Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Description

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews adds significantly to contemporary scholarship on cosmopolitanism by making the experience of Jews central to the discussion, as it traces the evolution of Jewish cosmopolitanism over the last two centuries. The book sets out from an exploration of the nature and cultural-political implications of the shifting perceptions of Jewish mobility and fluidity around 1800, when modern cosmopolitanist discourse arose. Through a series of case studies, the authors analyze the historical and discursive junctures that mark the central paradigm shifts in the Jewish self-image, from the Wandering Jew to the rootless parasite, the cosmopolitan, and the socialist internationalist. Chapters analyze the tensions and dualisms in the constructed relationship between cosmopolitanism and the Jews at particular historical junctures between 1800 and the present, and probe into the relationship between earlier anti-Semitic discourses on Jewish cosmopolitanism and Stalinist rhetoric. Contents Preface 1. How Did We Get Here from There? Introducing the Problem The Cosmopolitanist Debates The Jew in Contemporary Theories of Cosmopolitanism Nomads, Gypsies, Jews Jews and the Nation-State 2. Moving About: Cosmopolitanism from Jews in Coaches to Jews on Trains The Enlightenment Imagines Cosmopolitan Jews Writers in Coaches Jews Writing Their Own Cosmopolitanism 3. “Everyone Is Welcome”: The Contradictions of Cosmopolitanism in the Imperial Worlds of Austro-Hungarian and Wilhelmine Jewry From Vienna to Berlin and Beyond Vienna, Zionism, and Cosmopolitanism Prague: On the Fringes of Empire Berlin: Another Empire 4. Jewish Cosmopolitanism and the European Idea, 1918–1933 After the Deluge Stefan Zweig: The Model European Joseph Roth’s Hotel Patriotism Lion Feuchtwanger: The Empire Strikes Back Cosmopolitanism Tottering on the Brink of Catastrophe 5. “The World Will Be Your Home”: Cosmopolitanism under National Socialism and in Exile The Revolution of 1933 Thomas Mann and Egypt Joseph in Sigmund Freud’s Egypt Heidegger’s Rootless Jew Zweig’s Erasmus in Exile: The Cosmopolitan par Excellence Roth and Zweig: Idealizing the Austro-Hungarian Empire Zweig’s Brazil: The Farthest Exile Lion Feuchtwanger’s History in Exile, the Josephus Trilogy 6. Rootless Cosmopolitans: German Jewish Writers and the Stalinist Purges The Left in World War II and Thereafter Communism, National Socialism, and the Jews Writing the Stalinist Purges: Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Arthur Koestler, and Manès Sperber The Left and the Stalinist Purges after 1945: Rudolf Leonhard, Peter Weiss, and Stefan Heym 7. Russian Jews as the Newest Cosmopolitans Rooted German Cosmopolitans? In Germany, Gogol Is Not Sholem Aleichem In America, Nabokov Really Is Not Sholem Aleichem 8. Walls and Borders: Toward a Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index