Book Description Theodor Lessing, Jewish Self-Hatred
Bibliographic Information Lessing, Theodor, Peter C. Appelbaum, and Benton Arnovitz, Jewish Self-Hate (New York: Berghahn, 2021) ISBN: 978-1-78920-987-7
Summary
Lessing was an anti-Nazi journalist who attained a degree of fame in Germany in the early years of the 20th Century. He was well-known enough to suffer assassination at the hands of Nazi thugs while in exile in Czechoslovakia in 1933. His book is an attempt to pin down a well-known phenomenon that defies easy definition. This is the tendency of some Jews to identify with and promote slanders against the Jewish people. The phenomenon is real and puzzling in many ways. Unfortunately, a reader of Lessing’s book will have a hard time coming to any more profound understanding of the problems involved, even with the help of two essays, a forward by Sander Gilman and an afterward by Paul Reiter. Lessing presented profiles of six people from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in Germany, whom he saw as exemplars of the phenomenon. In each case, the sense of discomfort with Jewish origins, the bizarre conclusions drawn about Jews and Judaism led to tragic results (Several, most famously Otto Weininger, were suicides. One, Arthur Trebitsch, was a founder of the Austrian Nazi Party). Lessing writes from a perspective that is socialist, deeply committed to German culture, and deeply expressive of Zionist ideas. Nevertheless his Zionism has been described as yet another form of his own Jewish self-hatred. A complicated man and he wrote a complicated book.
Context
Lessing published the book in 1930, shortly before the Nazis came to power in Germany.
Style
Lessing’s writing style is relatively impenetrable. The translator laments the difficulty in rendering Lessing’s dense writing into readable English. While this style may have been a sign of profound literacy in its early 20th Century German-speaking environment, it does not convey ideas in readily comprehendible ways to even a very literate English-speaking audience.
Classroom
Jewish Self-Hatred will be a difficult book to use in education. It is inappropriate for secondary school. Perhaps a very high-level college group of students might use it. Graduate students might enjoy the book because it is a bit like viewing a daguerreotype photograph. Even if we are not impressed with the quality of the photography, we are grateful for the chance to peek at a long-deceased scene as it looked in its day. The Nazis destroyed the cultural world for whom Lessing wrote. They killed many of its people, including Lessing himself, just a few years after publication. He gives us a view into an intellectual world that is no longer current. For that, we can be grateful.