By Jon Catlin
University of Chicago

Ideas, not interests (whether material or ideal) intuitively control the actions of men. But: the “worldviews” which are fashioned through ideas, these have often served as switchmen for the track on which the dynamics of interests have moved action.

— Max Weber[1]

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in the entirety of world history: How did early nineteenth-century Germany, one of the most culturally and intellectually advanced nations its time, come to fulfill the wildest fantasies of irrational anti-Semitic ideology? But even predating Nazi anti-Semitism in its arguably unique racial focus, historians have attempted to link Germany’s anti-Jewish tendencies back to Jewish associations with Communism, the German loss in World War I, the collapse of the Weimar economy, and sheer jealousy over German-Jewish postwar social and economic advancement. But these kind of “explanations,” focused on actual historical circumstances, fail to account for one of the most underappreciated facts of this time: how few actual Jews lived in Germany at the time. Despite the rampant anti-Semitic ideology afloat, as famously evidenced in Nazi propaganda, Jews never comprised more than 1.09 percent of the German population between the years 1871 to 1931, with their percentage steadily declining in those years.[2] Resentment against these few actual Jews, whatever their prominence in German cities and institutions, seems an implausible explanation for the totality of German anti-Semitism, which seems rather to have had a mind of its own.

In his work Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2013), David Nirenberg shifts the focus in the study of Jewish persecution away from Jews entirely, and instead seeks to locate the roots of anti-Semitism in their persecutors and the long tradition of Western culture they arose from. Having studied the long history of Jewish persecution from Moses to the present, Nirenberg begins with a simple observation: “[I]n the vast archives of material that survive from Early Modern and Modern Europe and its cultural colonies, it is easy enough to demonstrate that words like Jew, Hebrew, Semite, Israelite, and Israel appear with a frequency stunningly disproportionate to any populations of living Jews in those societies.”[3] Nirenberg similarly notes how bizarre it is that Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which contains many common anti-Jewish beliefs of Elizabethan society, was performed in a place with fewer “real Jews” at that time than any other major European city.[4] Since the designation “Jew” is used throughout history, beginning around the Inquisition, to denote a vast variety of properties, the phrase “real Jews” is crucially kept in quotation marks throughout the book, asking the reader to treat even the noun “Jew” as a concept. Though scholars, for example of Merchant, have frequently been tempted to link what Nirenberg calls “imagined Jews” (in thought and cultural representation) to “real Jews” (living people), Nirenberg inserts a critical wedge between them, insisting that imagined Jews have no necessary connection to real Jews.

Anti-Judaism is a compendium of imagined Jews being scapegoated and blamed for the most bizarre of things: “[M]edieval Europeans invoked Jews to explain topics as diverse as famine, plague, and the tax policies of their princes” and “many who have been called ‘Jew’ or ‘Judaizer’ in no way identify with Judaism at all.”[5] Wild accusations of Jewishness abound in historical records, beginning in recorded history with ancient pharaohs attributing crop failure to Israelites and arguably hitting a zenith in Nazi identification of even some classical music or writing styles as Jewish. In a book talk delivered at the Seminary Co-op bookstore in February 2013, Nirenberg confessed that it was one particular conversation he overheard in New York, someone insinuating that Jews were responsible for 9/11, that got his mind thinking that this two thousand year history of imagining Jewishness could be brought together under one theory—giving rise to the project of Anti-Judaism. He frames his inquiry around a set of questions far removed from “real Jews”: “Why did so many diverse cultures—even many cultures with no Jews living among them—think so much about Judaism? What work did thinking about Judaism do for them in their efforts to make sense of their world?”[6] This approach is centered on an understanding of culture as a form of making meaning and understanding one’s world, rather than a reflection of actual circumstances or a historical record to be taken at face value. Yet this process was not isolated or formally limited to Jews: Nirenberg insists that “anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.[7]

Nirenberg first locates the earliest occurrence of this level of self-awareness about one’s own employment of concepts in Marx, who understood in “On the Jewish Question” that “‘Judaism’… is not only the religion of a specific people… but also a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world.”[8] Here Nirenberg distinguishes himself from other historians: “Marx’s insight, that our concepts can themselves create the ‘Judaism’ of the world to which they are applied, seems to me critical.”[9] Nirenberg attributes concepts themselves an explanatory role in history, and thus a kind of historical agency. Yet for all of Marx’s insight on the Jewish question, he did not go as far as he could have: “He might, for example, have asked why it was that Christian European culture thought of capitalism as ‘Jewish,’” and attempted to weaken this association. But Marx remained partially trapped by his conceptual tethering of Judaism to real phenomenon such as capitalism.

With this critical framework established, I want to get back to the problem I began with: German anti-Semitism. Only Nirenberg has forced us to reconsider that very problem. Was it actually a problem of “anti-Semitism,” which situates anti-Jewish thought in the realm of “real Jews,” or “anti-Judaism,” relegating anti-Semitic ideology merely to the status of explanatory power rather than granting it the status of documenting the real? So, more accurately, we have a problem of German anti-Judaism, a phenomenon of ideology, which may or may not have a connection to real Jews.

Leaving the possibility of a connection open, this paper investigates the larger question at the heart of the distinction between real and imagined Jews: Jewish assimilation, the extent to which it was possible, individual motives for assimilating, and its reception by non-Jews. Assimilation is the process of Jews abandoning their Jewish cultural practices, self-proclaimed identity, or religion, usually motivated by a separation from Jewish tradition and an eye toward social and economic advancement. These Jews stand precisely on the line between real and imagined Jew, being classified in state records and in the eyes of non-Jews as Jews but largely having either actually converted or simply no longer identifying as Jewish. But even further than becoming non-Jewish, many assimilated Jews even became anti-Jewish in particular respects, absorbing many beliefs about Jews from the culture they assimilated into. It is on account of these “non-Jewish Jews,” as Bernard Wasserstein calls them in his On the Eve, that it is worth studying German assimilation in particular. Of that roughly one percent of Germans that were Jews, nearly all were assimilated into German culture or had formally converted to Christianity. And yet these anti-Jewish Jews were the same Jews that espoused the wrath of Nazi ideology, which tellingly paid little attention to the pronounced differences and inner tensions that existed among German Jews, as in nearly all Jewish communities, between the assimilated and unassimilated, observant and unobservant, and Western and Eastern European. In fact, these assimilated Jews, in part due to their vast intellectual and cultural influence, became the earliest targets of German anti-Judaic fantasy at the first concentration camp at Dachau.

