In a 1915 essay, Hermann Cohen declared that in light of the achievements of German Jewry, “any Jew of the West must, in addition to being loyal to his political fatherland, acknowledge, love and revere Germany.” After the Shoah, a Jewish “love of Germany” is difficult to fathom. But what about Cohen's more basic point, namely, that the achievements of German Jewry should serve as a guiding example to Jews facing the challenges of modernization in the West? Again, the Shoah casts doubt on this claim. It is one thing to admire the remarkable cultural achievements of modern German Jews, but to say that the experience of this community provides a paradigm for how Jews confront modern conditions seems almost absurd in historical hindsight. And yet, even with the benefit of such hindsight, this is precisely the argument that Henry Levin Goldschmidt makes in The Legacy of German Jewry, originally published in 1957. Now available in English for the first time in a translation by David Suchoff with an enlightening introduction by Suchoff and Willi Goetschel, The Legacy of German Jewry offers a fresh opportunity not only to consider the achievements of German Jewry but also to show how contemporary Jews and students of the modern Jewish experience view those achievements.
Goldschmidt's argument for the significance of German Jewry's achievements owes a great deal to the work of Cohen and Cohen's Jewish disciples, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Born into an assimilated German Jewish family in 1914, Goldschmidt escaped in 1938 to Zurich, where he would begin his career as a philosopher and advocate for adult Jewish learning, founding a Lehrhaus after the war, modeled on Buber and Rosenzweig's institution of the same name. As Suchoff and Goetschel explain, Goldschmidt's philosophical work develops the notion of dialogue as a principle of cultural and historical development. In The Legacy of German Jewry, Goldschmidt develops this insight in a way that anticipates contemporary arguments about the value of multiculturalism.
This work is best understood not as intellectual or social history but as philosophical history. Goldschmidt argues that the achievements of German Jewry reflect an ancient Jewish approach to cultural interaction and exchange. The experience of the Jewish people since the Babylonian exile, he claims, reveals a pattern of cultural integration in which Jews contribute to world civilizations both by absorbing the achievements of foreign cultures and by maintaining cultural distinctiveness. The biblical paradigm for this Jewish experience is Jeremiah, who counseled the Judean exiles to “seek the peace of the city” in which they lived. This dialogical process of cultural integration contains two steps: “outer development,” in which Jews assert their political and cultural rights within a majority culture, and “inner development,” in which Jews turn to their own tradition and interpret it in light of modern knowledge and culture. Jews are the original multiculturalists in that they insist both on maintaining their cultural distinctiveness and on the value of cultural exchange.
Goldschmidt's philosophy of history also contains a messianic element, as he argues that this Jewish pattern of cultural exchange and integration represents Judaism's unique contribution to the universal redemption of humanity. The Jewish national experience in ancient Israel, he notes, was the integration of twelve tribes into one unified national family. This internal pattern of integration models the messianic hope for all nations to join as one family, maintaining their differences but united in purpose nonetheless. What makes the German Jewish experience so important is that it demonstrated the intense efforts of Jews to achieve inner and outer development in the spirit of this universal messianic project. Thus, Goldschmidt understands Moses Mendelssohn's embrace of German culture and his subsequent argument for a German–Jewish synthesis as an expression of a long-established Jewish cultural strategy and messianic longing.
On Goldschmidt's account, this process of cultural interaction is not a Jewish capitulation to majority culture, but a genuine dialogical encounter that affirms the dignity of both participants. Moreover, because true freedom and enlightenment depend on this kind of cultural exchange, the universal aspirations of Western culture turn out to depend on the very “sources of Judaism” the West had despised. The cultural interaction and exchange modeled by Jews since their first exile holds the key to all cultural vitality. This view leads Goldschmidt to the startling conclusion that only those Jewish writers and artists who embraced their heritage were able to realize their full potential. This category is somewhat broad for Goldschmidt, perhaps controversially so, as it includes writers such as Heine and Kafka, the former of whom converted. Goldschmidt's argument turns on the fact that even these writers did not succumb to the pathology of Jewish self-hatred (Heine only converted for the benefits, Goldschmidt thinks), which Goldschmidt defines as the attempt to deny altogether one's cultural heritage and the potential contribution it could make to a life of the spirit.
Goldschmidt attempts to capture the totality of the cultural, intellectual, and political achievements of German Jewry by considering particular spheres of activity, such as literature or politics, and significant figures, such as Moses Mendelssohn or Theodor Herzl, in thematic chapters. But the book is neither a survey nor an introduction. Goldschmidt's effort to capture the whole by considering all its parts is to a large degree an act of memory. In some chapters, we find long lists of names of cultural figures and their achievements. This does not always make for compelling reading, but these lists recall the contemporary custom of reading the names of Shoah victims. The recitation of name after name has a numbing effect: we cannot possibly comprehend the lives lost or the cultural vitality that was destroyed.
In one of the book's last chapters, Goldschmidt looks to the biblical paradigm of Job to understand the suffering of German and European Jews in the Nazi genocide, and here, too, his philosophy of history guides his response to suffering. While some now look at German Jewry's loyalty to their adopted homeland as a kind of grand delusion and a loss of Jewish self, for Goldschmidt, this loyalty was the highest expression of Jewish messianic consciousness, which only serves to underscore the injustice of the Shoah. The trauma of the Holocaust was not just the murder of innocents but the breaking of faith between the German and Jewish peoples. Although Goldschmidt acknowledges that too many German Jews were misguided by their love of Germany to realize what was happening in the early years of the Nazi regime, he refuses to become one of Job's false friends and blame the victim. Goldschmidt follows others in viewing modern antisemitism as an outgrowth of chauvinistic nationalism, but in his account, antisemitism was not just a response to the perceived threat of a Jewish minority, but, more importantly, a response to the threat of Judaism's teachings that cultural exchange would usher in human freedom. Like Job, the Jews of Germany suffered for being committed to their ideals. And like Job, Goldschmidt insists that the suffering is unjust.
The strength of Goldschmidt's argument for using German Jewry as a model for Jewish modernization turns on his ability to separate the aspirations of the victims to be loyal Germans from the response they received. Seen this way, the American Jewish project and the German Jewish project look remarkably similar, and Hermann Cohen's love of Germany was not that different from the widespread Jewish love of America. Goldschmidt's call to consider the ways in which the project of German Jewry lives on after its destruction will, of course, be enormously valuable for understanding the continued existence of a Jewish community in Germany today. But it should also draw our attention to the ways in which German Jewry lives on in many modern Jewish communities both in Israel and the Diaspora.
