In the Eyes of Others: The Dialectics of German-Jewish and Yiddish Modernisms.

Abstract

This dissertation is a transnational study of German modernism with emphasis on the cultural exchange between German-Jewish and Yiddish worlds. Focusing on the half century between the 1880s and 1930s when the mass westward migration of Eastern European Jews radically reconfigured the way in which Western and Eastern Jews related to each other, I argue that both German Jews and Eastern European Jews constructed their sense of Jewish self around portrayals of foreign Jewish difference. In German-Jewish culture, the image of the religious, bearded Eastern Jew in yarmulke (der Ostjude) served as a polarizing figure, which German Jews both rejected and admired in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Yiddish literature the inverse image of the assimilated, westernized German Jew (der daytsh) was a standard character who intruded into the Eastern European shtetl. An imbalance in research on German and Eastern European Jewish cultures has stressed the German-Jewish reception, rejection, or appropriation of the Eastern European Jew. A critical intervention of my research decenters such historiography by focusing on the exchange in gazes between East and West. Events in this period that directly impacted a cross-cultural pollination included the rise of Jewish nationalism, the westward migration of Eastern European Jewry, an emboldened Yiddish literary production, and the turn to modernism across Europe. Figures at the center of this study are the German-speaking authors Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Karl Emil Franzos, Nathan Birnbaum, and Martin Buber. I place texts from these German authors into conversation with Yiddish authors such as Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Moyshe Kulbak. I also analyze work by the German artist Hermann Struck and Galician artist Ephraim Moses Lilien. My focus on how translations, material culture, and authors crossed physical and linguistic borders demonstrates how the two modernist projects were co-constitutive partners in a dynamic process of Jewish identity formation. Postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory informs my analysis of sources in German and Yiddish, thus contributing not only to the field of German studies in broadening the scope of German modernism, but also to Jewish studies and scholarship on the processes of transnationalism.