This essay is, in a sense, a psychological inquiry into how two of the most prominent German-Jewish intellectuals of this time came to develop their conflicted views on Judaism in the midst of Germany’s anti-Judaic climate. I begin with the state of German Jewry by the 1920s and consider the cultural, demographic, religious, and economic assimilation of German Jews in order to give a portrait of their generally advanced level of assimilation during this period. However, through additional evidence of conflicted identity and traces of Judaism in even the most secularized and assimilated German-Jewish intellectuals, namely, the writer Joseph Roth and Frankfurt School social theorist Theodor Adorno, we will find apparent the marked limitations of this actual biographical assimilation.

Non-Jewish Jews

Assimilation of the German Jewry into gentile culture was so thorough by the 1920s that it created a class of what Bernard Wasserstein has termed “non-Jewish Jews,” of which he writes, “Pride and shame mingled incongruously and uncomfortably in many Jews’ attitudes to their Jewish heritage. Nowhere were these internal contradictions more often evident than in Germany.”[10] Though marked on the whole by one of the highest levels of assimilation in all of Europe, German Jews could not easily escape their Jewishness.

The German Jews were granted significant rights in 1848 in northern Germany and formally politically emancipated in 1871 following the unification of Germany by Bismarck. At this point they “were no longer debarred on principle from holding official, administrative, academic, and legal posts,” at least for several decades.[11] While Jews had formerly been limited professionally to occupations of commerce and Jewish religious positions, “The mental and emotional energies formerly devoted to religious pursuits [were] now released by the process of secularization among Jews,” as they sought out and often achieved status in fields such as medicine, law, and academia.[12]

Yet this political emancipation did not by any means bring an end to the realities of social and political antagonisms against Jews. In fact, the simultaneous processes of the secularization and professional assimilation of Jews into German society largely weakened their organizational power. Bach writes, “the displacement of unidentified spiritual values reinforced the feeling in Jews of the superiority of the surrounding civilization, and thus their dependence and vulnerability.”[13] Because Jewish spiritual and communal ties were weakened by newfound political and professional integration with the rest of society, Jews became more isolated than before they had assimilated. Yet racial and political anti-Semitism did not go away at the same pace of the assimilation, so the Jews that did assimilate, though culturally similar to their fellow countrymen, still felt socially and politically distanced from the rest of German life.

In the Western nations of Germany, Austria, and Hungary, far more modernized than traditional Jewish homelands in the Pale of Settlement, religious “conversion had long been common as a means of social advancement.”[14] Among the most significant of these new pursuits was the prominence of German Jews in the highest intellectual echelons and their association with radical schools of thought. The poet Heinrich Heine wrote in the late 1840s regarding his fellow German Jew, the socialist activist Ferdinand Lassalle, and his contemporaries, “This new generation is determined to enjoy life and to assert itself in invisible reality; we in our time bowed meekly before the invisible…resigned ourselves and wept. And yet our lot perhaps was happier than that of these stern young gladiators who so proudly march towards their doom.”[15] This early pessimism about the potential for Jewish acceptance in German society comes from the same Heine who had, perhaps seriously, called baptism “the entry ticket to European Culture.”[16] Leftist social thinkers like Karl Marx and Lassalle, while from bourgeois Jewish families, were largely assimilated to the extent that the former was even baptized as a Protestant. Emboldened as “gladiators” for social causes, the two took as their object the impoverished working class, rather than the Jews who had already been emancipated in most of Germany. The so-called “Jewish Question” that Bruno Bauer diagnosed in his 1843 book by that title, and Marx later responded to in his famous essay, was very much a live political question at the time: What is the future of Jews? Is their assimilation inevitable or desirable?

However, around 1880 categorization of the Jews in Germany began to shift from religious to racial. The religious conversion of many German Jews to Christianity, which had since the 1840s been a common price to pay for social acceptance, became less and less effective as an assimilation tactic. Bach writes that in the spirit of the “positivism of the later nineteenth century…seen for instance in the philosopher [Ludwig] Feuerbach’s suggestion that theology ought to be replaced by anthropology,” this new “Racial anti-Semitism took the basic pattern of its arguments from the lingering concepts of medieval Christianity about the Jews, although the ideas were secularized almost beyond recognition.”[17] Contrary to the assimilating Jews’ expectations and wishes, “To the extent to which the sense of the living spiritual significance receded in Jews, anti-Semitism could become a danger beyond the level of ordinary social friction. The surrender of spiritual independence produced a germ of serious weakness in German Jews.”[18]

Soon after this period the Dreyfus affair came to expose latent French anti-Semitism from 1894 to 1906 and great anti-Semitic pogroms occurred in 1903 and 1905 in Russia and Romania. However, Germans largely withheld from such explicit animosity to Jews. Yet increasingly after the rise of political and racial anti-Semitism toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jews, “unless converted…were barred from appointment to the judiciary, civil service, and municipal employment” and “The same invisible barriers prevented their access to academic posts.”[19] Though many could retain status and positions they had earned previously in the professions, “the social reception of Jews lagged in general far behind the degree to which they had been integrated into the national and economic life of Germany,” which created distance between even the most assimilated Jews and their German neighbors.[20] By the turn of the twentieth century, most German Jews were second-generation assimilated and largely adopted the attitudes of their surrounding society—to some degree even anti-Judaic ones: “Being a Jew became a liability, an embarrassment, a fact not to be mentioned if it could be helped.”[21]

