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A 19th-Century Medievalist Poised between the German Academy and the World of Jewish Tradition

Dec. 12 2016

The 19th century saw no small number of Jews leave homes steeped in Jewish tradition to adopt German culture and to become distinguished scholars, writers, or businessmen. Philipp Jaffé (1819-1870) was highly unusual in that he remained connected to the milieu from which he came. A groundbreaking historian of the Middle Ages whose works are still consulted by specialists today, Jaffé was born in a small town in German-ruled Poland but spent most of his life at the University of Berlin, despite being unable to obtain a full professorship because of his religion. Daniel R. Schwartz, who has recently prepared a volume of Jaffé’s correspondence, writes:

Jaffé was not the usual Berlin medievalist. . . . [W]hen he corresponded with his grandparents it was in German written in Hebrew script; and [when he was attending gymnasium in the city of Posen], as he would fondly recall years later, . . . every weekend, “some Schlomche” would bring him cakes from his grandmother.

Similarly, when his father, a businessman, sent him for an apprenticeship in business in Berlin in 1838, it was to a Jewish banker, and Philipp lived in a heavily Jewish neighborhood; his first historical publications were on medieval Jewish history; his letters over the next decades are full of references to relatives and other Jews visiting from Posen or, like him, living in Berlin; hardly a Jewish holiday goes by that he does not write his parents, or his sisters, to thank them for the traditional cake or other treats that they sent him to mark the holiday; and as late as 1866 we find him chatting with Leopold Zunz [a founding figure in the study of Jewish history] at a party sponsored by the Jewish community of Berlin in honor of one of its rabbis.

What is fascinating about Jaffé is the extreme way in which he was neither simply a German medievalist nor simply a Polish Jew. While others integrated their different identities, or maintained them irenically or even fruitfully alongside one another, Jaffé did not. Rather, each of them, frustratingly, prevented the other from fulfilling its potential. . . .

[H]is devotion to the study of history also separated him from his Polish Jewish family: his vocation to “the muse that I serve—history,” to “the objects of my study, which make my life worth living,” kept him busy in Berlin during the year and on the road every summer (traveling from library to library, and from monastery to monastery), day and night, year after year. The contrast between the obviously heartfelt expressions, in his letters, of his love for his parents and sisters in Posen, and of his yearning to see them, on the one hand, and the years and years that went by between his visits to Posen (although it was only a few hours by train from Berlin), on the other, is stark and tragic.

Read more at Tablet

More about: German Jewry, Germany, Midd`

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic