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Last update - 18:05 21/05/2008 Cultural History Pushing the boundaries of identity By James Loeffler Tags: Michael Steinberg  Judaism Musical and Unmusical, by Michael P. Steinberg University of Chicago Press, 256 pages, $21 (paperback) The late Edward Said once remarked, in an interview with Haaretz, that, "I am the last Jewish intellectual." Just as in his view, his fellow Palestinians had replaced the Jews as history's defenseless, morally just victims -- so too had he himself become the "the only true follower" of Theodor Adorno, the eminent German Jewish Marxist critic of European modernity (and Jewish tribalism). Was Said's comment just a provocative piece of rhetoric or a cleverly ironic, disarming joke about his own intellectual roots? Michael P. Steinberg, a professor of history and music at Brown University, thinks it was something more. In his new book, "Judaism Musical and Unmusical," he takes Said's symbolic Jewishness as the starting point for a broader, fascinating excursion into the ideological thickets of German Jewish culture, identity, memory and history. In the process, he successfully demolishes some myths, while raising new and challenging questions about the meaning of the German Jewish past. Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig -- it's easy to compile an impressive list of famous German Jewish intellectuals, much harder to say what such a list means. Is Freud, who famously denounced all religion, including Judaism, a Jewish thinker? What of such great composers (and converts to Christianity) as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler? What role does Judaism play in the alienated modernist writing of Franz Kafka or Karl Krauss? Taken as a whole, are their lives and works testaments to the failure of German-Jewish assimilation, the fragile but real triumph of German-Jewish symbiosis, or the fractured, indefinable nature of modern Jewish identity as a whole? These are not new questions, and Steinberg's book, a collection of loosely linked essays, covers well-trod scholarly ground. Yet there is something distinctive in his approach, and it has to do less with his interest in Said than with his own assumptions about what is Jewish and what is German. He begins by asking two deceptively simple questions, "What is Jewish?" and "What is musical?" The answers, he argues, are not merely philosophical reflections about art and Judaism. Rather, Jews and music are both central, yet ambiguous components of the European past -- forever changing, their essence a subject of fierce debate, richly evocative, yet frustratingly elusive. As such, they represent two abstract concepts that challenge stable notions of national or religious identity. Neither Jews nor Judaism can be defined in absolute terms, given their amorphous, changing nature down through history. The same holds true with music, an art form that also can't be reduced to one fixed meaning, since its very power lies in its abstraction. In the same spirit, Steinberg traces the common bond among the illustrious German Jewish intellectuals to their very resistance to classification. He has little interest in their political blind-sightedness or their complicated relations with Jewish religious tradition. Rather, he highlights their shared determination to challenge the boundaries and meaning of Deutschtum and Judentum, Germanness and Jewishness. This was a quest, in other words, to forge modern identities beyond religion and politics in the realm of art and culture. To demonstrate this thesis about the importance of the "aesthetic dimension of modernity," Steinberg offers a professorial ramble through several episodes in the German Jewish past. He leads the reader through the late writings of Sigmund Freud, particularly his classic "Moses and Monotheism." In Steinberg's view, Freud's attack on Judaism's iconic lawgiver was not a rejection of Judaism's cherished belief in its ancient biblical origins. Instead, faced with Nazi anti-Semitism and the Nuremberg Laws, Freud tried to undercut all ideologies, religious or political, that fixated on racial or cultural origins. This was no less than a profoundly Jewish act, Steinberg argues, for it evinced faith that just as Moses the Egyptian did not have to be an ethnic Hebrew to be the creator of the ancient Hebrew religion, so too did Jews not have to let the myths of Nazi anti-Semitism be the final word on what it meant to be Jewish. ?Life? Or Theater?' We also encounter a sensitive reading of the extraordinary autobiographical memory paintings of the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon. In the two years spent in exile from her Berlin home in the south of France, before her murder in Auschwitz, in 1943, she managed to produce "Leben? Oder Theater?" (Life? Or Theater?), a masterwork of nearly 800 small paintings that comprise a novel form of performance art, memoir and self-analysis without parallel in European art. For Steinberg, this work is a rejection of conventional ideas of Jewishness and Germanness for a new kind of radical modern individualism that transcends the boundaries between art, life, memory and history. The overall effect of these different essays is a dizzying ride through some of the great intellectual episodes of 19th- and 20th-century Jewish Germany, with interesting detours into the Jewish question in the fiction of Henry James, Edith Wharton and the career of Italian Jewish historian Arnaldo Momigliano. All of these case studies are fascinating and enjoyable, even if Steinberg's generally playful, lucid writing slides too readily into theoretical jargon and academic abstraction. But to get a broader historical perspective on these lives, we ultimately have to zoom out from the particular life stories to a larger narrative about what links them. Here is where Steinberg becomes most provocative. In his estimation, it makes no sense to reduce these individuals to categories of German or Jewish. Decrying what he terms the omnipresent, pernicious influence of nationalism -- German and Jewish -- in academic scholarship, Steinberg insists that the very act of trying to classify Freud or Kafka as Jewish is a political