Abstract
In this challenging and broadly convincing book, Martha B. Helfer investigates anti-Semitism, not among the usual suspects, but in a range of mostly canonical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts by Lessing, Schiller, Arnim, Droste-Hülshoff, Stifter and Grillparzer, where animus against Jews is mostly latent and has to be uncovered by close reading. Even the great philosemite Lessing, whose conscious good intentions Helfer does not impugn, reveals unconscious ambivalence, not only in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts but even in Die Juden and Nathan der Weise.
Helfer’s readings are astute and often persuasive. In the most clearly denigratory text, Die Sendung Moses, she shows how Schiller denies Jews credit for monotheism by ascribing its invention to the Egyptian Moses and portraying the Jews only as the ‘impure vessel’ which preserved it without understanding it. Stifter in Abdias clearly represents Jews as alien to Europe, especially by associating them with Africa, while Grillparzer’s Die Jüdin von Toledo makes philosemitic gestures which, in Helfer’s view, are undermined by the play’s evidence of the destructive impact of a Jewish woman on a European state. Helfer ingeniously associates Grillparzer’s Rahel with Lola Montez, the exotic, pseudo-Spanish Irishwoman who was accused of disrupting Bavarian politics in 1848.
In her most original interpretation, Helfer argues that Friedrich Mergel, the village deviant in Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche, may be a Jew by race, though without knowing it. Her key evidence is the phrase in the opening poem, ‘eitlen Blutes Drang’, which she thinks refers to Jewish blood, and Mergel’s burial in the ‘Schindanger’ or knacker’s field reserved for Jews. However, ‘Blut’ more probably suggests the impulsive fury that may have made Mergel commit murder; and if Mergel does not know he is a Jew, how do the village authorities know it? He is buried in the ‘Schindanger’ because he is a suicide. Helfer’s close reading of this notoriously enigmatic text is instructive, but in effect substitutes a crude anti-Semitic reading for the complex moral interpretation that the story demands.
It might be objected that in the works she studies Helfer discloses only possible counter-readings or subtexts which do not invalidate the overall positive attitude towards Jews that most of them present. She replies that since the Holocaust we are, or should be, more alert to latent anti-Semitism and can see in such undertones signs of the deep-rooted cultural mind-set that helped to make the Holocaust possible, so that an innocent or merely affirmative reading of these texts is not just inadequate but morally blind. Even in their immediate context, as she repeatedly shows, these texts embody negative responses to the slow progress of Jewish emancipation.
Nevertheless, I ended up feeling that although Helfer’s post-Holocaust readings do disclose real anti-Semitic stereotypes in her texts, the texts are thereby impoverished. Her restoration of one historical perspective serves to occlude others. On a broader view, her analyses indicate cultural patterns that complicate, qualify or even thwart attempts to write favourably about Jews. Often these patterns are theological. One is the traditional Christian assumption, nowadays deplored as ‘supersessionism’, that since the advent of Christ, Judaism has been superseded and survives as an empty, unspiritual, fossil religion whose adherents, according to Luther, embody a dire warning to Christians. But the significance of this pattern can be reversed, so that Judaism, the ancient ‘originary religion’ (p. 20), survives as an archaic threat to its successors, Christianity and Islam; this is the implication Helfer finds in Nathan’s ‘Ringparabel’. Droste, following St Paul, opposes Jewish law to Christian love, while Stifter in Abdias may really be worrying about the capricious God who dominates the Old Testament. Even if these assumptions are potentially anti-Semitic, it is important, in our post-Christian age, to recover them, without excusing them, and to restore the complex theological dimensions of these texts – which often imply a radical questioning of their own Christian assumptions.