This book treats a fascinating topic: “the allure of [medieval] Sephardic [culture]” for German Jews from the 18th century up to the interwar Weimar Republic. The topic has received previous scholarly attention but this is the first comprehensive treatment of how the cultural elite of modernizing German Jewry, seeking to end discrimination and win social acceptance, invented and appropriated a Jewry from a wholly different era and context to advance those goals. The success of this invention is clear from the fact that the term “Golden Age” about Spanish Jewry was a product of this initiative. John Efron makes a creative, convincing case in a most erudite and eloquent book.
Efron demonstrates that German Jewish appropriation of the Sephardic was not just intellectual—the well-known lionizing of Maimonides, in particular—but aesthetic, physical, and aural: his first chapter focuses on “the sound of Jewish modernity,” his second, on “Sephardic beauty in the eye of the Ashkenazic beholder.” The book begins with the Berlin Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment movement). As is known, the Haskalah despised Yiddish, the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jewry, to an extreme, irrational degree, projecting all manner of alleged degeneracy onto its use, a demonization not confined to German Jewry. Modernizing Jewries across the map of Europe seeking rights and acceptance internalized this and other anti-Jewish critiques and created programs of “regeneration” to remedy these defects. Efron shows that in Germany, the Jewish intellectual elite prominently held Christian Jew-hatred and persecution responsible for Jewish degeneracy and, by fantasizing an ideal, Sephardic Jewish “Other,” communicated that the way to a changed Jewry was a changed majority culture which, if tolerant, multi-cultural, and promoting of integration, as allegedly, Muslim Spain had been, would produce a rational, enlightened, acculturated, indeed, a bi-cultural Jewry like had occurred in Iberia. Far from the stereotype of modern German Jewry as craven in its desire for acceptance by the majority, the “myth of Sephardic superiority” (to quote Ismar Schorsch), entailed a devastating critique of Christianity, as Efron shows in an excellent chapter on the creation of Jewish-history writing in Germany, but which was an intrinsic element of the entire phenomenon he studies.
In a wonderfully illustrated chapter, Efron shows how German-Jewish orientalism extended to synagogue-building, with proliferation of an “Oriental” style that produced conspicuous, imposing structures which belie any notion that German Jews in the era of emancipation were reticent about announcing their distinct presence. It led to belles-lettres, by Heinrich Heine and many others, which glorified the Sephardic experience and dramatized that community's demise under religious and political persecution, with the clear message that what happened to the Jews happened to Germany, and what happened to the Iberian Jewry happened to a Spain which declined in the aftermath of the Expulsion.
Obviously, “the allure of the Sephardic” entailed pronounced Islamophilia and Efron incisively analyzes German orientalism—Germany was “the world leader in orientalist studies” (195)—and the ways in which the Jewish variant differed from the German. He levels a devastating critique of Edward Said's “simplistic,” highly selective, tendentious, “decontextualized” treatment of “Orientalism,” noting that Germany, unlike the England and France of Said's attention, was not an imperial power and that the discovery and use of the Orient there served entirely different (religious) purposes than those Said excoriates. Jewish orientalism certainly served no imperial purposes and was anything but triumphalist about Germany.
This is intellectual and elite cultural history. While this focus becomes clear, it is nowhere specified, which makes for confusion in a book which speaks of “German Jewry” and “Jews” as if these were synonymous with the intellectual elite—an antiquated assumption which major works of social history, one of which Efron cites perfunctorily, others of which he does not mention, have long exploded. This gap in methodological clarity and authorial self-awareness is the more surprising since Efron (191) notes that Jewish orientalist (“totalizing”) scholarship showed precisely this lack of awareness of ordinary Jews in its glorification of Sephardic culture. The book does not treat the reception of German-Jewish orientalism; its influence and popular impact, measurable for instance, in sermons or etiquette books, are asserted, not demonstrated. In his treatment of Ashkenazic appropriation of Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, he does not demonstrate how or, apart from a few episodic comments, even if his subjects heard actual Sephardic pronunciation. Perhaps Efron will see to the lacunae in this important contribution about, in Sander Gilman's words, “a fantasied … perfect world … a deception” quite alive in current discourse.