Leading into the 1920s, German Jewry attempted assimilation to such a degree that it threatened to demographically eliminate them. Wasserstein writes that the German Jews were so “modernized” due to urbanization and social mobility that they experienced dramatic demographic decline.[22] Bach explains this phenomenon, “A greatly reduced birthrate and a marked increase in mixed marriages, the children of which were almost without exception brought up as Christians, threatened group extinction within a few generations.”[23] It is in this spirit that the Jewish writer Franz Kafka called the process of shrugging off one’s father’s Jewishness “the most effective act of piety one could perform.”[24]

From changing their last names to religiously converting, these German Jews, particularly those of bourgeois background or acquired status, often sought to conceal their Jewishness. Even prominent Jewish thinkers were not immune to this custom. The famous Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin called himself the “kind of Jew with a strong Germano-Christian leaning” while the preeminent Jewish theologian of the period, Franz Rosenzweig, “seriously considered baptism until he experienced a spiritual crisis…in 1913.”[25] Paul Mendes-Flohr gives an account of German Jews expressing great pride in their German identity at the summer 1925 celebration of the millennial anniversary of the founding of the synagogue of Worms, which illustrated that Jews had lived in Germany a whole five hundred years before the Germanic tribes.[26] Yet, most Germans remained skeptical of the Jews’ alleged “parallel allegiance to Deutschtum and Judentum as national identities.”[27] Though constantly defending their German loyalty, the Jews also benefitted from an inversion of status that occurred in German society. Mendes-Flohr writes:

It was, as the historian Peter Gay has observed, a period in which the “outsiders” of Germany suddenly became “insiders”; all those who were hitherto excluded from the established centers of German politics and culture now seemed to rush in and assume positions at the center stage… Sharing this perception, Thomas Mann wrote in 1923 of “the literary-critical spirit of European democracy, which in Germany was, above all, represented by the Jews.”[28]

German Jews were among the most influential intellectuals of this period and were more socially integrated than ever. And yet this integration only fueled new and more extreme waves of anti-Semitism. In what Mendes-Flohr calls “the excruciating paradox of the Weimar experience for Jewry: while the Jews at long last became full participants in German culture and public life, their right to do so was questioned with ever greater intensity.”[29]

German Jews and Enlightenment Bildung

The historian George Mosse frames the so-called emancipation of the Jews as a product of the German Enlightenment around the 1840s, noting that German Jews largely assumed German Enlightenment values during assimilation. In addition to conversion to Christianity and integration into German economic life, “[German] Jews also found a secular faith—in the older concept of Bildung, based on individualism and rationality.”[30] He explains:

Jews were emancipated in German history when what we might call “high culture” was becoming an integral part of both German citizenship and the Enlightenment. The word Bildung combines the meaning carried by the English word “education” with notions of character formation and moral education….

Bildung and the Enlightenment joined hands during the period of Jewish emancipation; they were meant to compliment each other. Moreover, such self-cultivation was a continuous process which was never supposed to end during one’s life….Surely here was an ideal ready-made for Jewish assimilation, because it transcended all differences of nationality and religion through the unfolding of the individual personality.[31]

However, Mosse notes the degeneration of this concept over the years from being genuinely universalist during the German Enlightenment to absorbing the nationalistic and racial-supremacist undertones that emerged in anthropology toward the end of the nineteenth century and became state policy under National Socialism. Mosse writes,

Support for the avant-garde, for the new in culture, for what is called Weimar culture, in short, was built into the German-Jewish tradition of Bildung and the Enlightenment. Over a century had passed since emancipation, but the need to be accepted as equals, to find common ground between German and Jew, had not changed, nor could it change. This meant a constant effort to transcend German historical traditions which Jews could not claim as their own.[32]

Mosse thus explains German Jewish assimilation in terms of that group’s taking ownership of a distinctly German model of self education esteemed in German Enlightenment culture. Thus as a result of “the German-Jewish dialogue,” “Culturally Jews were the best Germans.”[33] For Mosse, even the anti-Nazi critical minds of the Frankfurt School did not resist the force of Bildung in German culture:

Despite the rejection of liberalism, a considerable amount of the concept of Bildung was assimilated in [the School’s] emphasis of the cultivation of the mind. Aesthetic perceptions occupied the central place in this socialism that they had occupied in the concept of Bildung.[34]

Mosse’s position on this is so strong that one historian writes it is actually “with the Frankfurt School—the least explicitly Jewish of those considered here—that this peculiarly German Jewish identity reached its climax!”[35] For Mosse, the assimilation of German Jews led them to figuratively bear the torch of German values.[36]

Joseph Roth’s anti-Jewish criticism

The German-Jewish writer Joseph Roth embodies in his own life the tension of assimilation as both a critic and a participant in the wave of assimilation that swept over the German intelligentsia. Born “Moses Joseph Roth” to a fatherless Jewish family in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of Poland and the Ukraine), in 1894, Roth typifies the trajectory of Eastern Jews who moved to Western Europe for intellectual advancement. He left Galicia to study German at the University of Vienna—where there was widespread contempt for Ostjuden, as Eastern European Jews such as himself were disparagingly called[37]—and began writing poems and articles in German, which he published in Vienna, and later Berlin, as “Joseph Roth,” having dropped his identifiably Jewish given name, Moses, after experiencing the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the Austrian Army during World War I.[38]

