Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824-1955

Stanford University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Skolnik, Jonathan, 1967- author.

Jewish pasts, German fictions : history, memory, and minority culture in Germany, 1824-1955 / Jonathan Skolnik.

pages cm–(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8607-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Jews in literature. 2. Jewish historical fiction, German–History and criticism. 3. German fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 4. German–20th century–History and criticism. 5. Collective memory and literature–Germany–History. 6. Sephardim in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

PT749.J4S56 2014

833.009'3529924-dc23

2013042647

ISBN 978-0-8047-9059-8 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions

History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955

Jonathan Skolnik

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS,

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

To my family . . .

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Chronology of German-Jewish Historical Fiction

Introduction: Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

1. Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization: Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837)

2. Who learns history from Heine? Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840)

3. Minority Culture in the Age of the Nation: Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen (1837)

Hermann Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden (1856–57)

Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado (1867)

Markus Lehmann’s Die Familie y Aguilar (1873)

Alfred Nossig’s Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes (1906)

4. German Modernism and Jewish Memory: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (1921)

5. Where books are burned . . .: Jewish Memories of Inquisition and Expulsion in Nazi Germany and in Exile

Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez (1934)

Hermann Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella (1936)

Ernst Sommer’s Botschaft aus Granada (1937)

Epilogue: Post-Holocaust Echoes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book owes the greatest debt to my teacher Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (z"l), who set me on a long path to consider the meaning of historical fiction about Jewish history in the modern age. When I was a graduate student at Columbia University, his reference to an obscure novel published by a Jewish press in Nazi Germany in 1934 (Sinheimer’s Maria Nunnez) ignited my curiosity about the relation of historical fiction to the forms and contexts of Jewish historical memory. Since that time, a host of teachers, colleagues, friends, and institutions have offered generous support, guidance, inspiration, and encouragement, which has enabled me to complete this project.

I am grateful to my colleagues in German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for all of their guidance and support: Sky Arndt-Briggs, Barton Byg, Susan Cocalis, Andrew Donson, Sara Lennox, Robert Sullivan. Special thanks are due to Sigrid Bauschinger for her inspiration and encouragement, and for her helpful comments on Chapter 4. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; and especially want to thank Maria Soledad Barbon, Christine Ingraham, David Lenson, William Moebius, Catherine Portugues, Bob Rothstein, and Amanda Seaman. I am grateful to my colleagues in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies: Aviva Ben-Ur, Jay Berkowitz, Shmuel Bolozky, Olga Gershenson, Susan Shapiro, and especially James Young. I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of History: Joyce Berkman, Jennifer Fronc, Jose Angel Hernandez, Jennifer Heuer, Brian Ogilvie, and Jon Olsen. I am also fortunate to have enjoyed wonderful support and encouragement from the University of Massachusetts administrators and their programs. I would particularly like to thank Julie Candler Hayes and Joel Martin.

Many friends and colleagues in the Five Colleges and Amherst-Northampton area have been a continued source of inspiration and support: Polina Barskova, Justin Cammy, Justin David, Lawrence Douglas, Lois Dubin, Catherine Epstein, Heidi Gilpin, Sean Gilsdorf, Jocelyne Kolb, Aaron Lansky, Karen Remmler, Christian Rogowski, Rachel Rubinstein, Jeff Wallen, Joel Westerdale.

This project benefited from generous support from several institutions. The final research and writing of this book was made possible in part by funds granted through a Soslund Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made and the views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author. I particularly would like to thank Jan Gross, Atina Grossmann, Krista Hegburg, and Jürgen Matthäus for their helpful discussions of my work. I am also grateful to Steven Feldman and the Emerging Scholars Program at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for expert support in the preparation of the manuscript and of the book proposal. I thank the Leo Baeck Institute for the generous research support provided by the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship. I am especially grateful to Frank Mecklenburg for his encouragement and guidance. A Kiev Judaica Collection Research Fellowship at the George Washington University afforded me the chance to research rare illustrated Heine editions. I am grateful to Brad Sabin Hill for his expert assistance.

