Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 23 1

1836 debut essay: “So have I done well? May I not be proud that old Hofrath

Th[eodor] Hell ranks me beside Wachsmann, and Menzel pats me amicably on

the shoulder, only warning me about Frau Therese Huber’s novel of renuncia-

tion? Now you will be so kind, gentle grisetttes, as to recommend me, and next

year I will be among Penelope’s suitors and will bring you beautiful, beautiful

pictures.”^137 Though Menzel might think Auerbach is treading too closely to

Therese Huber, the former wife of the revolutionary Georg Forster, the Jewish

novel that Auerbach parodies would still strike a balance between female and

male, popular and critical success.

Auerbach now brings to a close his two-tongued pastiche and invokes his

superior knowledge, as a Jew, of things Jewish in order to contest the inaccu-

racy and mendacity informing the clichés of the “Jewish” novel. In claiming this

authority Auerbach continues to address (and imagine himself from the per-

spective of ) a non-Jewish audience. Even as he claims the authority, as a Jew, to

point up the melodramatization and exoticization of Jewish life, Auerbach still

contends with his interpellation from without as a “Jew” by the vaguely hostile

audience he anticipates, and before whom he feels the need to justify himself:

In this way I might be able to make a decent literary name for myself, but

all these hack works are lies, lies from A to Z. Jewish girls were surely as

obedient at heart in every age as your blond privy councilor’s daughters; they

resembled in every age, mutatis mutandis, our beautiful bankers’ daughters in

Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin. They don’t fall in love, generally speaking, even

with a Jew, an esthetically cultivated clerk [Commis], say. They love whom-

ever their fathers permit or command. People make Jewish girls far too inter-

esting. Where, historically, in the Middle Ages, do you find Jewish girls who

fall in love by the dozens with Christian knights?

... It will not be interpreted as insolence if I maintain that it is infinitely

difficult for a Christian to enter completely into the intimacy and the details

of Jewish life. There is much that can be experienced only through upbring-

ing, habit, and tradition. We who come from it have the calling to depict it for

the world. There is a rich treasure of legends, miracle tales, etc. in the mouth

of the people [im Munde des Volkes]; we wish to salvage of this whatever can

be salvaged.^138

Auerbach asserts the authority to speak about things Jewish, yet this does not

grant him a stable authorial position. The prolixity of Auerbach’s profession of

unconcern actually attests to how preoccupied he is with the reception he will

receive—specifically as a Jewish writer—from Menzel. Auerbach admits it is not

without apprehensive hesitation (Zagen) that he sends his first major work into