Roth typifies the plight of the intellectual Ostjuden, many of whom emigrated to conduct business or study in the West. Wasserstein writes of Roth, “He admired the solid, inherited values of the Ostjuden and despised what he saw as the hypocrisy of the assimilationists,” though “Toward the end of his life Roth appears to have converted to Catholicism, possibly out of a deep identification with the cause of Hapsburg restoration.”[39] Though Roth spent much of his journalistic career observing the shetla of the Ostjuden in the Soviet Union and Galicia, near his birthplace, he wrote in German and lived among the intelligentsia in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. In a brief history of his life he composed, he apparently felt ashamed enough of his Eastern-European origins to alter the name of his birthplace from Brody, in Galicia, to “Szvaby, a German Settlement close to the Austrian frontier,” a place actually a village outlying Brody but phonetically evoking the German region Swabia.[40] Downplaying his Jewishness, he wrote, “To a Catholic like myself, my Jewishness is more or less what it would be to a Hasidic wonder-rabbi: a metaphysical affair, high above everything to do with Jews on this earth.”[41]

Though as a convert he would not have identified as a Jew, he knowingly left Germany the same day Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and never set foot in Germany again.[42] Though it is unclear exactly how much he predicted the anti-Jewish measures that would follow Hitler’s rise to power, he soon confirmed his earlier suspicions. “It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,”[43] he wrote in mid-February to his literary companion, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, to whom, according to Roth’s biographer, “this may have been far from clear, and who—like many of the most ‘assimilated’ Jews—continued to believe in the intactness, and quite possibly the immunity of his personal arrangements. Roth had no such illusions.”[44] Roth continues the letter, “Quite apart from our personal situations—out literary and material existence has been wrecked—we are headed for a new war. I wouldn’t give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”

Fulfilling the adage that one foot cannot stand in two boats, Roth’s headstone in Paris “bears neither a cross nor a Star of David,” since he had renounced Judaism but there was no witness to his alleged conversion to Christianity[45] and Roth apparently had two funerals, one Jewish and one Catholic.[46] After all, earlier in his life, Roth had written, “Any Protestant blundering into a Jewish temple would have to admit that the difference between Jew and Christian is not that great, and he might even give up his anti-Semitism if it wasn’t that he had such keen business competition from Jews.”[47] German Protestantism and Reform Judaism—both largely secularized demographics by this point—had much in common and proved remarkably effectually similar alternatives for assimilated Jews.

However, the price of this assimilation was often quite high. In the spirit of the social realism popular among interwar European writers, Roth traveled throughout Eastern Europe chronicling the destitute state of Jewish communities wracked by the Great War, rural poverty due to new forms of industry and capitalism, and emigration of the young and healthy to Western Europe and America. Complied in his magnum opus as a reporter, The Wandering Jews (1926-27), Roth’s reflections on European Jewry offer remarkable insight into both the plight of actual declining social conditions for Jews as well as the psychic trauma and spiritual and cultural bankruptcy their assimilation resulted in for whole swaths of the Pale of Settlement.

In addition to his journalistic work on the Ostjuden, Roth wrote acclaimed novels, including Job, a parable of interwar Eastearn European life based on the on the Biblical story of Job, who is recast as Mendel Singer, a “pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely everyday Jew” living in Zuchnow, a small Ukrainian village at the outset of World War I. Like Job’s, Mendel’s world seems to collapse around him as his three children are lost to him: one son is born with incurable disabilities, one joins the Russian Army, and one flees to America, and his daughter marries a Cossack. Even after fleeing with his wife and daughter to America, he experiences tragedy and never feels at home; the stable Jewish life he wants continually eludes him. Job’s translator suggests that “it is no wonder that the centuries-old figure of the migrant Jew who is nowhere at home would strike [Roth] as an embodiment of the peripatetic nature of post[-World War I] modern life, ultimately prompting him to evoke the trope of Jewish exile in Job.”[48]

Roth himself experienced for his entire adult life something like the feeling of alienation, abandonment, and homelessness of his paradigmatic Mendel. In The Wandering Jews, Roth writes on Ostjuden who, like himself, migrated in the early twentieth century to Germany, “They gave themselves up. They lost themselves. They shed their aura of sad beauty…They fell in with Western abuses and bad habits. They assimilated.”[49] Roth does not exempt himself from that melancholy characterization, which for him only worsened with his assimilation. Without a doubt, he was among the lost, wandering Jews, himself spending his entire adult life wandering cities of Western Europe, ending up destitute and alone in Paris, where died prematurely in 1939 of pneumonia and delirium tremens resulting from alcoholism.[50]

What makes Roth’s writing so helpful in thinking about German anti-Judaism is the extent to which Roth simultaneously identified with the suffering and disintegrating way of life of the Ostjuden he chronicled and the flourishing of the largely anti-Judaic Austrian and German intellectual culture he was so learned in. In addition to his abandonment of Jewish religious practice, Roth’s choice of secular education, Western writing reveals a subtle acceptance of that anti-Judaic preferences. Taken to its extreme, the German assimilated “non-Jewish Jew” could even become an “anti-Jewish Jew” as a subscriber to what German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing called “Jewish self-hatred” in his 1930 book by the same name.[51] According to Wasserstein, “Lessing, who converted to Christianity in 1895, himself exhibited many symptoms of the pathology that he later diagnosed in others.”[52] The concept of Jewish self-hatred seems to me unhelpful for two reasons. First, it seems to have been over- and misused as simply a pejorative, rather than a genuine characterization; Roth shrugs off this characterization in a letter to Zweig, writing, “I had an interview…where they told me I was an anti-Semite. Do you suppose I cared?”[53] Second, it misses the crucial distinction between the very different types of Jews. More accurately, Wasserstein writes, “Most Jews afflicted by some form of anti-Semitism were not so much haters of themselves as haters of other Jews,” notably the Ostjuden who were immigrating into German cities and spoke with Yiddish accents.[54]

This distinction is especially important in the context of Roth’s own Berlin. Crucially different from the experience of Ostjuden who immigrated into other Central European cities like Vienna or Prague, Berlin lacked a Jewish ghetto, which served as a buffer zone in these other cities between the West and the Eastern homeland. Roth writes in The Wandering Jews on Berlin, “[The German Jew] will assimilate faster there than his equivalent would in Vienna. Berlin levels out differences and kills off particularities.”[55] This allowed for quicker assimilation but also accelerated their disorientation resulting from rapid modernization, what sociologist Max Weber popularly termed “‘the disenchantment of the world,’” resulting in the destruction of “communities” and leaving in their wake, at best, “fanatical sects.”[56]

