German Jewish Parnassus

Born in Berlin to an assimilated Jewish family that eschewed Jewish ritual, Moritz Goldstein received a doctorate in German literature in 1906 and pursued a career as a journalist, poet, novelist, and playwright with mixed success. In the years before World War I, he was one of a number of young German Jewish intellectuals who criticized German Jewry’s deep cultural assimilation and called on Jews to turn toward cultural creativity in a national Jewish vein. His 1912 essay “German Jewish Parnassus” trod heavily on the sensitive question of whether German Jews played an outsized role in shaping contemporary German high culture: he argued that Jews were fooling themselves as to the degree of their acceptance in German national life and tenability of their cultural prominence. The essay touched off a heated debate in German and German Jewish letters, several pieces of which appear in this volume. He left Germany in 1933, lived in Italy until 1938, and then immigrated to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life.