish history. It is important, however, not to ignore the wider context. The neo-Moorish style was widely popular in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. It was especially used for buildings associated with recreation and entertainment. Jews diverged from this trend by choosing the style for their houses of worship. Some of the most prominent synagogues built during the 1850s and 1860s in the German states adapted the neo-Moorish style, most famously Berlin's Neue Synagoge, which was dedicated in 1866 in the presence of Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck and other dignitaries. King Wilhelm I attended a service in the synagogue in 1869, a few months before all Jews in Prussia were fully emancipated. The neo-Moorish style of the Neue Synagoge reflected an acceptable degree of difference in the heart of the Prussian capital and expressed Jewish confidence on the eve of full emancipation. The splendid (and costly) building provoked much criticism beyond the Jewish community, seemingly corroborating antisemitic allegations of Jewish power. For several decades after the dedication of the Neue Synagoge almost all new synagogues in Berlin were erected in courtyards, invisible from the streets. Neo-Moorish synagogues were also built in other parts of Europe and in the United States. Efron's discussion of synagogue buildings in Dresden, Leipzig, Vienna, and Berlin shows the difficulty of drawing general conclusions. Each building had its specific history and place. And some synagogues were intentionally designed in a neo-Gothic “German” style.

Efron's discussion of Sephardic themes and characters in popular literary works written by German Jewish authors is particularly intriguing. During the first half of the nineteenth century the German states experienced an “educational revolution.” German Jews formed the vanguard of this transformation, as Simone Laessig, Jonathan Skolnik, and other authors have shown recently. The market for popular literature expanded, and more readers began subscribing to periodicals and weekly papers, which published serialized novels. Jewish readers had a preference for history. Efron refers to Skolnik's thesis that historical fiction was “a literary vehicle for dissimilation” (168). Jewish authors treated Jewish history as part of German history without denying the particular background of Jews. One of the key promoters of popular history was Ludwig Philippson, a rabbi and the influential editor of the widely read German Jewish weekly Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.

In the chapter on scholarly works about Sephardic Jews and Islam, Efron questions Edward Said's widely accepted thesis about the Orientalism concept. Said based his critique on British and French authors ignoring German and German-speaking Jewish Orientalists. Publications by theologian Abraham Geiger, historian Heinrich Graetz, and Hungarian-born Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher are important “counterexamples” because these scholars seriously engaged with the history of Islam (and of Jews living under Muslim rule), even expressing, as Efron puts it, a “particular kind of empathy” (193). Efron's discussion of Goldziher is of particular interest because he has only recently been recognized as a founding father of academic Islamic studies. Like Geiger and Graetz, Goldziher distanced himself from Orthodox Judaism. Goldziher was also critical of Christianity and opposed the expansion of European powers in the Middle East. In passing, Efron mentions the impact of the 1840 Damascus affair. It would have been interesting if he (or Schapkow) would have discussed other lesser-known protagonists, such as Julius Fürst, a Hegel student who taught Semitic languages at the University of Leipzig and edited the weekly Der Orient during the 1840s.

Carsten Schapkow deserves credit for being one of the first scholars to research the German Jewish intellectual encounter with Sephardic history. Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation was first published in German in 2011. The translation omits several sections, notably a discussion of Zionist perceptions of Sephardic Jewry. In the first chapter Schapkow provides a short historical overview of Sephardic Jewry in medieval Spain. The following chapters deal with the Haskalah, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jewish historiography, and German Jewish popular literature. Schapkow takes a narrower and more constrained approach than Efron, concentrating primarily on intellectual discourses. Lengthy quotations and longwinded descriptions make it hard to follow the narrative. The complicated organization, with countless short subchapters, betrays the origins of the study in the German academic system. Patient readers, however, are rewarded. The study touches on several interesting aspects. One example is the political dimension of the German Jewish encounter with Sepharad. Ludwig Philippson regularly covered contemporary Spain in the pages of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. In 1851, for instance, the paper reported the expulsion of two Jewish visitors from the country. In 1854 Philippson sent a public petition to the Cortes, Spain's parliament, asking for a formal revocation of the notorious 1492 expulsion edict. The petition constituted a protest against religious intolerance in (and beyond) Spain. In the petition, Philippson praised the achievements of Sephardic Jews and condemned the expulsion as a great injustice. The Cortes ignored the petition, but it was widely debated in Germany and western Europe.

The German Jewish discovery of Jewish life in medieval Spain provides an intriguing perspective on a Jewish community in transition. The promise of peaceful coexistence and fruitful cultural exchange across religious lines within diverse societies appears remote in many societies. And admittedly, already in the early nineteenth century, German Jewish scholars showed that during certain periods Jews in Al-Andalus experienced discrimination and persecution. The quest of other groups for a usable past, for recognition, and for inclusion is hardly a uniquely Jewish story, as Efron points out. In the United States, Jews resemble other immigrant groups who have woven their particular history (with some success) into the fabric of America.