Category Books

The Jewish Question in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents »

Authors: Ritchie Robertson
ISBN-13: 9780199248889, ISBN-10: 0199248885
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: December 2001
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Ritchie Robertson

St Johns College, Oxford

Book Synopsis

This book is an erudite literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, Ritchie Robertson offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. No other study by a single author deals with German-Jewish relations so comprehensively and over such a long period of literary history.

	Abbreviations
	Introduction	1
1	Enlightenment	9
	German Jewry before Emancipation	9
	How the Enlightenment saw the Jews	22
	Lessing and Toleration	32
	Emancipation: Dohm versus Humboldt	45
	Moses Mendelssohn and the Rational Jew	54
	Mendelssohn's Legacy	65
2	Liberalism	77
	Jews and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century	77
	Schnitzler: Liberalism and Irony	93
	The European Humanism of Stefan Zweig	112
	Freud: Science versus Religion	129
3	Antisemitism	151
	Varieties of Antisemitism	151
	Literary Images of the Jew	202
4	Assimilation	233
	The Meaning of Assimilation	233
	Self-Hatred	285
	Hyperacculturation	345
5	Dissimilation	379
	The Jewish Renaissance	379
	The Eastern Jews	399
	The Jew as Oriental	428
	Zionism	465
	Select Bibliography	505
	Index	521