340 } Notes to Chapter 5
a Jew like Spinoza,” but also felt “more like a Jew than Spinoza,” we can see that Auerbach
was aware of his identification with and admiration for Spinoza, but also of the limits of both.
Of course, the context of the antisemitism debate and Auerbach’s own painful experience of
antisemitism may have inflected his memory of how he felt Jewish and how Jewish he felt in
the mid- 1830 s, but given his position in “Das Judentum und die neueste Literaturm” there is
very good reason to take Auerbach’s later remarks at face value. Nothing, to be sure, suggests
that Auerbach ever identified with a radical Spinoza; on the contrary, he strove consistently
to domesticate Spinozan ideas.
124. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew, 58.
125. Auerbach, “Das Ghetto,” iii.
126. Ibid., vii.
127. The anonymous Auerbach chronology in Scheuffelen’s “Berthold Auerbach, 1812 –
1882 ” mentions numerous abortive Jewish projects that Auerbach entertained between 1875
and 1881 , including a Jewish Dorfgeschichte, a Jewish novel, and an essay on Heine and Dis-
raeli. His late “Kindheitserinnerungen aus Nordstetten” contain interesting reflections on
the relations between Germans and Jews in the Nordstetten of his childhood.
128. Bettelheim (BA, 98 ) notes the affinity between the Gallerie preface and “Das Ghetto.”
129. Auerbach, “Das Ghetto,” iii.
130. Ibid.
131. Jonathan Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity,
73.
132. Ibid., 80.
133. See Hess (Middlebrow Literature, chapter 2 ) for an analysis of how Kompert’s ghetto
fiction partly accomplishes this dual function for an upwardly mobile German-Jewish audi-
ence while also appealing to a non-Jewish audience.
134. Auerbach, “Das Ghetto,” iv.
135. Here and in the following pages I paraphrase and quote from Auerbach’s Jewish
novel “recipe” in “Das Ghetto,” iv–vi.
136. Auerbach’s pastiche of the contemporary popular Jewish novel evokes aspects of,
among other works, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe ( 1820 ) and Eugénie Foa’s two-volume La Juive,
histoire du temps de la regence ( 1835 ), which was immediately translated into German as Die
Jüdin: Geschichte aus den Zeiten der Regentschaft. Foa’s novel was reviewed in mainstream
German literary journals, such as the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände in 1836. Foa’s self-
exoticization as a Jewish author would have been particularly repellent to Auerbach. On Foa,
see Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, chapter 1.
137. Auerbach, “Das Ghetto,” vi. Theodor Hell is a pseudonym for Karl Gottlieb The-
odor Winkler ( 1775 – 1856 ), author and publicist. Penelope ( 1811 – 48 ) was a Taschenbuch (a lit-
erary prose almanac) published by Theodor Hell. I have been unable to identify the Wachs-
mann to whom Auerbach refers in this passage.
138. Auerbach, “Das Ghetto,” vi–vii.
139. Ibid., viii.
140. Ibid., ix.
141. Ibid.
142. Ibid., vii.
143. See Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” especially 388. On one level, Benjamin is re-