Many at Columbia University have greatly shaped the ideas at the core of this work, and many have since provided invaluable criticism that aided in the completion of this book. I thank Mark Anderson, Volker Berghahn, Beth Drenning, Andreas Huyssen, Rashid Khalidi, Gertrud Koch, Neil Levi, Dan Miron, Harro Müller, David Roskies, Michael Rothberg, Michael Stanislawski, Frank Stern, and Daniel Unowsky. I thank great friends and colleagues at the University of Oregon: Ken Calhoon, Esther Jacobsen-Tepfer, John McCole, Richard Stein, and Peter Warnek. I would like to offer particular thanks to David Ruderman and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where I spent a semester in the early stages of this project: Richard I. Cohen, Adam Sutcliffe, and Liliane Weissberg. Many colleagues in German Studies, History, Jewish Studies, and other fields have also provided generous criticism, support, and advice. I am grateful to Ted Bahr, Fran Bernstein, Carolyn Betensky, Elliot Borenstein, Warren Breckman, Michael Brenner, Geoffrey Davis, Mark Gelber, Sharon Gillerman, Peter Gordon, Yael Halevi-Wise, Susannah Heschel, Marion Kaplan, Chana Kronfeld, Leslie Morris, David N. Myers, Thomas Pfau, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey Sammons, Astrid Schmetterling, Scott Spector, Nadia Valman, Till van Rahden, Deborah Vietor-Engländer, and Ian Wallace. Jennifer Taylor deserves special thanks for helpful information about Ernst Sommer. Special thanks to Marje Schuetze-Coburn and Michaela Ullmann of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. I am very grateful to members of the German and Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University who provided helpful discussions of my work: Bill Donohue, Katja Garloff, Sander Gilman, Jeffrey Grossman, Martha Helfer, Michael G. Levine, Agnes Müller, Sander Gilman, Karina von Tippleskirch, and Kerry Wallach. I would like to express special gratitude to Jonathan Hess for his helpful feedback and encouragement.

Many colleagues and friends in Germany, Austria, and France were a source of great encouragement and assistance as I conducted my research and developed my ideas. I thank Delphine Bechtel, Jürgen Bruhns, Petra Ernst, Justus Fetscher, Etienne François, Barbara Hahn, Johannes Heil, Klaus Hödl, Gerald Lamprecht, Inka Mülder-Bach, Karoline Ochse, Peter Schöttler, Eric Vieuille, Guido and Horst Wille, Ulrike Zoels-Offenberg. Thank you to colleagues from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.: Dorothee Brantz, Sonja Duempelmann, Cordula Grewe, Simone Lässig, David Lazar, Kelly McCullough, Christoph Mauch, Bernd Schäfer, and Richard Wetzell.

I am especially grateful to friends and colleagues in Washington, D.C., and New Jersey for encouragement and inspiration: Arthur Allen, Todd Barman, Johanna Bockman, Leah Chang, Cecile Chen, Tom Ciocco, Natan and Vered Guttman, Barry Hartsfield, Ben and Lisa Leff, Masha and Rob Levy, Paul and Ira May, Ryan Naftulin, Marina Burul-Sir and Robert Sir, Kenichi Sugihara, Kenji Sugihara, Margaret Talbot, Gayle Wald, Bill Winstead, and Andrew Zimmermann.

Thank you to Norris Pope, my expert editor at Stanford University Press. It has been a pleasure to work with him at every stage of this project. Thanks, too, to the other members of the Stanford University Press team: Thien Lam, Mariana Raykov, and Stacy Wagner. I am grateful to Andrew Frisardi for his expert editing of my manuscript. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors. Thanks to Todd Barman for his preparation of the index and to Kate Brown for proofreading.

Thanks extending far beyond the word limit for which I have contracted with Stanford University Press are due to my family: Mark Belenky and Nina Raben, Ira Makovoz, Masha Makavoz and Vadim Goldin, Yelena Raben and Bill Hurst, the entire Acker and Skolnik-Acker mishpohe, Ruth Kirschner and Mark Rosengarden, Barbara and Steve Kirschner, Leona (z"l) and Phillip Kirschner (z"l), Esther Skolnik (z"l), Julie Skolnik, Tressa Fiore and Miri Skolnik, Lucia Young. A whole other chapter of thanks are due to my parents, Norma and Stanley Skolnik. I thank Tosha Skolnik and Sonia Skolnik for their inspiration, patience, and humor as their father wrote this book. And, finally, I thank Masha Belenky without whose insight, support, and love this book would never have been possible.

An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as Writing Jewish History Between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 19:2 (May 1999): 101–26. Chapter 2 revises material published previously as Heine and Haggadah: History, Narration, and Tradition in the Age of Wissenschaft des Judentums, in Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From al-Andalus to the Haskalah, edited by Adam Sutcliffe and Ross Brann (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 213–24. A section of Chapter 3 was previously published as Writing Jewish History in the Margins of the Weimar Classics: Minority Culture and National Identity in Germany, 1837–1873, in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität, 1750–1871, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 227–38. A portion of Chapter 5 was previously published as "Dissimilation and the Historical Novel: Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez," Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 33 (1998): 225–37. Portions from my chapter The Strange Career of the Abarbanels from Heine to the Holocaust, in Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, edited by Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 114–28, appear in Chapters 3 and 5. I thank Indiana University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Böhlau Verlag, Stanford University Press, and the Leo Baeck Institute respectively for permission to reuse this material in this book.

