LET ME START WITH AN OBSERVATION from Leo Baeck that highlights not only the work of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt but, I would argue, the decisive point we must take in discussing the subject of German literature and its Jewish critics. The statement occurs in the concluding paragraph of Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism. “Nicht nur um uns handelt es sich, wo es sich um uns handelt.” In English: “Not only we are concerned when we become a matter of concern.”

To speak of identity means to speak of the intricately winding road along which self-determinations are expressed in a cultural environment which, in all its contingency, determines the nature of the discourse. The peculiar economy of self-explanation which comes into play here forces a compromise that precariously navigates between a heteronomous dictate and what we wish to view as authentic and autonomous interventions. For identities, like traditions, do not spring from pristine origins. Rather, they represent complex mediations of the crisis of modernity itself. Like symptoms, identities function as a compromise formation, and in the best cases, as a workingthrough of conflicts. Instead of originary positions of sorts, they are by definition fragile, precarious, strategic, and often dynamic.

In modernity, Jewish identity is, like any other identity construction, a result of the epistemological crisis that marks the emergence of modernity. This crisis meant that the social order had to be reinvented from the bottom up. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the new political models of the absolutist state and, eventually, the nation state were introduced to replace the model of the Holy Roman Empire, which had become increasingly precarious in the face of the new science and the emerging philosophies of nature and natural rights. This watershed marks the Jews as a particular group left out in the conceptual cold of societal reorganization. For the process of transition to the modern nation state is realized on the grounds of a Christian, if secularized world view that determines its outcome. The disintegration of the old Christian world order also meant that the place of the Jews had to be renegotiated. With the demise of the early modern Holy Roman Empire and the emergence of the nation state, there arose the new problem of nation building, and as one of its consequences, a problem termed the “Jewish question.”