Moses and Homer: Greeks, Jews and Germans: An Alternative History of German Culture

Moses and Homer explores the eradication of the Jewish tradition from German intellectual history between 1770 and 1800 and analyzes the numerous ruptures triggered by the exclusion of the representatives of Judaism from the German-speaking literary world.The closing decades of the eighteenth century were distinguished by a burgeoning admiration for Ancient Greece in Germany, while at the same time Judaism which had begun to open itself to European Enlightenment was vehemently opposed in literary and intellectual circles.Goethe’s and Schiller’s aggressive anti-Judaism was levied against the Biblical legacy of God’s revelation at Sinai and his legendary mediator Moses.Prompted by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s paean to Homeric culture, German Classics unfolded a new legitimizing discourse in which polytheism served to position the 'productive individual' and 'growing nature' as preeminent categories in modernity.The rationale was to replace monotheism with a religion of nature, a shift th