Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

228 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Dichter und Kaufmann.^127 “Das Ghetto” is a preface to an envisioned career

as a writer of Jewish historical novels that Auerbach did not ultimately pursue.

“Das Ghetto” differs markedly from Auerbach’s demarcation of the accept-

able limits of authorial subjectivity in his 1838 Europa essay on prefaces, ana-

lyzed above. His authorial position in “Das Ghetto” is divided in a number of

ways, and he is hyperaware of writing—or, at any rate, of being read—as a Jew-

ish author. His motivation for undertaking the projected Jewish historical novel

cycle is strongly reminiscent of his apology for the biographical portraits in the

Gallerie. Auerbach appeals to the need to record for posterity images of a rap-

idly vanishing Jewish life:^128 “Jewish life is gradually disintegrating; one piece

after the other breaks off. Therefore it seems to me to be time to let poetry and

history and both united preserve its movements in a picture.”^129 Unlike in the

Gallerie preface, however, Auerbach here turns a nostalgic eye toward the inner

coherence and self-sufficiency of premodern Jewish life, even as he regards it as

having been founded on a distorted worldview:

One could perhaps designate our age in general as the age of poetic justice;

what the previous century and the period of Enlightenment derisively cas-

tigated as superstition and folly and had to ridicule and brand with scorn

appears to us with awe-inspiring dignity, and even in its distortions we rec-

ognize the inner consistency of a hermetic disposition since its sad conse-

quences for life are far removed from us. We are seized by nostalgia [Weh-

muth] when we contemplate this past: we have lost the old intimacy [das alte

Innige] and only piecemeal achieved a new one.^130

As it approaches its vanishing point, and thus no longer needs to be opposed

in the spirit of Enlightenment, Jewish life can be granted “poetic” justice in the

cycle Auerbach announces with “Das Ghetto.” Yet the “wir/uns” that bestows

such poetic justice is highly ambiguous. The “wir” that has lost “the old inti-

macy” of Jewish life is implicitly Jewish, yet what this collective Jewish subject

has lost seems to be distinctly Jewish life itself. Thus does the “wir” that has only

“piecemeal” achieved a new intimacy coincide with the collective Jewish “wir”

that has suffered the loss? Or, with the loss of “Jewish life,” does the distinc-

tion between Jew and non-Jew become so attenuated that this “wir” becomes

all-inclusive? How useful is this nostalgia for consolidating and sustaining new

modes of German-Jewish identity?

A range of possibilities for German-Jewish authorship would emerge in the

decades following Auerbach’s novelistic debut that were not yet on the cul-

tural landscape he surveyed in 1837. The most influential nineteenth-century

German-Jewish journal, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was founded in