A Chronology of German-Jewish Historical Fiction

Selected works, with dates of initial publication and their translations into Hebrew:

Introduction

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

In every age, alongside the obvious phenomenon of assimilation, we can notice the dissimilation which always accompanies it.

Franz Rosenzweig (1922)¹

If historical fiction is a staple of the national imagination, how might a minority relate to it? What does it mean for a minority to imagine its history in a majority language, as it seeks to integrate in an age of nationalism and embourgoisement? This book is a study of how German-Jewish novelists used images from the Jewish past, most notably from the Sephardic-Jewish past, to define their place in German culture and society. Building upon the work of Pierre Nora and Yosef H. Yerushalmi, I argue that Jewish historical fiction was a realm of memory (lieu de mémoire), a cultural form that functioned as a parallel, and indeed as a corrective to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing (Wissenschaft des Judentums).² Jewish Pasts, German Fictions shows how, for German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century, for major authors like Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach as well as for minority authors like Ludwig Philippson, the Sephardic past came to represent both hopes for integration and fears about assimilation. For modernist German-Jewish writers from the 1890s to the 1920s, by contrast, Sephardic stories gave shape to their concerns with anti-Semitism and Zionism. Finally, this book shows how, after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists in Nazi Germany and in exile employed these very same images from the Sephardic past (Inquisition, expulsion, auto-da-fé) to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The term I use to describe this dynamic of minority memory is dissimilation, a term first coined by the German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig in a diary entry in 1922.

Dissimilation is a response to a conventional view of German Jewry, which has long been defined in popular representations by the polemical term assimilation. To integrate into German society, so the conventional view, Jews all too often paid the price of abandoning their heritage. The Jewish rush to enter mainstream culture life in Germany was a negative integration, a servile conformity which was unmasked as a tragic illusion by anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.³ In a 1934 illustration to the Passover Haggadah, by Arthur Szyk, the assimilated Jew is portrayed as the wicked son (Figure 1). In Syzk’s illustration, an image that is contiguous with racist anti-Semitic caricature, Jewish features are legible beneath the German clothes: assimilation is a German fiction which tries but fails to escape the Jewish past. By contrast, this book, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions, argues that the Jewish embrace of German-language culture also took on forms which encompassed a different relation between Jewish past and German fiction, one that makes necessary a different view of integration and acculturation. By imagining, indeed reinventing Jewish history through German-language historical novels, German Jews asserted their own unique identity as they integrated into larger narratives of German and European history. If the conventional view portrays the Jewish contribution to German culture as something beyond Judaism—German Jews as the truest devotees of the ideal of Bildung and of the classical tradition of German high culture⁴—then an examination of German-Jewish popular culture leads us to a different conclusion. Dissimilation is the crystallization of a new form of Jewish identity and distinctiveness that occurs as part of the dynamic of acculturation and alongside the phenomenon of assimilation.⁵

In recent decades, many scholars of Jewish social and cultural history have kept the concept of assimilation at arm’s length, as they have addressed the question of the extent to which German-Jewish modernity represents a rupture with Jewish collective memory. As Yerushalmi posits in Zakhor, the project of secular Jewish history was a challenge to Jewish collective memory. The Wissenschaft des Judentums school in early nineteenth-century Germany, the first generation of modern Jewish historians, turned to the Jewish past with an Enlightenment zeal to demythologize. Yet curiously, from the very same milieu that produced this Jewish version of German historicism, a new genre arose: modern Jewish historical fiction. What meanings did these fictional Jewish histories—written in German and often published and distributed by the same Jewish publishers and book clubs in that popularized the histories of Isaac Markus Jost and Heinrich Graetz in nineteenth-century Germany⁶—have in an age of secular historiography? What did it mean for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language in the age of modern nationalism? The answer, as I argue in this book, was the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. By integrating into German culture and society (i.e., writing German-language fiction), Jewish writers transformed rather than rejected the Jewish past. Dissimilation is fundamentally linked with historical memory. If, as Benedict Anderson famously asserts, historical fiction is a literary genre par excellence of the nationalist imagination, forging new identities vertically across time and horizontally across space through modern print media, then the German-Jewish example shows how historical fiction also became a vehicle for minority self-definition.⁷ In the form of German historical fiction about Jewish history (even by authors with integrationist politics), the Jewish embrace of German culture was thus not an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory better termed dissimilation.

