One of the most striking aspects of German-Jewish modernism, and
certainly what distinguishes it from the surrounding German
milieu, is its meditation on Jewish tradition, which to the
modernists represented a pre-modern authenticity that they felt
they had lost. Curiously, and perhaps not unlike my own rabbis,
German-speaking Jewish modernists most commonly fixed their gaze
not just on any Jewish tradition but that of Eastern European
or, more vaguely, 'Oriental' Jews, a term that enabled them to
stress their own distance from tradition while still claiming a
mystical as well as genetic connection. Like other Orientalists,
German modernists regarded the Eastern Jews as exotic and even
intimidating, like Kafka's gatekeeper. Yet they also saw in the
Eastern Jew a vision of their own personal origins, a ghost of
authenticity past. For what are Western Jews, the Austrian
writer Joseph Roth asked, if not Eastern Jews who had forgotten?
Roth mourned what seemed to him to be the irreversible process
by which Jews w