Heidelberg's Hope
Fania Oz-Salzberger
An inaugural lecture delivered at the
opening ceremony of the academic year,
October 19, 2003
RuprechtKarlUniversity of Heidelberg
Posen Forum Working Papers no. 2
Dr. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas
The School of History and the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa
The author wishes to thank the Rector's office at The University of Heidelberg and the compilers of the exhibition catalogue Juden an der Universität Heidelberg for kindly permitting the reproduction of the lecture text and a majority of the photographs.
Posen Forum Working Papers editorial staff : Dr. Ella Bauer
Ms. Noemi Harari
Let me tell you a story about a young man who came here, to Heidelberg, a hundred and six years ago.
He came full of immense hope - the hope for a wonderful future of the intellect, of great international scholarship, the hope for a new kind of Judaism. Even the hope for a new Jewish nationhood, and the revival of its ancient homeland, not merely as a safe haven from European persecution, but also as a trusted custodian of European learning and wisdom.
He was my great-great uncle, the student who signed his doctoral application in 1902 as Jossel Klausner, and later became Professor Joseph Klausner of the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. His years here may have been the happiest in his life. For a while, he lost his heart in Heidelberg. And he found in Heidelberg enough hope to last him a lifetime: intellectual, personal, Jewish, universal, national, erotic, human, scholarly, spiritual hope.
He was a young man from Russia, already a writer and editor, well read, and blessed with an almost sensual love of letters, and also with a very solid self - esteem, when he came to Germany in order to study. Simply to study. No Jews were allowed in the Russian universities. Russian Jews were being massacred and humiliated, and the Russian authorities looking on with glee. The German Kaiser's empire seemed to men like Klausner the very opposite of the Czar's dark regime. Germany had emancipated its Jews. The gates of high learning and educated careers had been thrown open to them. Germany was hope.
"A new world, the European West, was revealed to me", Klausner wrote in his autobiography. This autobiography was published in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in 1946, in the horrible immediate aftermath of it all, but its author's youthful love for the great metropolis of Berlin is delivered in all its freshness and glow. Berlin was his first German stop. It was full of wonders. Berlin was freedom. It was the European West. But Berlin, alas, was also too expensive, too full of noise and turmoil and distractions.
"In order to study properly one must reside in a small university town with great professors, where there is no noise and no interference, where time is not consumed by great distances or by numerous assemblies and guests. I therefore decided to make my way to the famous university town of Heidelberg, which then had 25,000 residents at the most, and was almost wholly mekom tora: full of academic institutions, professors and students."
Mekom tora: a seat of learning. A place where all the hidden energies, and eagerness, and Talmudic turns of phrase and turns of mind, of a young East European Jew like Klausner, like Leib Yaffe, like Nachum Goldman, like Saul Tschernichowsky, could come to grips with the finest tradition of German scholarship and arts.
Here, a German Jewish student such as Felix Rosenblüth (the future Israeli minister of justice Pinchas Rosen) could write a dissertation for a distinguished Jewish law professor, indeed the Rector of Heidelberg, Georg Jellinek, on a subject no less than "Determining the Concepts of People and Nation". And here, an American-born Jew like Yehuda Leib Magnes, coming all the way from San Francisco, could proudly complete his doctoral work in Semitic languages, philosophy and political economy.
Because in Heidelberg, at the turn of the nineteenth century, a Jew, born and intending to die a Jew, could hope to enjoy exactly what in the seventeenth century Baruch de Spinoza, a Jew from birth to death, knew that he would never be able to enjoy: the fullest swing of freedom of thought. The space and impetus to rethink everything: the human body and the universe, religion and science, man and woman, social norms and the teachings of history.
Spinoza, in 1673, said no to Heidelberg. He had received a kind and courageous invitation from the Elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate, who promised the great Dutch-Jewish thinker libertas philosophandi, "as long as the stability of religion is not publicly shaken". But Spinoza could not accept the offer. "What limits", he wrote back to the Prince, "would cut off my freedom of philosophizing, so that the stability pf religion is not publicly shaken?"
Two centuries later, Klausner and his fellow students felt very strongly that they could say yes to Heidelberg. They knew that it was one of Germany's most liberal universities; a seat of learning that employed a Jewish professor of medicine, Jacob Israel, as early as the 1652 - and even appointed him Rector. And later made Gustav Weil, in 1861, one of the first Jewish full professors in Germany.
When I was accepted as a regular student at Heidelberg, Klausner wrote, "my happiness was boundless". He goes on to write in his autobiography: "Here, in Heidelberg, a new era began in my life. An era flooded by light and brilliance, not diminished even by the relative material distress which I experienced most of those years as a Hebrew writer."
Can you imagine the bliss? To study philosophy with Kuno Fischer, literature with Max Freiherr von Waldberg, Semitic languages with Karl Bezold, history of Art with Henry Thode, son in law of Richard Wagner, and yet more philosophy with Paul Hensel, a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn. All borders could be crossed here: Heidelberg, mekom tora. Heidelberg's hope.
