Steven Aschheim's three essays, which this volume presents, pose some intriguing questions, and not just historical ones about the past but also ones about the curiously enduring challenge of German Jewish intellectuals for contemporary critical thought. Aschheim's examination of the persistence of the intellectual legacy of German Jewish emigrants abroad is a critically suggestive reminder that the auratic reception of Weimar intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor W. Adorno, as well as Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss, warrants a reflection that does not ignore the complicated but formative historical filiations that tie the present to an imaginary past that it relives as its future.

Aschheim's approach becomes especially illuminating where it regains critical access to a historical past that had been so successfully erased that attempts to reinvent a new future were oblivious of the legacy on which it rested. In his first essay, “Bildung in Palestine,” Aschheim demonstrates that if the modern reconstruction of Palestine was in many ways a very German project whose cultural vision owed its significance to the German Jewish experience out of which it sprang, then a critical evaluation of the Zionism it advanced hinges on the recognition of the profound humanist concerns that inform the binationalism that defines it. Defined by the Jewish experience that the early German Zionist had worked through, the history of Palestine and later Israel, Aschheim suggests, can only be comprehended if the moment of critical humanism and its alternative approach to reinventing a “Jewish” state come into view as a creative response not just to the geopolitical predicament in Palestine under Ottoman rule but also to the impasse of nationalist constructions that had come to a head in Europe as well. Simultaneously, Aschheim's attention to the genealogical ties of Zionism forces us to reconsider the claim of a monolithic construction that both Zionists and their critics have so fiercely maintained and to begin to see the rich and complicated filiations that ran between the German and the Jewish experience that provided grounds for constructing identity no longer in naive embrace of a monolithic vision of its origins. As a consequence, long underestimated if not forgotten figures such as Hans Kohn, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch, and the celebrated but at the same time strangely iconized Martin Buber emerge as more than haplessly anachronistic champions of Yeckishkeit. Unless the critical link between Israeli Zionism and its German Jewish origin is recovered and its alternatively binational moment appreciated, Aschheim's study suggests, a historical understanding of Israel's complicated position remains illusory.

If the German Jewish legacy might have only gained its momentum abroad, the existence “beyond borders” became a central aspect of the life and thought of German Jews pushed from what for centuries had been considered their “homeland.” Just as figures such as Hans Kohn and Martin Buber challenged notions of national identity but presented a transborder identity open enough to span the worlds of Israel as well as the United States as its new home, historians such as Walter Laqueur, George Mosse, Fritz Stern, and Peter Gay saw themselves in a world whose cold war politics called for a vision whose resolute postnational awareness pointed beyond traditional border constructions.

The second essay, “Tension of Historical Wissenschaft: The Émigré Historians and the Making of German Cultural History,” examines the distinctly different if not at times complementary approaches that distinguish German historiography from the particular vision of German cultural history examined by German Jewish historians in exile. If the first and the concluding essay on the Jewish Weimar intellectuals highlight the profound impact on the German Jewish experience and the way it inspired modern critical thought, the essay on the curious disconnect between the German and German Jewish historians and the principled disregard of the latter's work by the former group demonstrates how historiography can at times become, oddly enough, the continuation if not repetition of history with other means. As Aschheim laconically concludes, “The regrettable nondialogue continues.” However, and critically important, the creative force of the attempts of German Jewish historians at rewriting history in a way that would no longer exclude their own experience would become one more time a creative realization of their German Jewish legacy—abroad.

The concluding essay examines the peculiar phenomenon of how a bunch of “Weimar” Jews such as Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Strauss could ascend to such prominence and assume the status of “icons.” Aschheim's study reminds us that the unquestionable theoretical significance of their thought does not suffice to account for the stunning presence they have reclaimed in the current situation. If Aschheim poses the question of this rise to iconic importance in a critical manner that highlights the peculiarly paradoxical trajectory of their reception history, his presentation remains suggestive but abstains from dispensing final answers. But perhaps the sheer fact that the current conjunction of theoretical debates is addressed with regard to its historically formative context provides the critically illuminating change of perspective—or historiographic paradigm—these essays suggest. The German Jewish legacy that Hermann Levin Goldschmidt described in his seminal study of 1957, whose English translation appeared half a century later in the fall of 2007 as The Legacy of German Jewry Footnote ¹—a project that Scholem so categorically criticized while he emerged as one of its most formidable representatives—has now finally received with Aschheim's Beyond the Border a first and long-awaited study of that legacy's enduring importance. Highlighting the genealogical filiations of this contribution, Beyond the Borders traces the reasons for the postcontemporary significance of that legacy, the reasons why it was overshadowed, and the reasons why the German Jewish contribution of such figures as Goldschmidt bear a crucial message for our postmodern world. As Aschheim reminds us, the full critical force of these thinkers can only be recovered if we attend to the particular specificity of their thought and the context in which it arose, for its universal aspirations ground in a very particular and “real” history that we yet need fully to understand.