German Jews have long been recognized for their devotion to Bildung and classical high culture, such as the prominent role they played in establishing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's cult status in German literature. More recent academic studies have added nuance to our understanding of the German Jewish educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) by exploring the construction of a specifically German Jewish identity through popular or middlebrow literature. Jonathan Skolnik's study of German Jewish historical fiction makes four notable contributions to this ongoing discussion.
First, in his theoretical discussion, Skolnik advocates the use of the term “dissimilation” as an alternative to assimilation or acculturation. Although not exactly defined, dissimilation refers to a movement away from the majority culture and towards minority self-identification. Acknowledging the disparate ways that both Franz Rosenzweig and National Socialist propaganda used the term, Skolnik makes a case for dissimilation as “the crystallization of a new form of Jewish identity and distinctiveness that occurs as part of the dynamic of acculturation and alongside the phenomenon of assimilation” (2). Dissimilation thus serves as a productive means of analyzing the way writers created a space for themselves as Jews within German literature at specific historical moments. It also serves as a useful organizing principle that could interest scholars far beyond the field of German Jewish studies.
Secondly, Skolnik's study goes from 1824 until 1955, which takes the reader from Romanticism and the revolutionary Vormärz period to the postwar era. While the broad timeframe necessitates looking at the eleven primary literary texts as representative vignettes, the long trajectory helps Skolnik tie together different periods that are frequently examined separately in studies of German Jewish popular culture. For instance, the first chapter of Jonathan M. Hess's Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity provides a valuable analysis of Sephardic themes in nineteenth-century German Jewish middlebrow literature, yet it takes a work with Skolnik's temporal scope to facilitate a comparison between literary representations of Don Isaac Abravanel in works by Phöbus Philippson (Die Marannen, 1837), Alfred Nossig (Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes, 1906), and Hermann Kesten (Ferdinand und Isabella, 1936).
Moreover, Skolnik's specific focus on Sephardic Jewish themes reveals how visions of a Spanish past helped Jews negotiate their own German identities. This contribution would have been even more powerful had the author made the interplay between the imagined Sephardic past, eastern European Jews (the so-called Ostjuden), and Jewish self-Orientalization more explicit. As it is, the book successfully demonstrates that the themes of convivencia (the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain), conversion, the Inquisition, and expulsion were often-repeated themes in German Jewish literature, used by liberals, modernists, Reform and Orthodox rabbis, Zionists, etc.
Finally, Skolnik ties his corpus together by focusing on historical fiction. Building on Benedict Anderson's assertion that historical fiction is “a literary genre par excellence of the nationalist imagination, forging new identities vertically across time and horizontally across space through modern print media,” Skolnik argues that the “German-Jewish example shows how historical fiction also became a vehicle for minority self-definition” (4). The authors examined in this volume do not reject a Jewish past, but instead reinvent it in the context of a proud Sephardic heritage. As a case study of how a minority group engages with identity construction and nationalism through historical fiction, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is a fascinating contribution to the study of minority literature.
Skolnik's book is comprised of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction elaborates on the term “dissimilation” and introduces Skolnik's argument that by “imagining, indeed reinventing Jewish history through German-language historical novels, German Jews asserted their own unique identity as they integrated into larger narratives of German and European history” (2). The first chapter, “Jewish History under the Sign of Secularization: Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza (1837),” concerns Auerbach's novel in the context of the liberal literary group Junges Deutschland and the motif of the “wandering Jew.” The second chapter, “‘Who Learns History from Heine?’ Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heinrich Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacharach (1840),” draws a connection between Heine's use of medieval history in his novel fragment and the use of sources in the scientific study of Judaism. Chapter 3, “Minority Culture in the Age of the Nation: Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” discusses five different works of popular literature as an expression of a minority public sphere in the context of Emancipation and German nationalism. Chapter 4, “German Modernism and Jewish Memory: Else Lasker-Schüler's Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (1921),” returns to a single work by a canonical writer, looking closely at Lasker-Schüler's modernist text as a rewriting of Heine's fragment, a revision of German Jewish historical novels, and as a manifestation of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari might call an “unsettling” reterritorialization (114). Chapter 5, “‘Where Books Are Burned …’: Jewish Memories of Inquisition and Expulsion in Nazi Germany and in Exile,” examines the use of Sephardic motifs by writers grappling with Nazism, with reference to the 1937 museum exhibition commemorating Abravanel's 500th birthday. The book closes with an epilogue, “Post-Holocaust Echoes,” which notes postwar historical fiction and the continued relevance of Sephardic history in contemporary Europe.
Skolnik's topic enables him to integrate both “major” and “minor” German Jewish writers. The combination of both celebrated writers, such as Heine and Lasker-Schüler, and lesser-known writers, such as Markus Lehmann and Ernst Sommer, presents the reader with a striking panorama of German Jewish authorship. At the same time, resurrecting forgotten writers and inserting them into the canon does not appear to be Skolnik's chief aim. Auerbach is the only “major” author who might be unfamiliar to students of German literature, yet even he was incredibly popular in his day and is enjoying a recent resurgence of scholarly interest. Skolnik saves his most in-depth textual analysis for the chapters devoted to works by a single, better-known author. The “minor” writers are grouped together in chapters that focus much more on historical context than on the intricate depths of specific works. While Skolnik's division of attention makes sense in light of the material, the differences between chapters can be jarring at times.
Jewish Pasts, German Fictions has much to offer scholars interested in German Jewish studies, German literature, modern Jewish studies, Jewish literature, and minority or diaspora studies more broadly. Skolnik provides quotes in the original German, yet is quick to offer English translations. He is also clearly well read in Jewish studies, and readily refers to relevant texts from Hebrew and Yiddish literature, as well as English Jewish literature and the German canon. His engagement with the Frankfurt School (such as using Siegfried Kracauer's conception of the “wandering Jew” to introduce Auerbach's Spinoza) will please philosophers. Art historians will take note of his discussion of book art, paintings, and architecture, including the Moritz Daniel Oppenheim painting that graces the cover of the book, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Plays for Goethe (1864). In addition to the prose works that form the core of the literary discussion, Skolnik references poetic works by Heine and Lasker-Schüler. At times it can seem like a chapter tries to fit in too many of these interesting anecdotes or that the theoretical conversation around a text commences before a reader has enough concrete details to follow comfortably. The strongest parts of the book tend to be those that focus on the overarching context and why Jewish historical fiction matters, although Skolnik is also a sensitive reader of texts. Not surprisingly, the chapter that did the best job of balancing between the historical narrative and textual analysis was also the longest. Nevertheless, Skolnik provides a significant contribution to the study of German Jewish literature that will resonate with scholars in other fields of Jewish studies.
