Dialogue’s Impossibility: The Case of Jews and Christians in Germany

Robert S. Oventile

Jeffrey S. Librett. The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. xxiii + 391 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Dialogue, peaceful communication between persons or across cultures resulting in their transparent, respectful, and mutual understanding, is possible: this is an assumption questioned by The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond. Such cultural dialogue may finally be impossible, Librett argues, focusing on the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Germany as a massive, complicated, and terrible example of that impossibility. Librett begins by quoting the great German-Jewish scholar of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, who wrote the following in 1962: “I deny that there has ever been . . . a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever” (xv, Librett’s ellipsis). Librett would substantiate Scholem’s thesis: the Jewish-Christian “dialogue” in Germany concerning the “the Jewish question,” supposed to have taken place during the “period of so-called emancipation,” 1781-1871, actually never happened (xvi).

What did happen, with varying degrees of rhetorical violence, was a series of discursive attempts to resolve or finish off the aporetic tensions between Jew and Christian in terms of the apostle Paul’s system of tropes. Paul figures the Jewish Law (Torah) as dead and death-dealing letters, whereas he figures Christ and Christians as living spirit. Paul aspires to be the minister “of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3.6). Paul’s rhetorical figures distinguish the Torah as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets,” from the Christian gospel as a “ministry of Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3.7). Threads of (European) Christian tradition read Paul’s figurative distinctions between “letter” and “spirit” as positing a death-and-life opposition between Jew and Christian. The German Protestant theologian Martin Luther vehemently echoes Paul’s “letter versus spirit” rhetoric, and Librett shows the Reformation to be an important context for the (non)dialogue between Germans and Jews over Jewish emancipation and Christian-Jewish relations.

With impressive scholarship, documented in eighty-two pages of notes, and with intense care, evidenced in meticulous readings, Librett investigates the (non)dialogue’s “letter versus spirit” rhetoric in the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Schlegel, and Dorothea Veit, the first two representing the German Enlightenment and the last two, German Romanticism. These writers support emancipation in troubling ways that tend to equate it with assimilation. Chapters on Karl Marx and Richard Wagner focus on emancipation’s reversal: in a disturbing alliance of political Left and Right, Marx and Wagner find the “Jewish question” to concern, not the human emancipation of Jews in Germany, but the emancipation of humankind (Marx) or of Germany (Wagner) from Judaism. Librett includes a postscript on Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Sigmund Freud’s modernist resistance to the (non)dialogue’s anti-Semitism and ends his book by briefly discussing contemporary debates in Germany over “emancipation” from the ethical imperative to remember the Holocaust.

Extending Emmanuel Lévinas’s critique of ontology’s reduction of the “other” to the “same” in the anonymity of being, Jacques Derrida’s exploration of “the metaphysics of presence,” and Paul de Man’s interrogation of ideologies posited by cognitive systems of tropes, Librett argues that Paul’s “letter versus spirit” rhetoric constitutes a cognitive tropological system that formats Lessing and company’s various “understandings” of Jews, Christians, and their relations. Librett calls the system of tropes that we inherit from Paul “the rhetorical wheel of Judeo-Christian (mis)fortune” (35). Pauline rhetoric is “ontorhetorical” (17): housed in this tropological system, the participants in the (non)dialogue “know” singular others as figures of anonymous being (being Jewish, being Christian, being German) figured in terms prescribed by the “letter versus spirit” rhetoric and its ontology. This figuration homogenizes singular others referred to as Jews as “the same,” seducing us into aberrantly “knowing” what Jews are like and that any Jew can substitute for or figure any other.

Librett implies that we cannot simply call Pauline “ontorhetoric” Christian: rather, this “ontorhetoric” abjected the Torah in inventing Christianity as the living “spiritual” fulfillment of the Judaic prefigurative “letter” as deathly and material. Librett discusses writers, both Jews and Christians, who cannot avoid defining and responding to each other in terms set by the letter-spirit opposition’s figural interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures as an “Old Testament” superceded by a “New Testament.” Having usurped a cognitive authority virtually beyond question, the rhetoric of this opposition made and, Librett suggests, perhaps still makes dialogue between German Jews and Christians impossible. Paul’s system of tropes formats any supposed dialogue as “knowing” in advance what the letters of the Torah and so Judaism are: a covenant of sin and death.

Pauline rhetoric’s ontology, a “metaphysics of presence,” rejects mortal finitude as a sin-induced condition to be overcome in being as an a-temporal presence: the life after death. This ontology’s realization, the Christian apocalypse as the end of time, will only happen, Christian tradition says, when not one Jew is left, all Jews having become Christians. This total conversion is one theological “final solution” the Pauline tropological system, via the early Christian Fathers’ reading of Romans 11.25-6, prompts us to offer for “the Jewish question.” Lessing, Mendelssohn, Schlegel, and Veit offer various theological, social, and political solutions, but Librett details how all of their solutions find their contradictorily coherent logic in the oppositions Paul’s rhetoric elaborates, to which these writers correlate others.

