338 } Notes to Chapter 5
that Weill (not Auerbach, whom Heine does not deign to name) published not only the first,
but also the best, such stories in German. Heine claims he is unable to confirm this claim
due to unfamiliarity with the “masterworks of periodical writing” (Tagesschrifstellerei) on the
other side of the Rhine (“Vorwort,” n.p.).
87. Berthold Auerbach, “Rezension zu Heinrich Heine über Ludwig Börne,” 6 : 192.
88. Ibid., 6 : 193.
89. Ibid., 6 : 197.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, V.
93. Rabbi in the town of Braunsbach, Frankfurter was also the brother of Auerbach’s
Nordstetten teacher and friend, Bernard Frankfurter.
94. Anton Bettelheim, Auerbach’s biographer, relates that Riesser disparaged these is-
sues of the Gallerie as “nothing but a failed bookseller’s speculation” (Bettelheim, BA, 97 ).
Whether or not Auerbach shared Riesser’s assessment of the Gallerie, he needed money
badly and so was in no position to decline the work.
95. Bettelheim takes this view as well (BA, 97 – 98 ).
96. [Berthold Auerbach], “Vorwort.”
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid. Bettelheim notes the “similarly dubious motivation” (BA, 98 ) at work in this
passage and in Auerbach’s presentation of his Jewish historical novels in “Das Ghetto,”
which I discuss below.
99. [Auerbach], “Vorwort.”
100. Ibid.
101. See Sorkin (The Transformation of German Jewry, 144 – 46 ) for an analysis of Auer-
bach’s generational relationship to Gotthold Salomon, rabbi at the Reform Temple in Ham-
burg, and the ideology of emancipation he embodied.
102. The other three figures Auerbach profiled were all still living when he wrote about
them.
103. Berthold Auerbach, Gallerie der ausgezeichnetsten Israeliten aller Jahrhunderte, ihre
Portraits und Biographien, 5 : 21. Auerbach was fond of the phrase “an even temperature of
education” in these years, using it also in “Tagebuch aus Weilbach,” 115 , and his letter to
Alexander Weill of May 12 , 1839 (quoted in Bettelheim, BA, 131 – 32 ).
104. In “Das Leben Spinoza’s” (xvii–xviii) Auerbach elaborates on this view that tradi-
tional Jewish culture deindividualizes those who remain within it but also produces, among
those who break away from it, highly idiosyncratic individuals.
105. Auerbach, Gallerie, 5 : 24.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., 33.
108. Ibid., 34.
109. Auerbach, “Das Leben Spinoza’s, xi–xii. Auerbach echoes these thoughts on autho-
rial anonymity some years later in Schrift und Volk ( 85 ), in which he contrasts the irreducibly
subjective nature of Romantic authorship with the essential selflessness of the Volksdichter.
110. Auerbach, “Das Leben Spinoza’s,” xii.
111. Ibid., xii–xiii.