Editorial
Daniel Weidner, Yfaat Weiss, Christian Wiese

Idan Gillo
Forming a Liberal Coalition of Reason: Political Theology in the Mendelssohn-Lavater Affair

Thus far, scholars have discussed the Mendelssohn-Lavater affair from a liberal perspective: Mendelssohn’s reply to Lavater has been principally read as a defense of toleration.The broader context of conversion discourse in eighteenth-century Germany drew little attention. Taking issue with such apologetic-liberal readings, this paper interprets the Lavater affair as a polemical engagement with contemporary heterodox groups that regarded conversion as a necessary precondition for redemption. Mendelssohn’s reply, it argues, was a calculated political theology on the part of Enlighteners who sought to form a coalition of reason–including the Jewish and the Protestant orthodoxy, enlightened theologians, the state of Prussia and the Jewish financial elite. This coalition would fight Pietistic, Sabbatean, Frankist and other “enthusiastic” groups, for which the notion of redemption through conversion then became metonymic. Thus, the Lavater affair marks a turning point in the cultural, political and economical reconfiguration of eighteenth-century Germany.

Ofri Ilany
“Is Judah indeed the Teutonic Fatherland?” The Debate over the Hebrew Legacy at the Turn of the 18th Century

The article presents the eighteenth-century discussion on the place of Hebrew legacy within German culture. It argues that the exemplar of Hebrew poetry played a pivotal role in the work of a group of influential writers, especially members of the Sturm und Drang movement. As a reaction to anti-Biblical attacks by Deists and radical Enlightenment philosophers, German thinkers and poets posited the Old Testament as a model for sentimental and patriotic poetry. The Hebrew model acted as one of the cultural elements that allowed German literature of that period to distinguish itself from French-identified Neoclassical literature and develop its own stylistic and thematic avenues. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, new myths such as the Hindu-Aryan myth dethroned Hebrew myth from its central role in German identity. However, the search for the roots of German culture in Asia grew out of biblical scholarship, and only gradually disengaged from it.

Svetlana Natkovich
Elisha Ben Abuya, the Hebrew Faust: On the First Hebrew Translation of Faust Within the Setting of the Maskilic Change in Self-Perception

The publication of Meir ha-Levi Letteris’s translation-adaptation of Goethe’s Faust into Hebrew in 1865 was a prominent event in the contemporary world of Hebrew literature. The translator chose the story of Talmudic sage Elisha Ben Abuya, charged with connotations of otherness, heresy and rebellion, as a framework for absorbtion of Goethe’s tragedy. The translation-adaptation provoked a dispute among 19th century Maskilim about two pivotal questions of self-identification – their position relative to Jewish tradition and its canon of exemplary figures, and the role of European literature in the formation of a Hebrew literary canon. The essay argues that the polemics which erupted following the publication of the Hebrew Faust indicated a transition within Maskillic society from universalistic Enlightenment models of self-comprehension and identification to nationalistic particularistic ones.

Sabine Mangold-Will
Gotthold Weil, die Orientalische Philologie und die deutsche Wissenschaft an der Hebräischen Universität

This paper focuses on the German-Jewish orientalist Gotthold Weil (1882, Berlin – 1960, Jerusalem) and the legacy of German Wissenschaft and the field of Oriental studies at the early Hebrew University. Weil, both in Germany before 1933 and in Palestine after his immigration, contributed to a trend of German orientalist philology and Islamic studies searching for cultural interchange between the Orient and Europe. He attempted this form of German “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft” as a contribution to a humanistic or “anti-national” nationalism, and to realize an idea of Zionism meant to include Arab-Jewish cooperation. Although the attempt failed, what remained was Weil’s dedication to the German language as the language of orientalist Wissenschaft and his research on Semitic philology, which included Hebrew and Jewish history.

Vered Madar & Dani Schrire
From Leipzig to Jerusalem: Erich Brauer, a Jewish Ethnographer in Search of a Field

Erich Brauer (1895–1942) was born in Berlin, where he was active in the Jung Juda youth-movement. A talented graphic artist, he was trained as an ethnologist in Leipzig and is best known today for his ethnological studies done in Palestine, especially his monographs on the Jews of Yemen (published in German in 1934) and the Jews of Kurdistan (published in Hebrew in 1947 and in English in 1993). Brauer’s work is discussed in relation to his disciplinary habitus as a diffusionist ethnologist whose dissertation in Leipzig was devoted to the religion of the Herero and what was then known as the “Hamitic Thesis.” This background helps explain his relation to “the field” in two senses – the site where ethnographic fieldwork is conducted and the disciplinary field of German ethnology (Völkerkunde). These two fields are inseparable from one another and are discussed in the context of the status of ethnographic disciplines at The Hebrew University in Mandatory Palestine. Finally, the paper examines historiographic issues relating to the fate of the communities Brauer studied, his own Zionist identity, and the way German ethnology was practiced during National Socialism.

Matěj Spurný
Unerwünschte Rückkehrer. Staatsbürgerschaft und Eigentum deutscher Juden in der Nachkriegstschechoslowakei

The issue of displacement of the German speaking population of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War has been a subject of a broader Czech, German and international debate for several decades. This article examines the position of German-speaking Jews from Czech lands returning from emigration or concentration camps after the end of the war and the process of the nationalization of citizenship and property rights in post-war Czechoslovakia. As Jews, these former citizens of Czechoslovakia were undoubtedly victims of the National Socialist terror. As people of German (or at least non-Czech) nationality, however, they fit into particular categories affected by presidential decrees. This article shows how state authorities, and local officials especially, tried to use the post-war situation to eradicate all aspects of what was called “Germanness.” The story of German-speaking Jews in post-war Czechoslovakia is an element in the process of the disintegration of the state of law in post-war central-eastern Europe.

Vera Bronn
Herbert A. Strauss’s Über dem Abgrund. Inquiries into the History, Narratology, and Poetics of a Jewish Historian’s Autobiography

This article discusses Herbert A. Strauss’s Über dem Abgrund / In the Eye of the Storm (1997/1999). Strauss’s book is one of the numerous autobiographies published by Jewish historians forced to escape from Europe during the Second World War. By way of literary analysis, a crisis of autobiographical writing and narration is diagnosed, which corresponds with the manifold layers of crisis narrated in the text. These crises also correspond with Strauss’s historiographical approach. Such literary analysis therefore outlines the relevance of further inquiries into 20th century Jewish historians’ autobiographies for the history and theory of Jewish historiography.