This book is an erudite literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, Ritchie Robertson offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. No other study by a single author deals with German-Jewish relations so comprehensively and over such a long period of literary history.

• Introduction


• Enlightenment; German Jewry before Emancipation; How the Enlightenment saw the Jews; Lessing and Toleration; Emancipation: Dohm versus Humboldt; Moses Mendelssohn and the Rational Jew; Mendelssohns Legacy


• Liberalism; Jews and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century; Schnitzler: Liberalism and Irony; The European Humanism of Stefan Zweig; Freud: Science versus Religion


• Antisemitism; Varieties of Antisemitism; Literary Images of the Jew


• Assimilation; The Meaning of Assimilation; Self-Hatred; Hyperacculturation


• Dissimilation; The Jewish Renaissance; The Eastern Jews; The Jew as Oriental


• Zionism


• Abbreviations


• Select Bibliography