Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures; Transfer, Mediality and Situativity
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2021) 43-69
Keywords:
Brandes, Georg, Criticism and interpretation
;
Jewish critics
;
Jews Identity
;
Jews Cultural assimilation
;
Self-hate (Psychology)
;
Cosmopolitanism
;
Antisemitism History 19th century
;
Exiled Jewish authors
;
Exiles in literature
Abstract:
This chapter focuses on how the Danish-Jewish fin-de-siècle intellectual Georg Brandes (1842–1927) reacts with his cosmopolitan ideal of a transnational vision, particularly the figure of the modern Jew, to an otherwise dominant anti-Semitic projection of the bourgeois-influenced “assimilated Jew” as rootless and non-contributive. Brandes’ ideal suggests that the individual acts within a national culture but does not at the same time feel bound to its tradition, thus allowing the individual to create innovation more easily. Brandes projects this cosmopolitan ideal as universal, represented through the topos of exile and the figure of the emigrant. Brandes’ ideal is discussed as a predecessor to the figure of the stranger, which Georg Simmel is considered to have introduced to academic discourse in his essay “Exkurs über den Fremden” (1908). I argue that Brandes’ transnational vision and Simmel’s stranger have to be read as reaction to modern anti-Semitism which accentuates the contributions of the “assimilated Jew” to Western civilization.
DOI:
10.1163/9789004435285_004
URL:
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