Goethe and Judaism
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ISBN 978-0-8101-3133-0Goethe and Judaism
In Goethe and Judaism, Karin Schutjer examines the iconic German writer’s engagement with, and portrayal of, Judaism. Her premise is that Goethe’s conception of modernity—his apprehensions as well as his most affirmative vision concerning the trajectory of his age—is deeply entwined with his conception of Judaism. Schutjer argues that behind his very mixed representations of Jews and Judaism stand crucial tensions within his own thinking and a distinct anxiety of influence. Goethe draws, for example, from the Jewish ban on idolatry for his own semiotics, from the narratives of nomadic wanderings in the Hebrew Bible for his own trope of the existential wanderer, from the history of Jewish exile for his own emergent conception of a German Kulturnation. Schutjer thus uncovers the surprising debt to Judaism owed by one the most formative thinkers in German history.
"Karin Schutjer has produced a major contribution to Goethe studies. This is not an incremental addition to the English-language scholarship on Goethe; it is a recasting of our image of Goethe.” —David Wellbery, Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago
"The boldness and ambition of this undertaking is inspiring. The source matter is vast and diffuse, spanning the breadth of Goethe’s (enormous) corpus; the manner in which Schutjer marshals the material into a coherent narrative is in itself an impressive feat of critical scholarship." —European Romantic Review