Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 229

1837. As Jonathan Hess has shown in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of

German-Jewish Identity, this and several other Jewish cultural institutions dis-

seminated a steady diet of middlebrow Jewish fiction to German-Jewish reading

audiences. Jewish authors writing for a Jewish audience found ways to recon-

struct “usable” pasts, and certain Jewish authors succeeded in depicting usable

Jewish pasts also for non-Jewish audiences, as the case of Leopold Kompert,

the popular author of ghetto fiction, attests. Kompert began publishing in this

genre in 1848 using, ironically, Auerbach’s Black Forest Village Stories as one

of his models.^131 Whereas, in Hess’s apt characterization, Kompert’s “texts

mobilize nostalgia to create new forms of identity for an upwardly mobile, in-

creasingly German-identified Jewish readership,”^132 the operation of nostalgia

in Spinoza is less viable; and the usability of this Jewish past remains dubious.

Nostalgia is a powerful means of binding a community in relation to an imag-

ined past. Supremely malleable, it can both mark an emphatic break with the

past (the object of nostalgia has, by definition, been lost) and offer up an ideal-

ized image of the past for enjoyment, identification, and pride.^133 The above

passage from “Das Ghetto” tries to construct a nostalgic bridge between the

premodern and modern “wirs” it puts into play, yet the attempt to deploy nos-

talgia foregrounds more discontinuities than it smooths over. Auerbach’s sar-

castic tone provides an important measure of the dividedness and insecurity of

his enunciatory position vis-à-vis an uncertain audience. This stance is espe-

cially significant because of the extreme rarity of sarcasm in Auerbach’s oeuvre.

The main thrust of his early literary criticism is to attack irony and all forms of

enunciative duplicity, and he generally practiced what he preached: utter ear-

nestness. Roughly half of “Das Ghetto,” however, is devoted to a spoof of recent

Jewish novels and the models—or “recipe”—they offer to the aspiring Jewish

writer: “Our belletristic literature is rife with Jewish novels. I want here to give

a schema of them and test whether I, too, might have been able to put myself

in circulation in this popular way.”^134 Auerbach deploys this conceit to parody

contemporary Jewish novels and their popular and critical success.

Here is the “recipe” for successful Jewish novels that Auerbach lampoons:

A wealthy father who loves nothing but money, save for his beautiful daughter

Rahel, “since this and nothing else, or just possibly Judith, is what she has to

be called.”^135 Rahel, who is as beautiful as an “oriental gazelle” and speaks “as

beautifully as the Bible,” could never love a “dirty Jew” (schmutzigen Juden).

(The conscientious writer, Auerbach winks, will consult the Old Testament and

find a description of Rahel’s beauty in the Song of Solomon.) No, Rahel’s heart

belongs to the Knight Hugo von Hostenthal, though it is a pure, not lascivious,

love (“Clauren and Heine had not yet found an audience”). High time, Auer-