Forget assimilation: introducing subjectivity to German–Jewish history |
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Authors: | Scott Spector |
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Institution: | (1) History Department, University of Michigan, 1029 Tisch Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003, USA |
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Abstract: | Between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, a wide range of German-speaking Jewish subjects shared certain assumptions about
a problematic associated with being Jewish and living in a non-Jewish German society (and the concomitant process of relative
“assimilation”). The categories of identity and culture that undergirded this problematic became part of a shared lexicon
of a German-Jewish “identity crisis”—a lexicon that was handed down to the historiography of German Jews that would develop
after the community’s destruction. The author of this contribution challenges the validity of some of these categorical assumptions
by setting them against the varied background of German-Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering
a model of subjectivity (rather than identity) that might allow the historiography to break out of the cyclical repetition
in which it currently finds itself. By examining specific exemplars, including Gershom Scholem, Edith Stein, Martin Buber,
and others, the author models a reading strategy that would be appropriate for German-Jewish subjectivity. |
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Keywords: | Assimilation German– Jewish history Subjectivity |
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