Abstract
Gabriel Riesser was born two hundred years ago. Given the speed of our own global age, two hundred years seems a very long time. Indeed, in Riesser’s case some may be tempted to view him as an especially distant, a merely historical, figure, rendered sadly irrelevant by the subsequent course of German history, which mercilessly mocked and then shattered the dreams and achievements of this liberal champion of equal rights and of Jewish integration into a unified nation. Yet this reading would not only endow the murderous anti-Semitic Nazi assault with a kind of normative teleological inevitability, something which almost all historians reject, but would also misread Riesser’s longerterm centrality and significance for the German-Jewish experience as a whole. To belittle Riesser’s liberalism on the grounds of its (temporary) defeat because of the Nazi drive to “de-emancipation” amounts to little more than a species of blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator.2
On the Occasion of the Second Centenary of Gabriel Riesser’s Birth1
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Notes
For a discussion of the changing ways in which Riesser and other Jewish figures who fought for Jewish emancipation were represented in Jewish memory under the impact of Nazism, see Guy Miron, “The Emancipation ‘Pantheon of Heroes’ in the German-Jewish Public Memory in the 1930s,” German History Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 476–504. See especially pp. 498–500. For a superb analysis of the logic of eman cipation and its unfolding see Reinhard Rürup, “Das Ende der Emanzipation: Die antijüdische Politik in Deutschland von der ‘Machtegreifung’ bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Arnold Paucker, ed., Die Juden im Nationalsozialistichen Deutschland (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986), pp. 97–114.
Gabriel Riesser, “Über die Stellung der Bekenner des Mosaischen Glaubens in Deutschland,” in Riesser, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1867–1868), Vol. 2, p. 54.
Quoted and translated in Edward Timms, “The Pernicious Rift: Metternich and the Debate about Jewish Emancipation at the Congress of Vienna,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 2001, vol. 46, p. 7. (online at http://www.archive.org/details/gabrielriessers03riesgoog)
To be sure, there were major differences between the two organs. In the opening issue (April 1916), Buber remarked that while Riesser’s 1832 journal was devoted to matters of religious freedom and freedom of conscience and was aimed at the individual, his journal did not conceive of Jews as a confessional faith but rather as a living organism, as a Volkstum. Still, he consciously named his journal after Riesser’s and the typography of the journal’s title page was explicitly a modernized variation of Riesser’s Logos. See Eleonore Lappin, Der Jude 1916–1928. Jüdische Moderne zwischen Universalismus und Partikularismus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 2000), pp. 4–6.
Gabriel Riesser, Einige Worte über Lessings Denkmal; an die Israeliten Deutschlands gerichtet (Frankfurt am Main: Druck von Stockmar & Wagner, 1838) as quoted in David Sorkin, “Jews, the Enlightenment and Religious Toleration-Some Reflections,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 37 (London, 1992), p. 4.
See David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 144–146.
This appeared in the introduction to Laube’s drama Struensee and is quoted in Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 184.
The classical statement of this conjunction is George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
For this quote see Dagmar Herzog, “Telling Ethnic and Gender History Together: A Comment,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLVI (London, 2001), p. 153.
See Steven M. Lowenstein, “The 18405 and the Creation of the German-Jewish Religious Reform Movement,” in Werner E. Mosse, Arnold Paucker, Reinhard Rürup, eds., Revolution and Evolution 1848 in German-Jewish History (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1981), p. 263.
Quoted in Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 177.
See Deborah Hertz, “The Lives, Loves, and Novels of August and Fanny Lewald, the Converted Cousins from Königsberg,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLVI (London, 2001), p. 111.
See George L. Mosse’s extremely insightful piece, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 1–16.
Anton Rée, Die Sprachverhältnisse der heutigen Juden im Interesse der Gegenwart und mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Volkserziehung (Hamburg: Verlag von H. Gobert, 1844), p. 40.
This was the spirit of much of the communal action of German Jewry. These actual words have been attributed to Ludwig Holländer, director of the Centralverein. See Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 183.
See Shulamit Volkov, Chapter 10, “Paradoxes of Becoming Alike,” in her Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 202–223. The quote appears on p. 210.
This story is recounted by Eric Kahler in “What Are the Jews?” in his The Jews Among the Nations (New York: Ungar, 1967), p. 6.
Paul Breines, “The Jew as Revolutionary: The Case of Gustav Landauer,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 12 (London, 1967), p. 76. Breines refers to an interview with Scholem in Madison, Wisconsin, April 1976.
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, translated by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 80–81.
See Walter Hartenau (pseudonym for Walter Rathenau), “Höre Israel,” Zukunft 18 (March 16, 1897), pp. 454–462.
See Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Chapter 14 of the present volume.
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© 2012 Steven E. Aschheim
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Aschheim, S.E. (2012). Between Rights, Respectability, and Resistance: Reframing the German-Jewish Experience. In: At the Edges of Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002297_15
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