Marcus Pyka

Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz

This recent book from Marcus Pyka deals with the outstanding, multi-volume History of the Jews from Biblical times to the 19th century by Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891). The study is an interdisciplinary examination of the significance and meaning of Jewish identity for this first professional historian of Judaism against the background of the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of his time. Starting with the idea that “identity” is not fixed or self-evident, Pyka investigates Graetz’s writings and narrative history as well as the testimony of his contemporaries to explore how the problem of identity affected his work. My study focuses on the developments of Graetz’s thinking in the context of the multi-ethnical and multi-religious Prussian provinces of Posen and later Silesia, mainly Breslau (Wrocław), with its large Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish segments of population. As the study shows, Graetz formulated a basic concept of an essential Judaism oriented on rationality, temperance, and morality, instead of aspects of ‘nation’ or ‘religion.’ He argues that both ethical values and gender become major components in Graetz’s definition of Jewish identity. While some of these aspects can be found in other intellectual trends of this period across Europe among Jews and Christians alike, the ethical vigor and the consistent argumentation along these lines appears nowhere as early as in Graetz’ work. Only at the end of the nineteenth century do Graetz’s arguments become pivotal for the bourgeois experience in general, inspiring early Zionism as well as inciting reactions in authors such as Max Nordau and Kafka.

Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz (Jewish Identity in Life and Works of Heinrich Graetz). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2008.