Non-native German Jews like Roth were equipped with a dual-identity as Ostjuden-turned-German. This identity led Roth to develop an engaging social criticism of what the West stood for from the outside perspective of those who themselves accepted the it but were never fully accepted by it. He goes on to describe the origins of resentment toward the West held by Germany Jews who, like himself, had roots in the East:

The Eastern Jew in his homeland knows nothing of the social injustice of the West; nothing of the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average Western European; nothing of the narrowness of the Western perspective, jagged with factory smokestacks and framed by power plants.…The Eastern Jew looks to the West with a longing that it really doesn’t merit.[57]

Though Roth assimilated to a great degree, he retained the cultural sensibility of the Ostjuden, which often opposed German bourgeois values. In his preface to The Wandering Jews, Hoffman observes Roth’s “lifelong sympathies with ‘simple people’…and his antipathy to a selfish, materialistic, and increasingly homogenous bourgeoisie” and writes that “It is no accident…that The Wandering Jews begins with a proud and rancorous castigation of that West, which Roth wants no part of.”[58] Though Roth was certainly a respected writer among non-Jews among German intelligentsia, it is clear that he distanced himself from them in light of his Jewish roots and subsequent nostalgia toward them.

Compared to the idolized vision of the West among poor Jews in the East as a land of plenty and haven of freedom—views that likely motivated Roth’s own move form Galicia to Vienna—Roth’s later outlook was less rosy:

Anyone who deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilization, prepared to undergo the quarantine that we prescribe for immigrants. We do not realize that our whole life has become a quarantine, and that all our countries have become barracks and concentration camps, admittedly with all the modern convenience. The immigrants—alas!—do not assimilate too slowly, as they are accused of doing, but if anything too quickly to our sorry way of living.[59]

While others (notably Adolf Hitler while an art student in Vienna) held animosity for the Ostjuden for their failure to assimilate, Roth stepped back further and questioned in addition the very Western culture Jews were expected to assimilate into, all from the perspective of a double outsider—both as an immigrant and a Jew. It is in this light that Hoffman notes Roth’s belief that Jews were “human beings in their least packaged form” and that they were thus often perceptive critics of the dominant civilization around them, for example, as in Roth’s case, decrying the frenzy brought on by nationalism and social injustice of bourgeois capitalism.[60]

The Frankfurt School: a case study in assimilation

Nowhere is such Jewish critical thought more apparent than in the work of the so-called Frankfurt School of critical theory. This group of German intellectuals, assembled in 1923 at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, critiqued Western thought and civilization in now seminal works of social theory, largely through the lens of the Jewish background of its most important members such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin.[61] Unlike earlier delineated philosophical schools, including classical liberalism and even their own leftist forefather Marx, they hailed from disciplines as varied as sociology, philosophy, musicology, and psychoanalysis. The Frankfurt School held that, in the words of Paul Mendes-Flohr, “A genuine ‘critical theory’… must be open-ended and continuously self-critical,” in part by rejecting the thread running through Western thought from Plato to Descartes to modern science of pretention to absolute truth.[62]

In their philosophical system, Adorno and Horkheimer maintained the dialectical framework created by Hegel and continued by Marx but resisted the moves of these two to establish positive claims to truth. Paul-Mendes Flohr writes in Divided Passions about the German-Jewish roots of this philosophical methodology:

In an interview, Horkheimer—the Marxist philosopher…was pointedly asked by his interlocutor, “Is this utter caution in dealing with [the unknown] derived from Jewish heritage?” “Yes,” he replied,

And in the same way this utter caution has become an element in our social theory which we called the Critical Theory. “Thou shalt not make a graven image of the God,” says the Bible. You cannot depict the absolute good. The devout Jew tries to avoid if possible the word “God”; he does not spell it out, he makes a sign instead… Should we not ask ourselves why this shyness exists? No other religion apart from Judaism knows it. I believe it exists because what matters primarily to the Jewish religion is not so much what God is as what Man is. In the same way Critical Theory calls the Absolute cautiously, “the Other.” What instigates me is the challenge to apply the theological idea to a sensible theory of society.[63]

By drawing from religious and cultural aspects of the Jewish tradition, both Horkheimer and Adorno retained and indeed perpetuated Jewish ways of thinking like Roth’s—though they integrated them with the dialectical tradition from German enlightenment thinkers like their dialectician-forefather Hegel.

Unlike Roth, however, Adorno was one generation removed from the explicit tensions of assimilation. He was born in Frankfurt to an Italian Catholic mother and a Jewish father from a bourgeois German-Jewish merchant family who left the Frankfurt Jewish community when Adorno was seven and converted to Protestantism.[64] He was born with his father’s Jewish last name of Wiesengrund hyphenated with his mother’s maiden name (at her urging), to become “Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno” and was also baptized as a Catholic and later confirmed in the Protestant Church, though he never practiced a religion in adulthood and married a German Christian woman.[65] Biographer Müller-Doohm simply writes, “His decision to jettison the Jewish name Weisengrund” by the time he filled out his application for US citizenship, to become simply “Theodor W. Adorno” “in favour of the North Italian name…tells us where his preferences lay.”[66] Though a friend later attributed this act to his “‘ruthless ambition’ to be accepted as a writer in the Anglo-Saxon world,” Müller-Doohm sees this charge coming solely out of resentment: “[Adorno] never attempted to distance himself from his Jewish origins, or to deny his paternal inheritance.”[67]

In his biography of Adorno, titled One Last Genius, Detlev Claussen notes that Adorno is not known to have explicitly written on his own relationship to Judaism. Instead, Claussen analyzes Adorno’s level of Jewish identification through the way he characterizes his compatriot Heinrich Heine. Claussen reports:

