Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 233

are the remnants of fast-dissolving traditional Jewish life. Auerbach’s rendering

of Hebrew locutions in provincial dialect further exemplifies his desire to assim-

ilate the Jewish to the German Volk: “I have rendered certain Hebrew expres-

sions with German provincialisms, as High German seemed to me not to offer

anything that corresponded perfectly.”^146 Auerbach’s strategies for presenting

local Jewish culture and later for rendering the local culture of Black Forest

village life are remarkably continuous. The German Volk figured as Schwarz-

wald peasants moves into a literary space that Auerbach had first envisioned for

the Jewish Volk of his planned Ghetto cycle. In each case, Auerbach provides

frequent ethnographic glosses, parenthetically and in footnotes, of exotic cus-

toms and locutions for the uninitiated reader. Many of the key characteristics

of Auerbach’s village tales—the stylized orality of narration and the oral folk

culture being narrated, the evocation of locality and regionalism, and the atten-

tion to local customs—are already important elements of Auerbach’s Jewish

novel cycle Spinoza.

Auerbach’s success in rendering a nostalgic image of a usable Jewish past is,

however, very limited in Spinoza, for several reasons. Noting the influence of

Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten on Kompert’s ghetto fiction, Hess

instructively contrasts the two writers’ projects: whereas Auerbach “seeks to

build bridges... between provincial life and a future German political state,”

Kompert, writing in the Austrian Empire, seeks to harmonize “traditional Ju-

daism and German culture in the most far-reaching sense of the term.”^147 It is

revealing that Kompert could draw inspiration for his nostalgic portrayals of

ghetto life from Auerbach’s village tales but not from Auerbach’s abortive Ghetto

cycle, which—in its programmatic formulation, if much less in its execution

—shared many of the goals of Kompert’s work. If Kompert aspired to render the

recent Jewish past as an esthetic object that could bestow middle-class respect-

ability on acculturating Jews in the German cultural orbit, Auerbach’s thrust

was indeed more political, even in his early Jewish phase before his popular

breakthrough with Dorfgeschichten. As a liberal German patriot—indeed, an

erstwhile Burschenschaftler—Auerbach sought to create a space for Jews not

only in the sphere of middle-class German culture but also in an idealized Ger-

man polity. The most urgent aim of his debut essay, as we have seen, was to

contest Menzel’s deployment of the label “Jewish” as shorthand for un-German

in his attack on the subversive Young German writers and to insist that German

Jews are patriotic members of the Vaterland. The cultural and political were

intimately enmeshed for nineteenth-century German liberals. It is nonetheless

possible to identify in Auerbach’s envisioned Ghetto cycle a more nostalgia-

filled, culturally oriented project of doing poetic justice to the Jewish past, and a