Published by De Gruyter

Volume 15 Issue 2 - Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation

Issue of Naharaim

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Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available January 13, 2022

Introduction

December 1, 2021

Special Section: Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation

September 10, 2021

Dogmatism, Criticism, Divine Ideals: Rav A. I. Kook’s Concept of God in Light of H. Cohen

Yehuda (Yady) Oren

Page range: 153-177

Abstract

This paper examines the claim that the two final articles of Rav Kook’s book Ikvei Hatzon were written as a response to a lecture given by Hermann Cohen. It first reviews Cohen’s lecture showing that, regarding the concept of God, Cohen argues for the compatibility of Judaism and Kantianism in denying the dogmatic-mythological preoccupation with the existence of God in favor of understanding God as the basis of morality. Second, it analyzes Kook’s articles, demonstrating that he accepts the compatibility of Judaism and Kantianism together with the denial of the dogmatic relation to God as a substance. Nevertheless, Kook is not satisfied with the critical view that denies the dogmatic relation to the substance altogether, since it formulates a merely negative relationship with God. Instead, he develops his concept of the Divine Ideals, which synthesizes the dogmatic preoccupation with substantiality and the critical denial of it. The Divine Ideals are the moral progression of man, through which man gradually becomes identical to God. Within the Divine Ideals, dogmatism becomes an emotional striving to be identical with God as a substance, while criticism is the intellectual negation of the possibility of such identity, which ensures that the process will continue indefinitely.

November 24, 2021

Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob

Sabrina Habel

Page range: 179-200

Abstract

The article explores the connection between enlightenment and comedy, as well as its importance for German Jewry. Following Hegel, whose thoughts on ancient drama as well as modern society have shaped the German discourse on comedy until today, this article demonstrates that questions of self-formation, emancipation, and historical self-location are central to comedy. In Carl Sternheim’s comedy The Snob , the idea of self-formation resonates with the historic concept of “civic improvement” through “ Bildung ”: Jewish emancipation in Germany stood at the end of an educational project that outlasted Jews’ achieving legal equality. The Snob is a comedy about Jewish acculturation and bourgeoisification and embodies Marx’s understanding of comedy as ambivalent: on the one hand, comedy helps people to part cheerfully from their past that was characterized by inequality, but, on the other, it indicates that a world-historic fact like Jewish emancipation may be prone to repeat itself as a farce. Sternheim’s comedy develops a poetic that embraces ambivalence, but also opens the genre of comedy to the question of therapy and healing. It depicts the struggle between autonomy and social formation – the dialectics of German “ Bildung .”

November 16, 2021

“To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung

Yuval Kremnitzer

Page range: 201-220

Abstract

The conceptual history of Bildung, the German term for self-formation, encapsulates the ethical revolution of modern German thought, associated with the Kantian moment and its aftermath. Reshaped in modernity to respond to a post-Kantian, critical sensibility, the modern term emphasizes the reflexive, active process of self-formation, in contrast with the medieval theological sensibility which emphasized the receptive imprint of the image of God. In this article, I unpack Moses Mendelsohn’s idiosyncratic notion of Bildung. I show that what is unique, indeed, singular in Mendelssohn’s notion of Bildung is the way it merges the traditional, theological notion with the modern one. For Mendelssohn, to imitate God is to come to value one’s contingent being. The imitation of the ideal, the most perfect, is tantamount to embracing the perfectible, and the process of perfection or self-actualization. Jacobi, Mendelssohn, Bildung, Contingency, Pantheism affair, Moral Perfectionism

November 24, 2021

Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung

Sara Olga Melinda Yanovsky

Page range: 221-242

Abstract

Simon Szántó is known as one of the founders of the Jewish press in Vienna, the editor and main author of the Jewish periodical Die Neuzeit , and an influential educator during the high point of Austrian liberalism between the 1860s and the early 1880s. His enormously rich literary legacy covers issues such as the integration of Jews into the Austrian-Hungarian society, religious reform, gender roles, and particularly education. Szántó’s writings offer a unique opportunity to look at the Viennese liberal period of the second half of the nineteenth century and its challenges through the eyes of a mostly overlooked, but highly significant and influential actor of the time. This article will first introduce Simon Szántó’s cultural and educational background that impacted his ideals and his activities, and go on to discuss one of his main concerns, namely Jewish education. Religious education, confessional schooling, and Jewish upbringing at home bore the burden of responsibility for shaping Austrian Jewish women and men. These Jews were to be integrated in an Austrian culture, while at the same time taught to retain a strong Jewish particularity. Szántó aimed to unite this dichotomous reality through the realization of his ideals of Jewish Bildung .