Germans and Jews are inextricably intertwined in Heine’s life and works… In the English-language essay he wrote in 1949, Adorno refused to explain Heine’s achievement in terms of his Jewishness. It is not Heine’s Jewishness that explains the unmistakable color and texture of his work; such classification is superficial. Rarely do we find a passage in Adorno that comes as close to an understanding of himself as this one. It sounds like a reminiscence of the paternal ideal of a secularized Jewishness that succeeds in giving expression to universal tendencies…

Even Adorno’s insistence in 1949 that Heine’s Jewish origins were merely an accidental feature of his work is a response to the anti-Semitic reproach that Heine’s works were “Jewish.”[68]

Adorno refused to essentialize Judaism in himself as in others, but rather elevated the redeeming qualities of Judaism that inspired his critical theory to the level of the universal. Still, Müller-Doohm identifies in Adorno’s father a “somewhat ostentatious aversion to everything that was consciously Jewish,” a “hostility… directed in the first instance at the so-called Eastern Jews… who had settled for the most part on the eastern part of town”; Adorno adopted similar views and confessed that he “began to abandon his prejudice against the East European Jews” at the age of twenty-two, after befriending the Galician-born writer Soma Morgenstern.[69] Still, he never expressed any interest in Frankfurt’s famous Jewish Lehrhaus (house of learning), which was then home to the great theologians Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and he referred to his friend Erich Fromm, who had, as a “professional Jew,” presumably unlike himself.[70]

While assimilation was a kind of trauma for many Jews in this period, including Adorno’s close intellectual contacts, “Thanks to his youth, Weisengrund-Adorno appeared to his older friends to have been exempted to face up to this conflict” since he was raised secular.[71] In recognition of Adorno’s assimilated status, his colleague Walter Benjamin wrote to Adorno in 1940, responding to an essay Adorno had written on George and Hofmannsthal:

You speak felicitously about the experience of “that’s not what I meant at all”—that experience when time turns into something we have lost. And it seems to me that Proust was able to find a deeply hidden (but not, therefore, necessarily an unconscious) model for this fundamental experience: namely, the experience of the “that’s not it” with regard to the assimilation of French Jews… The very fact that Proust was only half Jewish allowed him insight into the highly precarious structure of assimilation; an insight which was then externally confirmed by the Dreyfus Affair.[72]

According to Claussen, Gershom Schloem, a friend of Benjamin and later Adorno, “never tired of pointing to this ‘that’s not it at all’ as a mark of the assimilation of the German Jews,” as well as the French.[73] Scholem and Benjamin see Jewish roots as a source of insight for even the most assimilated German Jews such as Adorno—something lost to consciousness but nevertheless always present. Despite Adorno and Benjamin’s mutually advanced degree of assimilation and forward-looking focus on the problems of modernity, Benjamin famously continued to write on Jewish theological themes, while Adorno did not. Adorno perceived in Benjamin a sadness that he described as “a Jewish awareness of the permanence of threat and catastrophe as such.”[74] Claussen continues on Adorno and his compatriot Kracauer, “The Jewish tradition no longer seemed viable to them, but it left unmistakable traces in the way they experienced life.”[75]

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Adorno was described feeling paralyzed and sapped of all his creative energy. Yet for a while he maintained hope that he would be able to live his life uninterrupted and that the Nazi’s “primitive racial theory, the irrational anti-Semitism would put many people off,” as would the economic incompetence of the party’s leaders.[76] But this hope didn’t last. In September 1933, despite his lifelong refusal of Judaism, “he found himself defined as being ‘of half-Jewish origin,’ a verdict that condemned him to permanent unemployment in Hitler’s Germany,” and was promptly fired from Frankfurt University.[77] However, Adorno’s “ties to the culture and language of his native land… were so powerful that he made every effort to try to avoid emigration,” including attempting to publish under a pseudonym.[78] He ultimately fled to London in April 1934 and later settled in California in 1941, after the outset of the war. There Adorno began to write aphorisms from this period, dominated by his prescient “unconscious fear” in his Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, which he only published ten years later. He wrote, “Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated,” but nevertheless stayed in the United States for several years after the war, before returning to Frankfurt in October 1949, where he taught until his death in 1969.[79]

According to a letter to Horkheimer from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Jewish contemporary, Otto O. Herz, regrets that Adorno’s funeral was not conducted according to Jewish funeral rites, writing, “In the shadow of Auschwitz, a Jew, regardless of whether he was religious or not, should have had the obligation of making a declaration through his death….We Jews and we human beings do not have many Adornos today.[80] In his response, Horkheimer expresses understanding of Herz’s complaint that “there were no expressions of Jewishness” at the funeral, but writes that Adorno’s relationship to “religion, to religious allegiance” was simply “complicated” on account of his dual Christian-Jewish family, but seeks to appease Herz with a reminder that “the critical theory that we both had a hand in developing has its roots in Judaism. It arises from the idea: Thou shalt not make any graven image of God.”[81] In an interview around the same time, “he emphasized that Adorno’s ‘negativism implied the affirmation of something “other,”’ which however is not susceptible to definition.” Again invoking the “Jewish prohibition on graven images for Adorno’s negative theology, “Horkheimer was evidently attempting to identify the legacy of Jewish thought in Adorno.”[82] Despite all his writing about the scarred nature of reality after Auschwitz, he retained something like Benjamin’s messianic Jewish hope, “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope,”[83] writing, “the disturbed and damaged course of the world… resists all attempts of a desperate consciousness to posit despair as an absolute. The world’s course is not absolutely conclusive, nor is absolute despair; rather, despair is its conclusiveness.”[84]

Conclusion

Equipped with critical methodology, Horkheimer and Adorno composed their seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment while, both being Jewish, in exile from Germany during the years 1942-44, seeking “to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism,” referring to news of the Holocaust.[85] Identifying “tendencies which turn cultural progress into its opposite” and that “reason is its own sickness,” Dialectic recognized a reversion in place of the unstoppable historical progress that their dialectical forefather Hegel had predicted.[86] Behind the horrors of the Nazi regime they identify a fundamental lack of self-awareness; unchecked instrumental reason, the ruthless domination by man over nature; and a reversion to mythology, projecting evil in their anti-Semitic ideology.

