This book studies how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Building upon the work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, it argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular history writing. What did it mean for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language in the age of modern nationalism? In the 1800s, the Sephardic past came to represent both hopes for integration and fears about assimilation (a parallel to the fash ... More

This book studies how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Building upon the work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, it argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular history writing. What did it mean for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language in the age of modern nationalism? In the 1800s, the Sephardic past came to represent both hopes for integration and fears about assimilation (a parallel to the fashion for “Moorish” synagogue architecture in Germany). For modernist German-Jewish writers, by contrast, Sephardic stories gave shape to their concerns with anti-Semitism and Zionism. Finally, this book shows how, after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists employed images from the Sephardic past (Inquisition, expulsion, auto-da-fé) to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The term used to describe this dynamic of minority memory is “dissimilation,” first coined by the Franz Rosenzweig. Jewish Pasts, German Fictions shows how both major nineteenth-century German writers like Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach, and writers like Ludwig Philippson and Marcus Lehmann, who wrote in German for exclusively Jewish audiences, used the Spanish-Jewish past as a source for their modern self-understanding.