Acculturated Jews and Their Cultural Contributions

Creating for an Intended Non-Jewish Audience

The creativity of people we might variously call “acculturated,” “assimilated,” or “integrated” Jews demands to be understood in very different terms than the secular-nationalist, traditionalist, or political Jewish cultural expressive modes—all of which were intended for Jewish audiences—in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. These decades saw a vast corpus of culture created in English, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Italian, and Arabic by individuals of Jewish backgrounds who shared the language and civic culture of larger communities and who were increasingly indistinguishable from their non-Jewish compatriots in comportment, aspirations, loyalties, beliefs, and loves. 

What are we to make of works of culture created by people who were Jewish by origin (whatever that meant) but who identified with a larger national community, who wrote in languages with overwhelmingly non-Jewish potential readerships and often saw themselves as creating not for Jews specifically but for some larger audience?

A Brief History of Western Jewish Assimilation

To make sense of Jewish creativity in the “language of the land” we must start in Western Europe. Already well before 1880, the Jewish populations of France, Britain, of recently united Italy and Germany, and of the United States before the great East European immigration were largely severed from traditional Jewish culture (with the exception of a fiercely committed Orthodox minority in Germany), and identified fully and enthusiastically as members of the larger nation. These were populations where almost all Jewish parents sent their children to modern non-Jewish schools to receive a secular education—one that instilled not Jewish identity but French, British, German, Italian, or American identities. These Jews consumed a diet of “general” culture with at most an admixture of Jewishly identified culture and ritual. Thus, it is not surprising that most of them directed a large part or even all of their creative energies not at specifically Jewish cultural endeavor but at a larger national or human conversation.

Jews by Origin Addressing Questions of Jewish Identity: Buber, Lasker-Schüler, and Kafka

Where does creativity by Jewish people in and for larger not-specifically-Jewish cultural spheres belong in a library of Jewish culture and civilization? One simple but not wholly satisfying answer might be to limit ourselves to that subset of creators who, though they wrote in larger languages, did manifestly address questions of Jewish identity, culture, community, and thought. Users will indeed meet many such figures in the Posen Library. 

Within Western Jewish communities, especially in Germany, there were some who challenged their fellow Jews’ seamless identification with larger West European societies and the concomitant narrowing of what Jewishness could mean. Martin Buber gained a following among some young German Jews with arguments that German Jewry could only be revitalized by a “spiritual Zionism” that forged connections with both the forgotten religious tradition and new Jewish secular-nationalist cultural currents in Eastern Europe and Palestine. The German poet and painter Else Lasker-Schüler wove into her work a protean exploration of Jewishness not only as a lamentable social fate but also as a fount of distinctive aesthetic possibility. Moving in a milieu permeated by tropes of Jewish difference as inexpungeably “Oriental,” “primitive,” and “racial,” Lasker-Schüler presented herself in poetry, in 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. 

The modernist giant Franz Kafka also belongs to this pantheon of idiosyncratic and ideo-syncretic post-assimilated explorers of the Jewish condition. His intense personal engagement with Jewish identity in ethnically divided Prague, with Yiddish and Hebrew culture, and with Zionism, was matched by his work’s obsessions with lost or concealed revelations, with creatures neither fully human nor fully animal, and with characters who are betwixt and between, neither lord nor peasant, nonnatives and strangers, unable to find their place in the social system or able to do so only at great cost. The young man turned bug of Metamorphosis is one such, of course, but so also is the unlovely Odradek creature, ambiguously “Slavonic” or “German” in origin, whom we encounter in “The Cares of a Family Man.” 

What Qualifies as Jewish Culture?

Yet if figures like Kafka or Lasker-Schüler show how new forms of self-consciously Jewish cultural exploration could emerge—dialectically?—from acculturation amid the continued problematization of Jewishness by the larger society, we must nevertheless recognize that most cultural creativity by individuals of Jewish background in Western and Central Europe between 1880 and 1918 was not intended to be ​​a “Jewish contribution” first and foremost, or even at all, but rather a contribution to a French, English, German, Italian, or world culture. 

There is little evidence of any interest in Jewishness in the work of Léon Bakst, the famed creator of the Ballet Russe’s lush visual aesthetic, or of the painter Sonia Delaunay, who moved seamlessly from a cosmopolitan upbringing in a completely Russified family to a significant role as avant-garde painter in Paris. 

Many cultural figures of Jewish background—some profoundly central to their larger cultural milieus—engaged Jewish questions or themes only in very limited and intermittent fashion. We might think here of Osip Mandelstam in Russia (who played as much or more with Christian and Hellenic identification in his poetry as with Jewishness), Georg Brandes in Denmark (for whom the discovery he was nominally Jewish was initially experienced as a kind of inexplicable misfortune), and French luminaries such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Marcel Proust, whose work might never have engaged Jewishness at all had larger forces in French and European life—like the Dreyfus Affair that put French Jewish loyalty on trial between 1894 and 1906—not reinvested the Jewish question with unexpected significance. Even writing that was expressly about Jews could be intended mostly for the larger culture: in the United States, the English-language immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska made much of her Jewish background but did so for non-Jewish readers, as a story of escape from Jewish patriarchy’s bonds directed to an Anglo-American society she aspired to join. 

Jewish Self-Understanding as Participants and Contributors to the Larger Culture

Jewish creativity in languages identified with larger communities also spread in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. In St. Petersburg and Warsaw, in the Polish-dominated Austrian-Galician cities of Lwów (now L’viv) and Kraków, in Budapest, and in the great cities of the Arab world from Beirut to Cairo to Baghdad, growing numbers of Jewish men and women embraced the language and culture of the larger communities in which they lived and saw themselves as participants therein. 

In Budapest, a generation of completely Magyarized Jews imagined themselves as chief “junior partners” in the Hungarian nationalist movement. In the Middle East, a region-wide movement for a suprareligious Arabic cultural renaissance, the Nahda, attracted a small but growing cohort of Jews like Ya‘qub Sannu‘, the Cairene playwright and gadfly who called himself “the Egyptian Molière,” the Beirut-born Esther Azhari Moyal, and the Safed-born and Cairo-raised Nissim Malul (though it should be noted that whereas Sannu‘ identified himself exclusively with an Arabic cultural project, figures like Moyal and Malul combined such interests with support for visions of Jewish national renaissance, deeming both compatible with loyalty to a supraethnic Ottoman imperial citizenship). At the same time, and on a larger scale, growing numbers of Jews in North Africa and both the Middle Eastern and Turkic-Balkan lobes of the Ottoman Empire began to create in French and (more locally) English and Italian in this period. This was both testament to a deep kind of assimilation and a highly paradoxical form thereof. To make sense of it demands an understanding of the distinctive history of Jews in the Muslim world, particularly in the Arab Middle East and the Ottoman Balkans.