Figures of Love in Romantic Antisemitism: Achim von Arnim1

I Although few dispute its existence, scholars have found it difficult to determine the scope and the character of Romantic antisemitism. This difficulty arises because the hallmarks of Romantic antisemitism are inconsistency and ambivalence, a simultaneous attraction to, and revulsion from, Jews and Judaism. Nothing illustrates this better than the life and work of Achim von Arnim. Arnim attended the same Jewish salons he condemned during the dinners of the Christian-German Table Society, of which he was a co-founder. He scorned both Orthodox and assimilated Jews but appreciated some elements of Jewish culture and religion, especially its mystical strands. His literary references to the Kabbalah have been read as a sign of syncretistic openness to different religious traditions.2 Arnim's contradictory attitude toward Jews and Judaism emerges most clearly in a series of writings he completed in 1811, just before the promulgation of the 1812 Prussian emancipation edict, to which he was opposed. In the prose fragment "Die Versohnung in der Sommerfrische," Arnim advocates a model of gradual emancipation in which the granting of political rights to the Jews would only follow their religious conversion and cultural assimilation. In line with earlier Enlightenment thinking, he supports the social integration of the Jews on the condition that they adapt to the economic, cultural, and religious norms of their Christian surroundings. His drama Halle undJerusalem, in which the only positive Jewish character is one who successfully overcame his Judaism, illustrates this presumed necessity of radical Jewish transformation. At the same time, Arnim harbors paranoid anxieties about the actual success of assimilation, most notably in his speech "Uber die Kennzeichen des Judenthums," which he delivered at the Table Society in the spring of 1811. The speech attempts to restore to Jews a visibility that he believed had disappeared because of their alleged "seltene Kunst sich zu verstecken," which involved only superficial rather than essential changes (6: 363). One way of explaining these contradictions is in terms of a clash between different belief systems that Arnim espouses simultaneously. On the one hand, the notion of Jewish mutability informed both Christian calls for conversion and the Enlightenment idea of human perfectibility, with its corollary belief that Jews are especially in need of improvement. On the other hand, this model of transformation conflicted with the historically new sense of Jewish physical, and therefore immutable, difference. Indeed, scholars tend to regard Romantic antisemitism as a transitional phenomenon on the route from traditional Christian anti-Judaism to modern antisemitism or, alternatively, from the 18th-century beginnings of Jewish emancipation to the l^century backlash against it. Modern antisemitism is here defined as (1) an expression of the socioeconomic fears caused by modernization, (2) a corollary of political ideologies, especially nationalism, that seek to unify populations, (3) a racial ideology that posits the existence of indelible physical differences between "Jews" and "Aryans," and (4) a hostility directed against assimilated Jews, whose claims of a German identity it denies.3 Measured by these standards, Romantic antisemitism is often found to be almost but "not yet" fully modern. There is some consensus among scholars that despite its (modern) economic and political motivations, Romantic antisemitism is not a fullfledged racial ideology and does not legitimize anti-Jewish violence.4 Wolf-Daniel Hartwich's recent study of Romantic antisemitism relies less on the notion of unidirectional historical development, without fully escaping it. Hartwich argues that Romanticism's simultaneous return to and secularization of Christianity opened up a syncretistic engagement with other religions, including Judaism. In contrast to the Enlightenment reduction of Judaism to a theocracy and a foil for a critique of religion, Romanticism developed a sense of Judaism's historicity. …