Figure 1. Arthur Szyk, The Four Sons (1934). The wicked son portrayed as an assimilated German. Image courtesy of The Robbins Family Collection. Reproduced with the cooperation of the Arthur Szyk Society. Burlingame, Calif., www.szyk.org.

Central to this new German-Jewish cultural memory and dissimilation was a notable fixation on the Sephardic-Jewish past. Related to the ways the nineteenth-century German Jews employed Moorish-style synagogue architecture to define their integration into the visual culture of German historicism while also asserting their religious and cultural distinctiveness,⁸ German-Jewish historical fiction centered on themes of convivencia (the flourishing of Jewish culture in Islamic Spain), conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion to project hopes for integration as well as fears of assimilation and anti-Semitism. In Jewish Pasts, German Fictions, I explore how major nineteenth-century German writers like Heinrich Heine (Der Rabbi von Bacherach [The Rabbi of Bacherach]) and Berthold Auerbach (Spinoza), and writers like Ludwig Philippson and Marcus Lehmann, who wrote in German for almost exclusively Jewish audiences, used the Spanish-Jewish past as a source for their self-understanding in German culture and society.

One of my main arguments in Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is that Jewish writers in the nineteenth century established a vocabulary of historical symbols that became a source for Jewish cultural memory as it faced the challenges of the twentieth century. The same historical symbols that served integrationist Jewish writers (whether of liberal or orthodox cast) in the nineteenth century became a source of cultural memory for writers reacting to the crises of Jewish identity in the Weimar and National Socialist eras. In Chapters 3 and 4, I recount how political Zionists like Alfred Nossig and cultural avant-gardists like Else Lasker-Schüler emulated and rewrote the works of Heine, Ludwig Philippson, and others to address a new, virulent anti-Semitism and the wish for a Jewish cultural renaissance: a new form of dissimilation.

In Chapter 5, I argue that with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers such as Hermann Sinsheimer, Hermann Kesten, and Ernst Sommer were able to respond by using images from the Sephardic past. For Jewish writers in the 1930s, stories of Inquisition, expulsion, and auto-da-fé were now used to grapple with the Nazi attempt to remove Jews from German culture. As I detail in Chapter 5, by 1934 the National Socialists had adopted dissimilation as a programmatic word for their anti-Jewish campaign. For Jewish novelists, historical fiction became an important cultural and political resource with which to respond to Nazi persecution as well as to come to terms with the dashed dreams of nineteenth-century German Jewish writers.

Dissimilation and Assimilation

In the 1930s, the Nazis’ campaign for their version of dissimilation unleashed a debate in the German-Jewish world. Jewish nationalists and Jewish integrationists criticized each other, while the National Socialists hounded all Jews. Historians of Jewish history adopted the term dissimilation in the meaning that the Nazis had given it, as Salo Wittmayer Baron did in A Social and Religious History of the Jews (1937),⁹ but the word also began to be used in a wider sense, as Jews, under the pressure of Nazi anti-Semitism, began to reconsider the terms of Jewish integration throughout history. Around 1990, perhaps after sufficient historical distance to the tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s had been reached, historians of German-Jewish history began to express discontent with the assimilation paradigm in the historiography, which was increasingly seen as outdated. David Sorkin and Shulamit Volkov were influential historians who reached for new terms, as they turned their attention to the development of distinct minority spheres and dissimilar cultural practices that developed as part of the general phenomena of the acculturation and embourgoisement of the majority of Jews in nineteenth-century Germany. Sorkin and Volkov employed terms such as subculture and rediscovered dissimilation to describe the secularization of Jewish life and the creation of new forms of Jewish distinctiveness.¹⁰ The four-volume synthetic work edited by Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, shied away from assimilation as an analytic term in favor of the more neutral acculturation.¹¹ David Sorkin’s article Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History argued that assimilation, deeply encumbered by the 1930s polemics of Zionists versus integrationists was too ideologically laden to be analytically useful in conveying how German Jews fashioned themselves and interacted with their environment.¹² It is in this spirit that the term dissimilation attracted the attention of contemporary scholars.

