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but every last one of them thinks of it. They seem caught in this
magic circle of Jewishness; none of them can get out of it.
What is missed by Gay's strategy of argument is best seen in his
treatment of the insights and career of the sociologist Georg Simmel,
who was baptized as a Protestant at birth. Simmel nevertheless experi–
enced the Jew's vulnerable position in German society. He was denied
a professorship until he was fifty-six, and then it was at the boundary
of the German Reich-at the University of Strasbourg. Simmel in 1908
defined the Jew in European society as the prototype of the
" stranger" -who is not merely
the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the
person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the
potential
wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite
overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a
particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are
similar
to
spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is
determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it
from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not
and cannot stem from the group itself.
The stranger, Simmel said, " embodies that synthesis of nearness and
distance which constitutes the formal position" of not being " radicall y
committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the
group, and [he] therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of
objectivity! But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and
detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and
nearness, indifference and involvement. "
Simmel's position reflected the jeopardy, risk, and sense of precari–
ous insecurity he felt as a baptized Protestant who, when he was a
candidate for a chair at Heidelberg, was successfully attacked in a letter
to Baden's Minister of Culture as: "surely an Israelite through and
through, in his outward appearance, in his bearing, and in his mental
style. "
Gay takes cognizance of these facts of Simmel's life and thought.
Yet, he dismisses "The Stranger" as a " brief excursus in his largest,
most comprehensive work" which, although "uncannily prescient"
and "prophetic," is not essentially German-Jewish. Gay shows that
Simmel was a cosmopolitan scholar influenced by, among others,
Comte, Spencer, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. While conceding Simmel's
personal identification with "The Stranger, " Gay would obscure what
