in the last century and a half, only a handful were dedicated to Del Medigo’s other works.18 These works, composed in Italy, addressed traditional philosophical themes in the fields of Aristotelian logic, physics, and metaphysics. Moreover, in these works, Del Medigo, at the request of his non-Jewish patrons, intentionally omitted discussions of a religious nature that may have appeared polemical or contentious.19 Del Medigo’s Italian works do not discuss the relation between reason and revelation, not to say the rational foundations of Judaism. Therefore, scholars in the field of Jewish studies found little interest in these works. Yet since Del Medigo was canonized as a ‘Jewish author’, he received very little attention from scholars of the Aristotelian scholastic tradition, and his unedited works on physics and metaphysics were confined to the dusty shelves of various European libraries.
The story of Del Medigo’s reception in modern scholarship is therefore an unfortunate one, and does not reflect his actual contribution to Western thought, which consists more in his introduction of Averroes’ thought to the Latin West, than his shaping of Jewish thought. The majority of his works – the so-called Italian works – were understudied throughout the generations, and still are. Consequently, Del Medigo’s recognition and subsequent canonization in the field of Jewish studies appear to have been based on a misconstrued understanding of his literary output. Not only is BH given exaggerated attention, it is analyzed out of context, without reference to Del Medigo’s prior philosophical activity among non-Jews, which certainly contributed, at least to some extent, to the apologetic nature of BH. In short, Del Medigo’s reception in modern scholarship reflects a distortion of the historical reality and a reinforcement of a misconstrued historiographical perception, a clear manifestation of the wider phenomenon to which Hughes refers in his book.20
Conclusion
This paper attempted a critical examination of the roots of Jewish historiography through the examination of a particular case study, the academic reception of Elijah Del Medigo’s BH. Future studies will hopefully contribute to this critical endeavor, either by corroborating its conclusions or, perhaps, revealing the author’s own biased assumptions and thereby modifying or restricting his critical reading. One methodological tool available for doing so is that of comparative analysis. Scholars in the fields of Latin and Arabic medieval philosophy have also reflected on the ideological roots of a given discipline, and their conclusions may contribute, mutatis mutandis, to the critical study of Jewish historiography.21 Dimitry Gutas is one such scholar. In his The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Gutas criticizes what he calls the “Orientalist Approach” in the study of Arabic philosophy:
It is an unfortunate distortion with grave consequences to state that the issue of religion versus philosophy was central in Arabic philosophy. […] not only is what was in reality a legal debate mistaken for a philosophical controversy […] but also the subject of that legal debate is taken to be representative of all Arabic philosophy and its central concern.22
With few adjustments, Gutas’ critique may be applied to the case of Del Medigo’s reception as well. Employing Gutas’ terminology, Del Medigo scholars have replaced the study of “philosophy proper,” as it appears in Del Medigo’s Italian works, with the legal, meta-philosophical debate of the BH, taking this debate to represent Del Medigo’s oeuvre in its entirety. In addition, one may point to the “unfortunate distortion with grave consequences” evident in the scholarly reception of Del Medigo’s literary activity. To this “unfortunate situation”, to quote Hughes’ study, Del Medigo serves as single testimony among many others.
East-West Experiments in the Prose of the Young Heine
Maria Carolina Foi
A fascination with the East permeates all the literature of the Goethezeit starting from Lessing’s eighteenth century masterpiece Nathan der Weise. In the age of Romanticism, the imagination of many German poets and writers (Novalis, Wackenroder, Tieck, Arnim, Brentano, Hoffmann – to mention just a few) veers decisively towards the East or, rather, to the many different Orients working in parallel in the fields of philology, linguistics and translation, with Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp in the forefront.1
With regard to the particular interest in the Orient in German-speaking countries – an interest which at that time was not sustained by colonial interests nor fuelled by direct contact with the Other – Eduard Said assigned to this singular German imaginative fascination with the Orient a kind of intellectual authority.2
Another German author who shared this fascination with the Orient and bowed to its intellectual authority was Heinrich Heine, who was writing in the wake of, arguably, the greatest poetic achievement of that period, Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan: “Unbeschreiblich ist der Zauber dieses Buches”; as Heine himself was to declare in his essay Die romantische Schule: “es ist ein Selam, den der Okzident dem Oriente geschickt hat.”3 As has been authoritatively pointed out, in all his poetic works Heine makes a “wise but also quietly shameless”4 use of the themes, motifs and topoi of various aspects of the Orient, indulging in a dizzyingly ironic exploitation of their evident cliché-status.
Experiments with the East, however, are striking features of Heine’s early literary production. And I am not referring to famous poems such as Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Die Lotosblume, or Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam, published in Buch der Lieder,5 but rather to his tragedy Almansor, published in 1823. It is well known that Herder and the early Romantics had assigned a fundamental role to Spanish literature in the modern canon. In the years of the Restoration, this drama on which the young Heine had been working between 1820 and 1822 can be inserted into the rediscovery of Moorish Spain and the epoch of the Reconquista cultivated by the Spätromantik. The young Almansor, an Arab nobleman who, after the victory of the Christians had refused to renege his faith and chosen to go into exile, returns to his homeland of Granada to see again his one-time beloved who at this point has been converted and is about to be married. Their love is rekindled but the story ends tragically when the young lovers choose to die. But is Heine’s Almansor really a tragedy inspired by an attentive study of the Islamic world or simply a key drama, an allegory of the problematic Jewish-German identity of Heine himself?
Considered in these terms, the alternative on which the scholars have worked so exhaustively,6 is perhaps simply insoluble or ill-placed. In the first place, Almansor is only the first and, artistically speaking, the least successful of a whole series of experiments that hinge on relocations, plots and echoes of Oriental themes and motifs that were to be decisive in both the poetic and intellectual development of the young Heine. In his writings, in fact, there is an East at work that is specifically linked to Judaic culture in its various aspects. It is an East relocated both in Spain and in Eastern Europe: in both cases it is an Orient that should be investigated in the light of a recognition of the Jews as an Eastern people and of the Bible as a poetic text – a recognition that had already been formed in the eighteenth century,7 and that was to gain a firm hold in the early nineteenth century when it became a turning point in Jewish thought and self-representation. The East-West experiments of the young Heine on which I would like to focus took place, in fact, between 1821 and 1824 and they can be defined through his enthusiastic discussion of the themes of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden and then with the emerging Wissenschaft des Judentums, to which they provide a kind of literary countermelody. Heine’s dual concept of the East moves from West to East and from East to West and creates singular poetic concretions involving a hybridization of themes and motifs that interact within the context of the German and Romantic culture of the time. In order to understand how this comes about, I would like to concentrate on Heine’s prose of that period and to analyze in particular relevant passages taken from the travelogue Über Polen and from Die Harzreise, concluding with some observations on Der Rabbi von Bacherach. My intention, in short, is to establish whether and to what extent the historical-conceptual categories introduced by the Verein into research on Judaic identity in modern times were reworked and represented by Heine in a literary medium and what meaning the various Eastern motifs they evoke may have.
To this end, it is necessary to briefly recapitulate on some of the objectives pursued