Historians and scholars of Jewish literature and thought have used dissimilation in a number of ways, often not with reference to Franz Rosenzweig. (Historians also do not use dissimilation in the technical sense it has in the field of linguistics, that is, to describe the way sounds are changed to distinguish them from neighboring sounds within a word.) Dennis B. Klein used dissimilation in his critique of Peter Gay to describe the limits of Jewish integration in Central Europe and the self-conscious affirmation of cultural distinctiveness by a small but significant minority of Jews.¹³ Shulamit Volkov first employed the term to describe the dynamics at work in assimilation as an ongoing process, with immigrant Eastern Jews reminding German Jews of their own status as relative newcomers on the assimilation ladder.¹⁴ Volkov then expanded her use of dissimilation, as a term relative to assimilation, to connote the fluid synthesis of integration and isolation that characterized Jewish life in nineteenth-century Germany.¹⁵ Some writers have used dissimilation in Volkov’s earlier sense to illustrate how German and eastern European Jews participated in a Jewish cultural renaissance in the years before and after World War I. For example, Gavriel Rosenfeld uses the term in his study of art criticism in the journal Ost und West; and Ritchie Robertson uses the concept, in his consummate study The Jewish Question in German Literature, as an organizing rubric for a broad historical phase in Jewish literature, for works influenced by cultural Zionism and the encounter with Ostjuden.¹⁶

Franz Rosenzweig’s use of dissimilation, as introduced in his diary entry of April 3, 1922, posits a permanent, transhistorical dynamic in the history of the Jews that nonetheless belongs to a concrete historical moment. Stéphane Mosès explains Rosenzweig’s use of the term as both a dialectic of identity construction located at the rift between differing notions of historical experience (Jewish vs. Western-Christian) and a movement that signifies a withdrawal from Western civilization and return to the sources of Jewish identity.¹⁷ For Rosenzweig, dissimilation is a countermovement that accompanies assimilation. The crucial distinction is that it is a conscious step in the affirmation of a Jewish identity.

In Jewish Pasts, German Fictions, I use dissimilation in the dual sense that Franz Rosenzweig intended it. On the one hand, I argue that Jewish historical fiction is indeed a dialectic between Jewish historical narratives and Western, secular notions of historical time, a perennial dynamic of the Jewish encounter with other cultures, but one that experienced a greater tension in an era of emerging ideas of the nation. On the other hand, in the five chapters that follow, I show how dissimilation took different forms at specific historical junctures. At each stage, Jewish historical fiction was an articulation of Jewish identity in response to the non-Jewish environment. In Chapter 1, I examine one of the earliest modern Jewish historical novels in a Western language, whose subject—Baruch Spinoza—is paradigmatic for the Jewish encounter with modernity. In Berthold Auerbach’s hands, dissimilation is a Jewish response to a demand for radical assimilation, a secularization that erases Jewish identity. Jewish historical fiction is the secular culture that articulates Jewish difference. This created a model which later writers follow, as they create a German-language minority culture.

In Chapter 3, I focus on these German-Jewish minority writers including Ludwig Philippson, Marcus Lehmann, and Hermann Reckendorf in order to elucidate the meaning of dissimilation in an age of emerging national culture and Jewish embourgoisement. For these mid-nineteenth century writers, Jewish popular novels on Sephardic themes projected nineteenth-century European conceptions of religion, family, and politics backward into Jewish history as a means to give historical legitimacy to various shades of integrationist Jewish identities (Reform, neo-Orthodox). Dissimilation was, as Rosenzweig saw it, the flipside of assimilation, a crystallization of Jewish identity in tandem with the formation of new German identities.

By the later nineteenth-century, however, as the anniversary of 1492 was commemorated in 1892, the ambitions of the integrationist form of dissimilation began to give way to an understanding of dissimilation as estrangement from European culture in the sense of political and cultural Zionism, as a response to anti-Semitism. In Chapter 3, I show the work of the German-language writer Alfred Nossig to be just such a response, as I also explore the translations and adaptations of German-language novels from the mid-nineteenth century into Hebrew and Yiddish in the later nineteenth century,¹⁸ illustrating the transformation of minority culture into national culture, something that moves beyond dissimilation.

Dissimilation, drawing upon its meaning in linguistics, is of course always fundamentally bound up with language. The transposition of German-language minority culture into Hebrew-language national culture is one important case, and the search for a Jewish literary language in the context of the Jewish cultural renaissance of the Weimar years is another. In Chapter 4, I explore the modernist writer Else Lasker-Schüler’s 1921 novella Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (The Wonder-Working Rabbi of Barcelona). As a rewriting of Heine and Ludwig Philippson, Lasker-Schüler’s book is on one level a renewal of the tradition of German-Jewish Sephardism, a perceptive reinterpretation of minority cultural memory that speaks to the crisis of German Jews after World War I. Yet her modernist language experiments illustrate another level of dissimilation. Lasker-Schüler was one of the rare German-Jewish writers to engage on a literary level with the literary-political concerns of Hebrew and Yiddish modernists in 1920s Berlin, and my interpretation of Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona revises our view of her work: Lasker-Schüler was in no way a cryptic and individualistic poet but one whose modernist prose gives linguistic shape to dissimilation as the positive articulation of Jewish