To the extent that Anglophone readers are familiar with the name of Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt at all, most of them will recognize him as the editor of the Corsair literary journal, which first caricatured and then, famously, evoked the ire of Søren Kierkegaard. They are not likely to regard him as one of the important figures in the development of a modern Jewish literature. Happily, David Gantt Gurley's monograph on Goldschmidt redresses this situation, offering an authoritative overview of some of his most important works, as well as a bold thesis on the overlooked significance of this author.

Goldschmidt's literary profile is better known in his native Denmark, but Gurley makes a convincing case that, for reasons internal to Goldschmidt's work, it should not be confined to the boundaries of national literature. Gurley draws on the Danish-language scholarship on Goldschmidt, but generally speaking does not wade into its debates. His book is aimed primarily at readers who are interested in modern Jewish literature, but who also fall into the category of Anglophone readers mentioned above.

Some of these readers may think that the author at times overstates his case, as when he claims, without addressing questions of influence, Goldschmidt as “a father of modern Jewish fiction” (12) and as a “protomodernist” (65), based on some similarities between his sensibility and Kafka's. In light of the evidence presented by Gurley, however, it is difficult to deny a similarity in approach to traditional sources in Goldschmidt and in more well-known authors working in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German around the same time or a generation or two later. This approach is described by Gurley as “double canonicity” (133), using Robert Alter's term for the creative use of the Hebrew Bible in modern writing to account for Goldschmidt's use of the Bible but also, and above all, of midrash and Talmud. For the most part, the contexts in which Goldschmidt wrote were secular and Danish. What exactly Goldschmidt does in presenting Jewish ways of thinking and being in these contexts is what Gurley calls Goldschmidt's “poetics.”

“Poetics” is one of the recurring terms in this monograph. It is perhaps an unfortunate development in literary studies that the meaning of this term is assumed rather than defined, with the result that it is sometimes unclear exactly what work a scholar thinks the term is doing. Reflecting this development, the author does not give a definition until page 143, where it is glossed as “the genealogy of the text.” Genealogy is, indeed, one of the central concerns of this book, in which Gurley repeatedly shows the importance to Goldschmidt of the metaphor of “blood.” Talmud is, for instance, in Goldschmidt's words, “a legacy of blood” (125). This metaphor is determinative of Jewish identity, for Goldschmidt, but not simply in a biological way; it extends to text and artistic production more generally. While, according to Gurley, Goldschmidt belongs to a tradition of Reform Judaism, his childhood did include a brief but apparently formative period when he stayed at the house of an Orthodox relative, and this experience leads him to criticize his fellow Reform Jews, for whom Jewishness would be separable from Jewish ways of interpreting texts, and who thus evince something like “blood weakening” (129).

Goldschmidt wants both to privilege rabbinic modes of interpretation and knowledge as sources of personal and intellectual formation on a par with, if not superior to, contemporary ideas of Bildung (133), and to advocate a thesis that European culture owes much more to originally Judaic ideas than is commonly acknowledged. He wants to remind his European audience (and his audience in Danish would have been, by far, majority Protestant) of the Jewish roots of European culture. He advances a thesis about “Afro-Semitism” in this regard in his reflections on the figure of nemesis. The concept of nemesis had actually been explored some decades before Goldschmidt by another of the Danish Golden Age's leading cultural lights, Johan Ludvig Heiberg. If one could wish for a book with an additional chapter, I would like to see a more sustained exploration of this rather unusual aspect of Goldschmidt's work, which, as Gurley notes in passing (15), anticipates the thesis of Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism.

Much is made, throughout the book, of Goldschmidt's “reading habits” (140) and of his intimate familiarity with sources of rabbinic literature. Only in the final chapter are these actual sources on display. Here, the author examines a collection of Hebrew Legends that first appeared in English, focusing in substantive and convincing detail on the figure of the rabbi in these stories. In this case, Gurley shows that while Goldschmidt borrowed heavily from the Hebrew Tales rendered in English by Hyman Hurwitz, several of the stories in his own book of legends appear to have as their source the original texts of midrash (e.g., Bereshit Rabbah, Eikhah Rabbah) and Talmud (e.g. B. Sanhedrin 102a). These source notes are the primary evidence in this monograph that Goldschmidt was familiar with actual texts of rabbinic literature. Throughout chapters 2 and 3, which treat an alleged allusiveness to, respectively, midrash and Talmud that runs throughout Goldschmidt's work, the reader is left wondering what, specifically, the Danish author would have read of midrash and Talmud. By the end of chapter 3, we learn that for Goldschmidt, “Talmud” is primarily “a mode of subjectivity” (130) and not, we can infer, a textual body. The Talmud is, for Goldschmidt, an idea, or an ideal, the clearest evidence of which in the book under review is probably the rather bizarre comparison between the Talmud and St. Peter as heaven's gatekeeper (131).

If we accept the proposition that the development of modern Jewish literature is to some extent a history of desacralizing, then this image of the Talmud will not be surprising. And in any case, with its powerful, if not radical, hypothesis and carefully detailed readings of published texts and letters from throughout Goldschmidt's authorship, this book goes a long way toward not only introducing, but also rehabilitating, an unjustly neglected figure in the history of modern Jewish writing.