August 26, 2021

„Ein modernes Verdeutschungs-Unternehmen“. Über die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel

Inka Sauter

Page range: 243-267

Abstract

This article traces a debate on Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s Germanization of the Bible. The trigger of the debate was Siegfried Kracauer’s infamous critique entitled “Die Bibel auf Deutsch” (“The Bible in German”), published in April 1926 in the Frankfurter Zeitung . In his harsh review of the first volume of the translation, Kracauer regards the use of the German language by Buber and Rosenzweig as an archaization. Relying in part on unpublished letters, this paper presents and explores the different perceptions of the translation, which embody the depths these fault lines penetrated both in general public discourse and, more specifically, in German-Jewish circles. This article also points towards the change of the German language in the 19th century that is embedded in the historical semantics of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible.

Other Contributions

September 17, 2021

Marx and Rosenzweig on Community and Redemption

Eugenio Muinelo Paz

Page range: 269-285

Abstract

The first and second parts of the paper will deal with the problem of assimilation and the genesis of a kind of cultural hibridity in the context of the German Jewry in the Modern Age. I will try to understand the figures of Karl Marx and Franz Rosenzweig as complementary visions of Jewish identity, the latter from within, and the former from without it. The third and the fourth parts will tackle the question of how that identity may be fully realized in a socio-institutional sense, not necessarily restricted to a narrow political conception of the State. My conclusion will be that both Marx and Rosenzweig affirmed human freedom as an essentialy social phenomenon enacted through redemption, which must take always in account the problem of alterity.

September 9, 2021

When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews

Mariusz Kałczewiak

Page range: 287-309

Abstract

This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term “Ostjuden” to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980’s and 2000’s, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term “Ostjuden” and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term “Ostjuden” re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term “osteuropäische Juden” (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.

December 10, 2021

The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song

Dana Rubinstein, Ynon Wygoda

Page range: 311-340

Abstract

Among the hidden treasures squirreled away in the archives of Israel’s National Library lies a fragmented correspondence that sheds new light on the afterlife of a project that was long deemed the farewell gift to the German language and culture from the remnants of its Jewry. It is an exchange of letters between two scholars, whose interest in the German rendition of the Bible occupied them for many years, first in Germany, and later in the land where Hebrew was vernacular and where one might think there would no longer be a need for translations of the Bible; particularly not into a language that aroused considerable aversion in the aftermath of the war. And yet, the 1963–64 exchange between the two Jerusalemites, the Vienna-born and Frankfurt-crowned philosopher, theologian, and translator Martin Buber and the Riga-born, Berlin- and Marburg-educated biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz tells a different story. It shows they both believed the project that began under the title Die Schrift, zu verdeutschen unternommen should be revised once again, after its completion so as to underline its ongoing relevance for present and future readings of the Bible tout court , in German and Hebrew speaking lands alike.

About this journal

The journal Naharaim was founded by the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007 and appears bi-annually. It is a peer-reviewed journal and publishes the latest research on philosophical, literary and historical aspects of German-Jewish culture. The articles appear in both German and English.

Naharaim (Hebrew for Zweistromland, a land that lies between two rivers) presents biographical portraits and research on the intellectual history of German-speaking Jewry. The journal explores paradigmatic thinkers within German-Jewish modernism since the Emancipation; traces the outlines of the German-Jewish experience both in the context of general Jewish issues and beyond the specific Jewish horizon; discusses the phenomenon of secularisation as a process of transformation of religious content taking place within the framework of a secular worldview; and critically engages with theoretical debates in France, North America and Germany that address topics from past and contemporary Jewish thought.

Volume 15 Issue 2 - Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation

Issue of Naharaim

Frontmatter

Introduction

Dogmatism, Criticism, Divine Ideals: Rav A. I. Kook’s Concept of God in Light of H. Cohen

Abstract

Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob

Abstract

“To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung

Abstract

Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung

Abstract

„Ein modernes Verdeutschungs-Unternehmen“. Über die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel

Abstract

Marx and Rosenzweig on Community and Redemption

Abstract

When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews

Abstract

The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song

Abstract