BOOKS
lines of various epochs. Their mind matured where the most diverse
cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on
the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations.
Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it.
It
was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies,
above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike
out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.
467
These social commentators idealized the Jewish position in West–
ern culture. The truth, however, is much more ambiguous, and this
negative ambiguity of the Jew's vulnerable position on the boundary
was expressed by Jews in the Wilhelmine era.
In
the Imperial Germany
of 1912, well before the glorification of the Jewish position by Veblen
and Deutscher, Moritz Goldstein published an essay, "German-Jewish
Parnassus," in which he discussed Jewish prominence in the press,
theater, music, and even the formal study of German literature which
was now dominated by Jews in the seminars of German universities.
He regretfully noted that Jewish contributions were resented and
rejected with hostility. His conclusion was that Jews should cease
engaging in apologetics and self-justification to the Germans. The
indignant defensive position of seeking to be accepted would yield no
results. His prescription was that Jews should proudly go their own
way: "I don't know how other people feel, but, if I followed my
instinct, I would go away. I would no longer endure being disliked, I
would take what gifts I may possess somewhere, where people are
prepared to use them-if only I knew where. We don't know of a way
out. Perhaps we do, but we are not allowed to take it."
Goldstein's article stirred a stormy debate in the press. Among
those who replied was my grandfather, who passionately defended the
right of Jews to an equal place on the literary scene, with no second–
class status. He asserted: "We are Germans, and want to remain
German." Yet his poetry and stories are filled with the rage and
frustration of a man who was deeply hurt in his life and interpersonal
relations by anti-Semitism. When he was scheduled to speak at a
meeting and another writer took his place because the racists protested,
he said,
"If
our positions had been reversed, I would not have ac–
cepted."
What must it have felt like as a Jew to have one's status the subject
of a great public debate in the 1870s and 1880s in which the German
nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke, and the great historian
of the Roman Republic, Theodor Mommsen, argued the role of the
Jews in the German nation? Treitschke wrote ringing lines that would