It was, first and foremost, a hope of the intellect. Heidelberg gave these young lovers of learning the taste of true, deep, detached and committed scholarship. The critical rationality of a free, educated mind. They were intoxicated with learning, those young Russian Jews, those lovers of forbidden books: at last, they had wings to fly.
Serious scholarship, of course, is not a matter for vulgar populists. Professor Paul Hensel once repronched a certain French philosopher whose style, he claimed, was way too simple. Philosophers must never be so bright and clear, Hensel told his students. A typical German opinion, Klausner commented in his memoirs.
On the other hand, some professors knew how to be simple and deep at the same time. "[Kuno Fischer] had a special talent to define concepts, to sort out ideas and to clarify both so well, that the most difficult philosophical problems would become luminous and clear almost to the point of transparency".
This, writes Klausner, is where I learnt to write clearly about complex things. This is my way of academic "cheating": while others pretend to be "deep" using an abstract and complicated style, I try to "cheat" by a simple, light style as I lecture on issues that are neither simple nor light. "And who cares if some fault-seekers will say that my books and articles are shallow and lengthy, devoid of the celebrated German 'originality'?"
Klausner cared, or course, about his image. Acutely, all his academic life. And I feel a great sympathy here for my great uncle, who died shortly before I was born. Like him, I am a historian, and like him I seek to convey my scholarship to a broad and (hopefully) fascinated audience. One member of the generation between Klausner and myself has chosen to become a novelist (um Gottes Willen), but we, true to our academic vocations, are committed to scientific rigour - and yet aspire to be clearly understood.
Here was a deep affinity between Rabbinic learning and German scholarship, and also a constant dissonance, running across the two academic cultures. It is the dissonance between obscurity and clarity, between the depth of specialization available only to a select few - yodei chen, beholders of secret wisdom in Judaism, and the academic equivalent of the Protestant Chosen - as opposed to the ideal of Bildung, of Aufklärung, of haskala, the wish to disseminate knowledge across minds and genders and social classes and ethnic groups.
Here was the longtime German and Jewish concern with the wide, generous dispersion of high learning - from Maimonides to Mendelssohn, from Luther to Habermas. And here was the spirit of Goethe, hovering over Heidelberg's green landscape, over Tschernichowsky's poems and Klausner's prose style: Gray, dear friend, is every theory, but green - the Golden tree of life. Grau, teurer Freund, is alle Theorie, und gruen des Lebens goldner Baum.
And Heidelberg, in those days, was green and gold and vivid. Heidelberg allowed that lucky generation to reconsider Judaism itself, to rethink it for the modern mind. "In my very first days in Heidelberg an idea entered my mind: that Judaism is not just a religion but a Weltanschauung; you can only cling to it out of love; and you can only love it out of knowledge, and you can only know it by comparing it to the other great world views, Christianity, Hellenism, Islam and Buddhism."
Against this vast humanistic horizon of world scholarship, the young Joseph Klausner developed a modest research program: "To write four books on the four great figures of humanity: Jesus, Plato, Muhammad and Buddha."
Was my uncle being just a little ambitious in his research plan? Perhaps. But Heidelberg's Jewish scholars had already paved the way for Klausner: Abraham Geiger with his Lives of Jesus attached to his History of Judaism; Gustav Weil with his celebrated translation of A Thousand and One Nights, his biography of Muhammad, and his critical introduction to the Koran.
Heidelberg's Jews, and some of their gentile colleagues, were steeped in the nineteenth-century lust for inter-religious theology, world literature, comparative philology, the hidden universality of philosophies, and what George Eliot ironically called "the key to all mythologies". All cultural differences were waiting for nimble scholarly fingers to expose their secret common threads, creating a fabric of unbiased truth for generations to come.
So all Klausner needed were the languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin he already had, Arabic he studied at Heidelberg, Sanskrit he took up with Professor Salomon Lefmann. In the end, however, my determined uncle had to settle with his life-long research of Christianity and Judaism, publishing a few short items on Plato and Buddhism, and nothing on Muhammad.
But the ambition! The scope! The reckless optimism of conjoining Judaism and humanity. These two words became Klausner's life motto, the words chiseled on the stone gate of his house in Jerusalem. For young emancipated Jews like him, the Heidelberg kind of globalization accorded with their very dreams: the refined globalization of worldviews, moralities, and intellects.
On this floor stood the great German Jewish bookcase: from the fine Hebraist collection of the Bibliotheca Palatina, from Sebastian Munester's humanist promotion of Hebrew to the level of a lingua sacra, all the way to Weil's Koran, to Tschernichowsky's Goethe and Kleist, to Klausner's Plato and Jesus and Paul.
But Heidelberg was also world-wise, world-weary. Heidelberg knew something about the necessity of looking at the real, changing world around it. After all, it was a town conquered time and again, belonging to a principality that lost major wars. It was a university whose very library, the same celebrated Bibliotheca Palatina I have just mentioned, had been captured and taken prisoner to Rome and never fully returned. Its professors could not afford to overlook reality, politics, and current affairs.
"[Professor Hensel's] knowledge was almost beyond human capacity. When I asked him, once, "Herr Professor, how did he manage to get so far?" he answered abruptly: "I don't read newspapers". But Klausner, a sharp-sighted gossip, knew better than that: Hensel quietly employed a 'lectrice', a reader, a female assistant who provided him with a concise briefing of the daily press.
And the daily press was exciting. In Basle, the first world Jewish congress convened in the very same year of Yaffe and Klausner's matriculation in Heidelberg. Zionism came to Heidelberg with these Russian students and the Russian - Jewish professor, Herman Zvi Shapira.
Clearly, the Zionist ideal needed a sound scholarly basis. This was Shapira's goal when he laid down the plan for a University in Jerusalem. And this was Klausner's project in his historical works. Pinchas Rosen's project was to provide a legal-philosophical framework for the new national movement. Rosen's friend Moshe Smoira (Zmora), and their younger colleague Joel Sussman, who studied in Heidelberg in the 1920s, all went on to found Israel's juridical system. The solid liberalism of these emancipated Jews, coupled with a powerful, but not vile, commitment to nationhood and statehood, and a sound formal legal education - here are the hidden German fingerprints upon Israel's independent judiciary. To this day, Israel's separation of powers owes something to the pre-war German law faculties. Israel's democracy owes something to Heidelberg. But there were other sides to this brave new world of European modernity. There were the new metaphors of relations between the sexes, the modernist redefinition of masculinity. There was the dark fascination, German as well as Jewish, with physical power, with bodily achievement, with romanticist aspirations to climb national and individual mountaintops.
Ethics is not for the faint hearted, wrote Joseph Klausner, who will later become one of the extreme voices of revisionist Zionism. "Morality", so he gleaned from his philosophy seminar, "is sometimes demanding and strict, and when need be, even cruel". After all, this notion was Hebraic as well as Germanic: were not the prophets of the bible just, and strong, and at times by necessity cruel in their justice?
On this juncture I part ways with my great great uncle, and feel somewhat closer to the pacifism of his Heidelberg colleague, who became his bitter rival at the HebrewUniversity, Yehuda Leib Magnes. For indeed Heidelberg, and other German universities, left us with a variegated legacy: from Buberian love of peace to militant nationalism, via the strong legalist culture of the jurists. The German-born and German-educated Jews took their place along the whole political spectrum of the early state of Israel.
Into the vision of biblical moral cruelty, transformed into modernist national might, stepped another Heidelberg man, Max Nordau, the dreamer of 'a Zionism of muscles', of physical awakening and the brushing aside of cultural degeneracy. Entartung was the title of Nordau's own book, now seldom remembered. For, high above Heidelberg's hills, hovered the powerful spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, whose majestic prose was admired beyond all moral disagreement. Nietzsche, whose philosophical beauty lay beyond good and evil.
"But Nietzsche is a madman", one student dared to utter in the seminar, and Professor Hensel, a Jew, replies with a resounding "Donnerswetter!" - "I, too, am willing to go raving mad if only I can write such beautiful tomes as Nietzsche".
And Heidelberg, of course, was so beautiful. The hills and forest walks. The fortress, the river and the bridge. The poems told by heart. The cross-point of Hellenic and Nordic aesthetics that Saul Tschernichowsky hoped to convey, at last, into modern Hebrew. Because the Jews, so he felt, had never afforded and never enjoyed this wild pagan beauty. Here was Tschernichowsky's hope: to eroticise Hebrew literature. To open it up to the sensuality of pagan beauty. To allow Jews, for the first time in their history, not just the pure wonder of staring at Apollo's statue, but perhaps even the permission to be a little like Apollo, handsome and masculine and free of restraint. The poet Saul, blessed with a self-esteem not unlike that of Joseph Klausner (and decidedly better looks), was constantly hoping to achieve this ideal in person.
The Heidelberg landscape will soon become a lost, beloved image of the lost, beloved Europe, avidly imagined, irreversibly gone, from the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Talpiot and Rechavia. In a hot, humid, dusty, dangerous Orient, so far removed from A Thousand and One Nights.
But best of all hopes was the table. The German Jewish table. The common Tisch. And the German Jewish table talk, the common Tisch-Reden.
"Following Hensel's philosophical seminar, which took place in his private house and ended at 8 PM, we would all go with the professor to a beerhouse and sit with our beer mugs till eleven at night". All of us meant both male and female students, "for there were excellent female participants there, such as Marianne Weber, Professor Max Weber's wife, and Elizabeth Schmidt, who later received the Kant prize, and more […] We would raise all sorts of questions - scientific, moral, social and literary […] Those were the most wonderful hours of my university years".