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Wandering Jews

其他書名	Existential Quests Between Berlin, Zurich, and Zion
出版	University of California, San Diego, 2011
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=cMsN7P63wNgC&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋For more than seventy years the shadow of the Holocaust has darkened modern Jewish historiography. Historians dealing with all facets of Jewish history have tended to treat the destruction of European Jewry as a foregone conclusion. This narrow focus on the "end" rather than on what came before has led to a distorted equation of Jews as nothing but victims. This dissertation, which deals with the Jewish German poet, philosopher, and literary critic Margarete Susman (1872-1966) and her fellow intellectuals, both Jews and Christians, employs a different, non-teleological approach. Susman grew up in the world of the highly assimilated Jewish-German bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany. Her views were informed by the messianic ethos of reform Judaism as well as by the political project of the Left. Despite growing antisemitism and the rise of race thinking in the late 19th and early 20 th century, she regarded herself first and foremost as German; in other words, language was more important to her than blood. Her ongoing struggle with questions of self-identification and belonging throws light on the vexing question of the category "Jew." By embedding a thinker like Susman in the context of the various social and intellectual networks which she was part of, this project deliberately obfuscates conventional historiographical approaches. Starting from the premise that thinking should be studied from an embodied perspective, this study investigates thinking and living, i.e. the intellectual and the social, not as two distinct realms but as spheres of experience that continually overlap and reinforce each other. A close reading of sources ranging from archival biographical materials to newspaper articles, philosophical treatises, memoirs, and extensive correspondences reveals that the intellectual creativity of individuals like Susman, Karl Wolfskehl, Ernst Bloch, Edith Landmann, and many others was largely the result of a particular Jewish-Christian milieu that roamed geographically as well as topically. Even Hitler's rise to power and the extermination of millions could not extinguish this milieu. By examining Susman's beliefs and practices, as well as those of her peers, we arrive at a fuller understanding of Jewish German cultural and social life from the founding of the German empire to the post-Holocaust era.