decision based on the often unconscious influence of Zionism. This is not a particularly novel or controversial point. But Steinberg has even harsher words not for Zionists or anti-Semites, but for what might be termed today's German Jewish liberals. Indeed, his biggest objects of criticism are those Jews and Jewish institutions that continue to view the German Jewish experience in positive terms of the "Jewish contribution" or "participation" in the shaping of modern German culture. In his estimation, the parties guilty of this extend from the venerable emigre German-Jewish institution the Leo Baeck Institute, to the new Jewish Museum of Berlin to individual writers such as Amos Elon. In their efforts to dignify the German Jewish past by showing that the Nazis distorted the picture by obscuring how much a part of German culture Jews were, they implicitly embrace the logic and model of German nationalism itself. Even if we replace the term "assimilation" for "integration," and speak of Jewish Germans or a dual German-Jewish identity, Steinberg writes, we distort the historical past. In reality, Jews and Germans were too mixed, too intertwined as a people, to be separated into two polarities on the basis of nationality. Bernstein in Vienna Lest we dismiss this as postmodern obscurantism that ignores the bitter reality check of history, German anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Steinberg offers fascinating chapters devoted to the question of how Jews and Jewish life are remembered and represented in postwar Germany and Austria. Indeed, one of the gems of the book is his reconstruction of American Jewish composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein's visits to Vienna, during which he took the city by storm. Steinberg argues persuasively that a considerable part of Bernstein's intense popular appeal was due to his status as an American Jew and champion of Mahler who evoked the city's Jewish past. Sitting in an Austrian television studio in the 1960s, blithely chatting away in German with a cigarette in one hand while dressed in an Austrian-style jacket, Bernstein played on the irony of his own presence and the ambiguous relations between German culture, Jews, anti-Semitism and postwar Austria to great effect. Steinberg's background as a premier scholar of the intersection of German music, Jews and European intellectual history serves him well when he discusses Bernstein, Mahler and other factors. He is on shakier ground when he enters into the present to celebrate Daniel Barenboim as the "last Yekke," whom he praises for challenging the taboos of performing Wagner in Israel and launching a joint Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra. While Steinberg does not shy away from pointing a finger at anti-Semitism and its real effects on Jews and Jewish culture during the 20th century, it is clear that he writes from a post-Holocaust generational perspective. Sixty years after the end of World War II, with the Jewish population of Germany on the rise, he proposes that the period of German Jewish life and culture, once declared closed, has begun to reopen in dramatic new ways. The examples of Bernstein and Barenboim suggest that Steinberg ultimately favors those Jews who push against the implicit boundaries of their identities to rethink and reshape the memory of the German-Jewish relationship. Indeed, in his eyes the iconoclastic Barenboim is the true descendant of the eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn because of his very liberal cosmopolitanism. This typifies the best of the German Jewish intellectual tradition from the Enlightenment onwards. It is, in his eyes, the definition of Jewishness by intellectual choice ("by constitution" in his phrase) rather than by the more conventional focus on ethnic, national or religious origins. This brings us back to Said and the legacy of culture and history today. Steinberg is not an uncritical admirer of Said. He does gently take him to task for some of his distortions of the ideas of Freud. But Said together with Barenboim are clearly his heroes. The reason is simple; they challenge the normative meanings of Jewishness and the parochial dictates of Jewish nationalism and Israeli culture today. While Jews today seem obsessed with identity and belonging, these two propose a cosmopolitan universalism that he finds attractive and morally superior. But the problem with this approach is the same problem that Freud, Arendt and all of the other German Jewish intellectuals faced in their day. It was fine to be a cosmopolitan European intellectual, until the blunt force of politics intruded into the realm of ideas, forcing real, hard choices. The same is true in the Middle East today. Steinberg himself notes that Said's comments about his identity came in the wake of a famous incident in the months leading up to the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. Said was photographed hurling a rock at the Israeli border from neighboring Lebanon. Defending himself from charges of violence and anti-Semitism, he had recourse to his comments on his putative Jewishness, going so far in the same interview, as to declare himself a "Jewish-Palestinian." Said, of course, was a notorious political provocateur. Steinberg is not. But in valorizing the Palestinian intellectual and his Israeli-Argentinian comrade as the fullest heirs to the German Jewish intellectual tradition, he ends up only mythologizing the German Jewish past -- and present -- in new ways. His clear-eyed dismissals of the romantic excesses of nationalism -- Jewish and German -- in the historical scholarship about German Jews are on target. But his lionization of today's radicals as the natural -- and perhaps sole -- inheritors of a nobler European Jewish humanism and truest proponents of "humanistic politics" smacks of the same romanticization he decries in other scholars. It is hard, after all, to imagine Sigmund Freud hurling a rock in hopes of changing the world. James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, is writing a book about Jews and music in modern Russia. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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