Description
First published in 1957, The Legacy of German Jewry is a comprehensive rethinking of the German-Jewish experience. Goldschmidt challenges the elegiac view of Gershom Scholem, showing us the German-Jewish legacy in literature, philosophy, and critical thought in a new light.
Part One re-examines the breakthrough to modernity, tracing the moves of thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, building on the legacies of religious figures like the Baal Shem Tov and radical philosophers such as Spinoza. This vision of modernity, Goldschmidt shows, rested upon a belief that “remnants” of the radical past could provide ideas and energy for reconceiving the modern world. Goldschmidt’s philosophy of the remnant animates Part Two as well, where his account of the political history of the Jews in modernity and the riches of Jewish culture as recast in German-Jewish thought provide insights into Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, among others. Part Three analyzes the post-Auschwitz complex, and uses the Book of Job to break through that trauma.
Ahead of his time and biblical in his perspective, Goldschmidt describes the innovative ways that German-Jewish writers and thinkers anticipated what we now call multiculturalism and its concern with the Other. Rather than destined to destruction, the German-Jewish experience is reconceived here as a past whose unfulfilled project remains urgent and contemporary—a dream yet to be realized in practice, and hence a task that still awaits its completion.
About the authors
HERMANN LEVIN GOLDSCHMIDT (1914–1998) founded and directed the Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Zurich from 1952 to1962. This is his first book to be translated into English.
Hermann Levin Goldschmidt's profile page
DAVID SUCHOFF is Professor of English at Colby College. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville, and Kafka.
Willi Goetschel is Professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Editorial Reviews
Rich in content, elegant in style, and eye-opening on many issues of modern German-Jewish history and culture. . . A cohesive, illuminating historical account.---—Amir Eshel, Stanford University
This book is fascinating, but deceptively so. It retraces familiar
byways in German-Jewish intellectual and cultural history, stopping to
recall key figures and moments. And yet, it constantly generates bold
new interpretations--and not only of German Jewry, but of the modern
Jewish experience and the project of modernity itself. In this
important regard, _The Legacy of German Jewry_ is more than an account
of the past; it is also a profound meditation on the Jewish and human
conditions after the Holocaust. Its excavation after fifty years of
obscurity is a a most welcome development.
---—David N. Myers, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies
"Little known outside of Switzerland, to which he fled from Nazi Germany in 1938, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt's /Legacy of German Jewry/ can now receive the attention it richly deserves in David Suchoff's fine translation. Against Gershom Scholem, who held that there never was a German-Jewish dialogue, Goldschmidt argues that such a dialogue did,
indeed, take place and that its legacy is crucial for understanding what it means to be modern. In this argument from a book published
originally in 1957, Goldschmidt anticipated ideas widely accepted today in ways that are philosophically challenging and ethically persuasive." (MAY EDIT AS WE SEE FIT)
---—David Biale, University of California, Davis
A particularly trenchant and at times surprising cultural history. A significant legacy.---—Robert Gibbs, University of Toronto
More than 60 years after the Holocaust, Goldschmidt's text, whose scope ranges beyond the borders of Germany, underlines how the Jews have shaped and still influence the European environment. Recommended.
—Choice
The Legacy of German Jewry offers a fresh opportunity not only to consider the achievements of German Jewry but also to show how contemporary Jews and students of the modern Jewish experience view those achievements.
—AJS Review