Nirenberg contrasts Adorno and Horkheimer to their compatriot Hannah Arendt, who “believed that the ideology [of anti-Semitism] made cultural sense because it described something that Jews really were, something that they really did.”[87] In her Origins of Totalitarianism, like Marx in his early “On the Jewish Question,” Arendt suggested that the Jews were “co-responsible” for inciting the anti-Judaism that would ruin them due to their associations with the objectionable systems of both bourgeois capitalism and communism. Her further insistence in Eichmann in Jerusalem of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust and similar attempts at explaining Nazi anti-Judaism borrowed many statistics and unchecked and essentialist assumptions about Jews from Nazi sources. As Nirenberg illustrates, Arendt was ultimately un-critical in her absorption of this information from the anti-Semitic culture around her, and she stubbornly refused to question “any relationship between anti-Semitism and the real… even after the full extent and fantastic projective power of Nazi anti-Semitism (includings its vast exaggeration of the Jews’ economic importance) became clear.”[88] The best explanation for this tendency in her thought is her advanced degree of assimilation into German culture, though she was certainly also critical of much of it.

In justifying German animosity towards the Ostjuden on account of real alienating factors, Joseph Roth falls into the same foible as Arendt. Not having witnessed the Holocaust, as Adorno and Horkheimer did, he could not have predicted just how detached from reality Nazi ideology was, and thus kept his critique of German anti-Judaism on the level of practical interest. Nirenberg critiques such a view, assuming real Jews: “what it cannot explain is why Germany and not, say, France.”[89] Roth thus stands as a place marker on the road to the self-realization of German Jews as to the unique ideological origins of German anti-Judaism. So immersed in the problems of his own time, he would have been fundamentally unable to connect the dots across millennia as Nirenberg has. And this error is bound up with Roth’s inability to ever reconcile himself to his assimilated Judaism. He sadly concluded as the Nazi specter loomed over Europe in late 1933: “The word has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more, none in the current state of things.”[90] Without Adorno’s self-critical hope in changing ideology, Roth fell into despair.

By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno explain anti-Semitism as a perversion of mimesis, mimicry, that projects taboo qualities of oneself onto social others:

Anti-Semitism is based on false projection. It is the reverse of genuine mimesis and has deep affinities to the repressed… If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself… In fascism this behavior is adopted by politics; the object of the illness is declared true to reality, the system of delusions the reasonable norm in a world which makes deviation neurosis.[91]

Under this framework, “It makes little difference whether the Jews as individuals really display the mimetic traits which cause the malign infection or whether those traits are merely imputed.”[92] Horkheimer and Adorno thus vindicate Jean-Paul Sarte’s quip that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”[93] For Horkheimer and Adorno, like Sarte, “the liquidation of the Jews of Europe was not grounded in ‘reality.’ It took place in the vast gap between explanatory framework (‘anti-Semitism’) that made satisfying sense of the world to a significant portion of its citizens and the complexity of the world itself.”[94]

Nirenberg suggests Adorno and Horkheimer were critically aware of the biases of their own culture and the hazard of mythological reification—the error of mistakenly granting mere thought the status of necessary reality—in a way that Arendt or Marx never quite were. They took so seriously the threat of a return to mythology through reason that they refused to accept historical explanations for Nazi ideology the way that Arendt did, writing in the Dialectic, “Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.”[95] And they both retained a hope that enlightenment could be salvaged from mythology and barbarism with a self-reflective critical theory of society, for “The pathic element in anti-Semitism is not projective behavior as such but the exclusion of reflection from that behavior.”[96]

We would do well to accept Nirenberg’s distinction, for, as we have seen, the very real assimilation of German Jews on religious, economic, demographic, and intellectual (as portrayed by Mosse) fronts was not sufficient to abate anti-Jewish sentiment in that country’s thought or practice. While Joseph Roth retained his Jewish sensibility and criticism for Western civilization from his perspective of an assimilated Ostjude, Jewish members of the Frankfurt School advanced this project even further. With their unique cultural and philosophical double vision, these assimilated Jews serve as a case in point that however actually assimilated German Jews generally became, they remained vulnerable outsiders in German society. Uniquely oppressed but equipped with powerful theoretical perspective, it is not an accident that assimilated Jewish intellectuals conducted many of the greatest-ever critiques of Western society.

Coda: Why History Needs Critical Theory

That Nirenberg hails from a department as interdisciplinary as the Committee on Social Thought is telling. In Nirenberg’s work, history, a discipline focused on that concrete reality, and critical theory, a discipline often discredited for its distance from reality, come into unison to advance a theory that history can not only be theorized but is indeed fueled by theory just as it is by historical reality. Nirenberg sees his project as restoring the importance of the history of ideas—“how what people have thought in the past… affects what and how people think in the future.”[97] “That question once animated the discipline of history,” he continues. “It is seldom asked explicitly today, both because it is so large and because many… have become (rightly) suspicious of easy answers to it.” I hope to have shown the importance of thought—both as self-assessment motivating Jewish assimilation and as anti-Judaism—for the historical reality that befell the Jews of Europe. Tracing the ultimately misguided and conceptually trapped assimilation of Josef Roth to its destitute limits, we see the very real warning Nirenberg delivers in making “an argument for the vital role that the history of ideas can play in making us aware of how past uses of the concepts we think can constrain our thought.”[98] Breaking through this barrier with Adorno’s successful assimilation, we realize the incredible power thought has over us and the history we conceive. This is the gift of critical theory to history.

