The Wonder-Working Rabbi of Barcelona

The highly original German-language modernist poet, visual artist and bohemian Else Lasker-Schüler was born into a well-to-do, nonobservant Jewish family in Ebensfeld, Germany. Raised with little connection to Jewish tradition, she nevertheless wove into much of her work—particularly in her Hebräische Balladen (Hebrew Ballads) of 1913—an exploration of Jewishness, not only as a lamentable social fate but also as a font of distinctive aesthetic possibility. Moving in a milieu permeated by tropes that portrayed Jewish difference as “Oriental,” “primitive,” and “racial,” Lasker-Schüler presented herself in poetry, in playful visual art, and in a cultivated public persona as “Prince Yusuf,” a time-, ethnicity-, and gender-bending composite of Jew and Muslim, Hebrew and Arabian, ancient Egyptian and medieval Near Eastern, man and woman. Moving in German expressionist and avant-garde circles in Berlin and Munich, she also cultivated close relations with intellectuals interested in ideas of Jewish national renaissance and, in the 1920s, close relations with displaced East European Jewish Hebrew and Yiddish literati like the poets Uri Zvi Greenberg