Explore the vast range of titles available.

Recent scholarship has brought to light the existence of a dynamic world of specifically Jewish forms of literature in the nineteenth century—fiction by Jews, about Jews, and often designed largely for Jews. This volume makes this material accessible to English speakers for the first time, offering a selection of Jewish fiction from France, Great Britain, and the German-speaking world. The stories are remarkably varied, ranging from historical fiction to sentimental romance, to social satire, but they all engage with key dilemmas including assimilation, national allegiance, and the position of women. Offering unique insights into the hopes and fears of Jews experiencing the dramatic impact of modernity, the literature collected in this book will provide compelling reading for all those interested in modern Jewish history and culture, whether general readers, students, or scholars.

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function.Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

The 1858 kidnapping of six-year-old Edgardo Mortara by officials of the Papal States in Bologna unleashed a media frenzy across Europe and North America, giving voice to widespread expressions of outrage over the overreach of the Catholic church and the anachronism of Papal rule. Jews in the German-speaking world did not just follow the sensationalized reporting on the fate of this Italian Jewish boy baptized by his Catholic nurse. They also produced a body of melodramatic fiction and drama that took the Mortara case as its inspiration. This literature, written by rabbis and those with close ties to rabbinical leadership, responded to the Mortara affair by creating narratives with happy endings where Jewish children taken into custody by the church inevitably return to their parents and embrace Jewish tradition. Discussing literary texts by Salomon Formstecher, Leopold Stein, Abraham Treu, and Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, this article explores how German-Jewish writers self-consciously transformed the Mortara affair into melodramatic literature designed for the purposes of entertainment. Melodrama hardly marked a withdrawal from the arena of political protest, however. Studying how these texts functioned to entertain their readers, this article explores how this body of literature drew its energy from an interplay of fantasies of Jewish power and vicarious experiences of Jewish victimhood. In doing so, the analysis reflects on the social function of melodrama in nineteenth-century Jewish life, bringing to light the mechanisms that Mortara fiction used to produce pleasurable feelings of self-righteousness in its Jewish readers.

This article explores the function that visions of America played in nineteenth-century German Jewish culture. Particularly in the decades surrounding the granting of complete emancipation in the German Empire in 1871, Jewish life in the United States proved especially fascinating to German Jewish writers. Looking at a variety of travelogues and fictional texts produced by Jews for Jews in the German-speaking world during this period, this article illustrates how representations of American Jewish life could be used to mediate knowledge about the New World while underscoring the leading role that German Jewry reserved for itself at home.

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

Following in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt's celebration of the \"conscious pariah\" in her seminal writings of the 1940s, the field of German-Jewish literary and cultural studies has concerned itself overwhelmingly with the subversive dimension of the German-Jewish experience. Over the last several decades, figures as diverse as Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine and even Moses Mendelssohn have been rehabilitated as intellectuals who issued fundamental challenges to the homogenizing and assimilatory project of modernity. In this way, scholarship has often fashioned Jews not as modernity's passive victims but as its most prescient critics. For the vast majority of German Jews in the nineteenth century, nevertheless, German culture was not perceived as monolithic, and a self-conscious celebration of subversion hardly proved to be the mantra governing their entry into the worlds beyond traditional Jewish culture. Looking at a set of fictional texts by Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, this essay lays out an alternative model for studying German-Jewish culture, the poetics of acculturation and the complexity of minority identity in nineteenth-century Germany.

Nineteenth-century intellectuals often decried nostalgia as a widespread social and cultural malaise, issuing harsh indictments of contemporaries who expressed their discomforts over the rapid pace of modernization and urbanization by fixating on an idealized past. Yet as this article emphasizes in its discussion of the fiction of Leopold Kompert, nostalgic longings for the past were not always a symptom of dislocation in the present. Kompert, one of the earliest and most popular producers of ghetto literature in nineteenth-century Europe, geared his nostalgic tales of traditional Jewish life in his native Bohemia at an upwardly mobile Jewish community increasingly identified with German culture as well as at the general reading public. Through an analysis of his works and a study of their reception, this article explores the ways in which fiction helped promote a vision of the ghetto as a usable past. By memorializing traditional forms of Jewish life in respectable aesthetic forms, Kompert's tales claimed cultural respectability for the immediate Jewish past. Ghetto literature sought in this way to secure Jews a form of bourgeois cultural respectability that might serve as a marker of their newly-found—or yet-to-be achieved—middle-class status. An investigation of ghetto fiction and its reception illuminates thus both the dynamic role of German-Jewish literature in reinventing tradition and the ways in which this process of acculturation was inextricable from the quest to produce Jewish literature that might claim to be secular culture of the highest possible order.

Rather than simply indicting Goethe for his anti-Jewish views (he was, among other things, a clear opponent of Jewish emancipation) or seeking to acquit him of prejudice by stressing his long-standing interests in the Hebrew Bible, Schutjer explores how Goethe's conception of the modern world was inextricable from his conception of Judaism. When Schutjer argues, for instance, that the peculiar form and texture of the Hebrew Bible, and Genesis in particular, provided an ongoing source of fascination and inspiration for Goethe's experimental literary style, she makes this claim with a deep literary appreciation of Goethe's work, the Hebrew scriptures, and the way they have been understood and read over time, including in Goethe's day. The same is true for her sustained exploration of the ways in which Goethe appropriates the Hebrew Bible for a modern, secular literature at the same time as he strives to distinguish himself from the modern Jews who claim to be its heir and also denigrates the text he celebrates as his model.