Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

234 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

more politically motivated interest in Spinoza as a figure who transcends Jewish

particularity and points the way to an inclusive liberal politics.

The projects of rendering a culturally usable Jewish past and of rendering

a past leading to a liberal German political future pull in different directions

that are not successfully harmonized in Spinoza. As Nitsa Ben-Ari has noted,

the early German-Jewish historical novel (beginning in the 1830 s) struggled to

balance the not easily reconcilable aims of both disowning the national element

in Judaism and looking to Jewish history as a source of pride.^148 Extending to

the Jewish past the German fascination with the historical novel that had begun

in the 1820 s with frenetic translations of Walter Scott and others (who subse-

quently found native imitators aplenty) was no simple undertaking. Looking

back in 1880 on his first novel and the projected cycle it was to launch, Auerbach

remarked: “I had read the novels of Walter Scott with great fondness, and even

today I am full of admiration for the master of the historical novel. I can say that

I have never in my life imitated anyone.... I didn’t have the slightest in tention of

imitating Walter Scott; the thought simply entered my mind that it was possible,

indeed necessary, poetically to depict Jewish life in its intimacies in a manner

similar to how Walter Scott depicted Scottish life.”^149 Much in Scott, as a re-

gional Scottish author chronicling the history of a rapidly disappearing minority

culture, would have seemed suggestive indeed to the young Auerbach. Edward

McInnes notes that the great favor Scott’s novels found among German critics

was “intimately bound up with the general respect of German critics for his

unique position as a regional writer.”^150 Yet, as McInnes also stresses, the Ger-

man appreciation for Scott, the necrologist of Scotland, was only half the story.

In contradistinction to the Jewish past that Auerbach in “Das Ghetto” clearly

wants to record but not to perpetuate, the Scottish past was one with a national

future. Scott’s Scottish past was an object of such powerful identification for

nineteenth-century Germans because it figured simultaneously the ineluctable

loss of a way of life and the resilience of the national subject despite the loss

suffered.^151 Auerbach’s Spinoza could not respond to this double challenge. An

unbridgeable chasm separates the Jewish past being narrated from the idealized

German national community of Zuhöher, whom the act of narration is intended

to bind. Auerbach’s attempt to create a viable voice in German cultural politics

with a Jewish historical novel was fundamentally fraught with contradiction.

Auerbach sought to finesse the tensions inherent in trying to fuse Jewish his-

tory and German patriotism by pinning his hopes on the all-resolving figure

of Spinoza. The ambiguities regarding the novel’s audience—a would-be inti-

mate community, but consisting of whom?—contributed to its failure to find any

readership to speak of. Despite the great hopes and fears Auerbach entertained