Berlin for Jews by Leonard Barkan;

Author:Leonard Barkan; [Barkan, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-01083-0
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

And:

I imagine that just as I was being thrust into this world a supernatural being plunged a dagger into my heart, with these words: “Now, have feeling, see the world as only a few see it, be great and noble; nor can I deprive you of restless, incessant thought. But with one reservation: be a Jewess!” And now my whole life is one long bleeding.

Hannah Arendt takes outcries like these pretty straight and uses them to nail down charges that Rahel was fatally deluded by the promises of the Enlightenment.

That may be true, but when we take a closer look, we see a more complex tangle of beliefs and desires. The letter about being “ein Schlemihl und eine Jüdin,” written in 1793, is an answer to Rahel’s friend David Veit (a fellow Jew), who has recently been granted the privilege of visiting Goethe—a privilege not yet accorded to her—and it resonates with a sense of unentitlement, both on religious and gender grounds. It is also, however, steeped in an almost ostentatious mastery of Christian German culture. The quotation about the executioner’s axe is drawn from Goethe’s Egmont, near the moment of the hero’s death (itself a religious issue, since he is a Dutch Protestant being executed by Spanish Catholics). So Rahel has the text of Goethe’s (quite recently written) play at her fingertips, and she identifies with it. On the other hand, she identifies with it negatively, since in the original the executioner’s axe does gnaw on his heart. On the third hand, the very focus on this passage—which turns up elsewhere in her letters—about cutting and not cutting is bound to arise from some of the most basic issues of difference between Jews and Christians. On top of which, the very phrase “ein Schlemihl und eine Jüdin” depends on a piece of Biblical-origin Yiddish that had been quite thoroughly domesticated into German. Domesticated, that is, without ceasing to be Jewish—which makes the person Rahel and the word Schlemihl partners indeed. If this is Jewish self-hatred (a detestable phrase and, for me, most applicable to those who accuse others of it), it is also an expression of pride. The same goes for Rahel’s whole life as “one long bleeding.” Along with the dagger in the heart, the “supernatural being” has bestowed upon her a golden array of “Jewish” traits: deep feeling, unique vision, continuous questioning, and a natural nobility that defies the world’s petty categories of inherited social class.

Of course, all this philo-Judaism wrapped inside anti-Judaism as expressed by Rahel herself must come up against a far simpler and nastier account of the matter by those around her. However Rahel might strive either to escape from or redefine her identity, there were plenty who nailed her as a Jewess without any fancifying attributes—even among those close to her. One could consider ambivalent the remark by Kleist that “Jewish Society would be my favorite if the Jews did not act so pretentiously about their cultivation.” It’s harder to discount Ludwig Tieck’s

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