For example, Schlegel, in writings that allude to his marriage to the Jewish Veit, opposes Christianity as masculine to Judaism as feminine. Librett’s examination of this couple’s (non)dialogue traces the inscription of large theological, social, and political concerns in the intricacies and intimacies of one marriage. A Christian, Schlegel writes a “Dithyrambic Fantasy about the Most Beautiful Situation” that imagines Christian-Jewish reconciliation in terms of androgynous sexual play. But, Librett demonstrates, Paul’s tropological system scripts this literary-philosophical cross-dressing “Fantasy,” which erases the “prefigurative difference of the feminine, Jewish letter” by dramatizing that letter’s sacrificial fulfillment in the masculine, Christian spirit (164). This ominously “Beautiful Situation” whirls by on one of the several spins Librett shows Schlegel, Veit, and their relationship to take on the “the rhetorical wheel of Judeo-Christian (mis)fortune.”

The chapters on Schlegel and Veit exhibit the book’s deft interpretive moves from the intensely personal to the broadly historical. Librett reveals his authors’ writings to be indistinguishably autobiographical, theological, political, and cultural. Mendelssohn, in responding to aggressive demands that he convert to Christianity, is very concerned to vindicate his close friendship with Lessing as exemplifying enlightened Jewish-Christian coexistence. Veit’s parentage, her father being Mendelssohn, informs Schlegel’s contributions to the (non)dialogue. And Wagner’s anti-Semitism turns out to be determined in part by Wagner’s fear that his father may have been Jewish.

How are different readers likely to respond to Librett’s arguments? Some Christian readers and Pauline scholars will ask: Is Librett claiming that Paul’s thinking is irredeemably or inevitably anti-Semitic? These readers may also note Librett’s description of Daniel Boyarin’s A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity as “an attempt to rehabilitate Paul as a Jew” (295, note 25). A distinguished scholar of Talmudic culture and Jewish-Christian relations in late antiquity, Boyarin argues that Paul “is not the origin of anti-Semitism” even though Paul’s “theory of the Jews nevertheless is one that is inimical to Jewish difference, indeed to all difference as such” (156). Librett argues, however, not that Paul is “the origin of anti-Semitism,” but that the abjection of “Jewish difference” Paul’s tropes perform is a rhetorical contingency of tremendous and often frightening historical consequence. And Librett’s effort is not incompatible with Boyarin’s Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, a nuanced historical and exegetical attempt to dismantle or even “deconstruct” the death-and-life opposition between Jew and Christian.

Readers skeptical of “deconstruction” are likely to have little patience with Librett’s argument that a rhetorical structure inescapably determined the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Germany (and elsewhere). These readers may also question Librett’s assertion that the impossibility of the Jewish-Christian cultural dialogue in Germany is only one example “within a world in which all dialogue remains marked by a certain impossibility” (xvi-xvii). But such readers will have a hard time denying the acuity of Librett’s readings. For example, Librett’s analysis of Marx’s essay titled “On the Jewish Question,” by situating it in the (non)dialogue’s rhetoric, discloses a logic and an import in that text’s minute particulars that one cannot imagine having noticed without Librett’s help.

Readers sympathetic to “deconstruction” will also have concerns. Wouldn’t de Man question Librett’s grouping of texts into periods: Enlightenment texts, Romantic texts, and Modern texts? This move seems to depart from de Man’s rejection of periodization as dissembling texts’ quasi-idiomatic “materiality.” Readers sensitive to de Man’s term “materiality” might want Librett to distinguish “materiality” as the (pre)figurative quality Paul attributes to the letters, chiseled in stone, that kill, more explicitly from de Man’s notion of texts as historical material events that disarticulate their own ideology-positing tropological systems (de Man 132-4).

In conclusion, Librett’s book is an important contribution to the historical study of the philosophy, literature, and criticism of the German Enlightenment and of German Romanticism. Readers interested in how the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man can inform historical inquiry will learn much from Librett. And The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue also deserves a wide readership among those concerned with the conflicted relations between dominant and subordinate groups. In teaching us to read and to question, rather than, in an inevitably naive and violent gesture, to spirit away the necessary impossibility of dialogue among the diverse, Librett reminds us to eschew desires for “final solutions” to conflicts in multicultural societies.

Robert S. Oventile is assistant professor of English composition and literature at Pasadena City College.

Works Cited

Boyarin, Daniel. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

—. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Ronald E. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.