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Role Model and Countermodel

The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation

By: Carsten Schapkow, Corey Twitchell (Translator)

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eBook | 9 December 2015

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This book explores the “Golden Age” of Sephardic Jewry on the Iberian Peninsula and its perception in German Jewish culture during the era of emancipation. For Jews living in Germany, the history of Sephardic Jewry developed into a historical example with its distinctive valence and signature against the pressure to assimilate and the emergence of anti-Semitism in Germany. It provided, moreover, a forum to engage in internal dialogue amongst Jews and external dialogue with German majority society about challenging questions of religious, political, and national identity. In this respect, the perception of prominent Sephardic Jews as intercultural mediators was key to emphasizing the skills and values Jews had to offer to civilizations in the past. German Jews invoked this past significance in their case for a Jewish role in present and future societies, especially in Germany.

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In this fluent, accessible and compelling study, Carsten Schapkow provides the first detailed survey of how German Jews, from Mendelssohn to Graetz, looked back to the Jews of medieval al-Andalus, and made use of this Iberian model in their collective memory and in debates over political emancipation and cultural pluralism. The ‘Sephardic mystique’, he shows, was considerably more complex and contentious than most historians have realized. Drawing on an extremely wide range of sources—political, historiographical, philosophical, and fictional—Schapkow’s study elegantly weaves together these various strands of German Jewish cultural memory in the age of emancipation.