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Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is the first comprehensive study of how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Jonathan Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing. What did it imply for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language? Skolnik makes the case that the answer lies in the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists, both in Nazi Germany and in exile, employed images from the Sephardic past to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The book goes on to show that this past not only helped Jews to make sense of the nonsense, but served also as a window into the hopes for integration and fears about assimilation that preoccupied German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Skolnik positions the Jewish embrace of German culture not as an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory.

[...]in Lasker-Schüler's poem, the black swans signify at least five things at once: (1) a Romanticized symbol of the non-European exotic; (2) a figure for poetry as \"singing\" black swans, including poetry's ability to generate symbols that exoticize and exclude; (3) a figure of identification for Lasker-Schüler as a poet and an outsider; (4) a sober negation of European poetic Orientalism, when the image is read historically, as a fallacy of the European colonial encounter; and (5) a vehicle for another kind of poetry, a counter to Romantic Orientalism, a poetry of \"dark tones\" which can express the sufferings and longings of those marginalized as \"exotic.\" (To be sure, \"mother-of-pearl\" additionally highlights one of the poem's central themes, maternal love.) The image of \"Straußenhähne\" (male ostriches) brings the poem's focus directly to southern Africa, and to the site of genocidal war against the Herero and Nama. See PDF ] Notably, the ostrich feather trade in South Africa, which was centered in Oudtshoorn, was an economic niche where Jews were especially prominent, a marker of their complex and fluid race and class position in colonial society.10 On the eve of World War I, German colonists in neighboring Southwest Africa were keen to develop their own ostrich farms (Scherer; see Figure 3).11 [ Image omitted: See PDF ] German colonial novels celebrated the clearing away of resisting native peoples, and in one notorious description of the pursuit of the Herero into the desert following the Battle of Waterberg, in Gustav Frenssen's Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1906), ostrich feathers figure among the wreckage, seen from the perspective of the victorious colonial soldiers: \"In their path of flight lay blankets, skins, ostrich feathers, household utensils, women's ornaments, cattle, and men dead and dying and staring blankly.