Adorno noted the need for even a critical philosophy to remain grounded in claims to truth, without which “truth will turn into untruth, philosophy into folly.”[99] And this despite the risk of reversion into mythology. Yet, he issued a hopeful charge for the discipline: “And yet philosophy cannot abdicate if stupidity is not to triumph in realized unreason.” Nirenberg proposes a similar wager for history: Despite the risks of dissociating history from reality, it is time that historians acknowledge the latent power of the concepts upon which they depend.

[1] Max Weber in his “Introduction” to The Economic Ethics of the World Religions, quoted in Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013), p. 9.

[2] Gordon, Sarah Ann. Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’ (Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 8.

[3] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 1.

[4] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 271.

[5] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 1.

[6] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 2.

[7] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 6.

[8] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 3.

[9] Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism, p. 4.

[10] Wasserstein, Bernard. On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 196.

[11] Bach, H.I. The German Jew: A Synthesis of Judaism and Western Civilization, 1730-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 116-117.

[12] Bach, The German Jew, pp. 117-118.

[13] Bach, The German Jew, p. 121.

[14] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 200.

[15] Bach, The German Jew, p. 120.

[16] Claussen, Detlev. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 22.

[17] Bach, The German Jew, p. 127.

[18] Bach, The German Jew, p. 135.

[19] Bach, The German Jew, p. 136.

[20] Bach, The German Jew, p. 137.

[21] Bach, The German Jew, p. 143.

[22] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 14.

[23] Bach, The German Jew, p. 165.

[24] Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphoses and Other Writings (New York: Continuum) p. 201.

[25] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 200.

[26] Mendes-Flohr, Paul in German-Jewish History in Modern Times Volume 4: Renewal and Destruction, Ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 157.

[27] Mendes-Flohr, German-Jewish History, Volume 4, p. 160.

[28] Mendes-Flohr, German-Jewish History, Volume 4, p. 170.

[29] Mendes-Flohr, German-Jewish History, Volume 4, p. 171.

[30] Mosse, George L. German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), p. 42.

[31] Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, p. 3.

[32] Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, p. 23.

[33] Berghan, Klaus L. The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered (New York: Peter Lang, 1996) p. 3.

[34] Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, p. 59.

[35] Aschheim, Steven E. In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) p. 39.

[36] Despite Mosse’s case for the influence of Bildung in German-Jewish thought, the Jewish nationalist philosopher Gershom Scholem dismissed the so called German-Jewish Dialogue as a myth in moving a postwar essay.[36] After the war, Scholem, who had emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1923, was faced by precisely the opposite problem of assimilation as his German-Jewish predecessors: Scholem, “who no longer wanted to be a German, nevertheless could not—and would not—completely cease being German, in his own way…. [L]iving in Jerusalem, ever a Berliner…. Scholem could never fully leave the land of murderers.” See A tribute by Bohlich, quoted in Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters 1914-1982, ed. and trans. Edward David Skinner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 354.

[37] Translator’s Afterword in Joseph Roth, Job, trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Archipelago, 2010) p. 205.

[38] Ross Benjamin, Job, p. 206.

[39] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 205.

[40] Joseph Roth, p. 309-10.

[41] Joseph Roth, p. 266.

[42] Joseph Roth, p. 237.

[43] Letter 182 to Stefen Zweig, dated mid-February 1933 in Joseph Roth, p. 237.

[44] Hoffman, Joseph Roth, p. 229.

[45] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 205.

[46] Michael Hoffman in Joseph Roth, Report From a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939, ed. Hoffman (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 18.

[47] Roth, Joseph. The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hoffman (1926-27; New York: Norton, 2001), p. 14, 22.

[48] Ross Benjamin, Job, p. 206.

[49] Roth, The Wandering Jews, p. 21.

[50] Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, trans. and ed. Michael Hoffman (New York: Norton, 2012), p. 526.

[51] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 211.

[52] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 211.

[53] Joseph Roth, p. 274.

[54] Wasserstein, On the Eve, p. 212.

[55] Roth, The Wandering Jews, p. 71.

[56] The phrase is Weber’s translation of Friedrich Schiller’s “de-divinization”: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.” See Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1946), pp. 51, 155.

[57] Roth, The Wandering Jews, p. 5.

[58] Roth, The Wandering Jews, p. xv.

[59] Roth, The Wandering Jews, p. 11.

[60] Roth, The Wandering Jews, p. xvi.

[61] Mendes-Flohr, German-Jewish History, Volume 4, pp. 186-187.

[62] Mendes-Flohr, German-Jewish History, Volume 4, p. 187.

[63] Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) p. 373.

[64] Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 19.

[65] Wasserstein, On the Eve, pp. 197-198.

[66] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 19 n. 16.

[67] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 94.

[68] Claussen, Detlev. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 24, 28.

[69] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 19 n. 17.

[70] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 20.

[71] Claussen, One Last Genius, p. 64.

[72] Adorno, Theodor W. And Benjamin, Walter. The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940 Ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) pp. 329-330.

[73] Claussen, One Last Genius, p. 37.

[74] Claussen, One Last Genius, p. 47.

[75] Claussen, One Last Genius, p. 54.

[76] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, pp. 176, 178.

[77] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 24.

[78] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 180.

[79] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1951; London: Verso, 2005), p. 33.

[80] Claussen, One Last Genius, p. 365 n. 84.

[81] Claussen, One Last Genius, p. 365

[82] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 485.

[83] Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926. (1919-22; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 356.

[84] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966; New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 404.

[85] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. xiv.

[86] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. xiii, 242.

[87] Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 463.

[88] Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 464.

[89] Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 458.

[90] Letter to Stefan Zweig, 2 October 1933 in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, trans. and ed. Michael Hoffman (New York: Norton, 2012), p. 274.

[91] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 154.

[92] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 152.

[93] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Reflections on the Jewish Question” (1946), quoted in Nirenberg, p. 4.

[94] Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, pp. 465-466.

[95] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 3.

[96] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 156.

[97] Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 2.

[98] Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 2.

[99] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 404.