T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 101, No. 4 (Fall 2011) 604–630
Auerbach’s Scars:
Judaism and the Question of Literature
GALILI SHAHAR
P R O L O GU E
E R I CH A U E R BAC H ’ S B O OK M I M E SI S , written in Istanbul between
1942 and 1945, is a fascinating example of literary criticism that does not
deny its dual origins—its ‘‘scars.’’1 My essay discusses Auerbach’s book in
its historical context and explores its theophilological pretext: Auerbach’s
reading of the biblical story of the Akeda (the binding of Isaac) that follows the account of Odysseus’s scar. Auerbach’s interpretation of the
silent and unrepresentable scene of Abraham’s story constitutes in Mimesis the condition for the possibility to discuss literary representation. The
text on the hidden and formless Jewish God who has no image is the
origin of Auerbach’s critical discourse of representation.
Auerbach’s view and experience of Judaism and its relationship to his
literary enterprise has been discussed in recent years in various contexts.2
My essay deals with this question, but charged with a different urgency.
1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen
Literatur (Bern, 2001). All references in the body of the article are to the English
translation: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. D.
Trask (Princeton, N.J., 2003).
2. For a recent discussion, see James I. Porter, ‘‘Erich Auerbach and the
Judaizing of Philology,’’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 115–47; Martin Treml, ‘‘Auerbachs imaginäre jüdische Orte,’’ in Erich Auerbach: Geschichte und Aktualität eines
europäischen Philologen, ed. M. Treml, K. Barck (Berlin, 2007), 230–51; and Earl
Jeffery Richards, ‘‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as Meditation on the Shoah,’’
German Politics and Society 59.2 (2001): 62–90. Another significant view on
Auerbach’s ‘‘Jewish background’’ and his devotion to Christian doctrine of
representation is found in Edward W. Said’s ‘‘Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition’’ of Mimesis (Eng. trans.), Mimesis, xvii–xviii; xx–xxvii. See also
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress: Erich Auerbach’s
Legacy,’’ in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. S. Lerer (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 13–35.
The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2011)
Copyright 䉷 2011 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
All rights reserved.
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In my view, Auerbach’s Mimesis, his concept of literature, and his understanding of realistic representation should not be separated from his
views on Jewish monotheism and from his modernist negotiation with its
heritage. I do not suggest, therefore, reading Mimesis as a ‘‘Jewish’’ project of literature or denying other contexts of reading this book, such as
the ‘‘Romanist’’ one.3 The reception of Auerbach’s book as a project of
European humanism, reading Mimesis as an exilic perspective on Western
civilization,4 exploring its Turkish context,5 revealing its non-European
roots, are all significant for understanding Auerbach and the different
faces and legacies of his book.6 My own contribution, however, is based
on the argument that Mimesis attests to the ambiguous structure of identity; Mimesis shows the differences and similarities, the gaps and the
belonging-together of the Jewish, the Christian, and the Greek. It is the
structure of a cut and a stitch, the structure of a scar, that reflects the
dialectics of representation in Auerbach’s project. The scar is the signature of Mimesis. It is the sign of German Jewish writing that was charged
with an experience of pain, crisis, and exile—Europe 1942.7 In other
words, my essay returns to discuss the ambiguous representation of
Judaism in Mimesis, not in order to ground Auerbach’s project in its
‘‘Jewish background’’ or to attest to his attraction to Christian doctrines.
Rather, I wish to show how Auerbach’s work involves resistance and
denial, and deconstructive treatment of origins and traditions, which,
however, lead to a productive and progressive understanding of literature. This is why I suggest discussing the foundational contexts of Auer3. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten:
Carl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss
(Munich, 2002); William Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From
Spitzer to Frye (Toronto, 2007).
4. I refer here to Edward Said’s significant readings of Mimesis and the exploring of its exilic perspective and humanistic depth. Said writes on Auerbach’s book
in his seminal works, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, 1983) and
Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993). See also Said’s ‘‘Introduction to the
Fiftieth Anniversary Edition’’ of Mimesis, ix–xxxii.
5. Kader Konuk, ‘‘Deutsche-jüdische Philologen im türkischen Exil: Leo
Spitzer und Erich Auerbach,’’ in Erich Auerbach, 215–29.
6. On Auerbach’s legacies and the different receptions of his book, see Herbert Lindenberger, ‘‘On the Reception of Mimesis,’’ in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, 195–211.
7. In the first chapter of Mimesis (‘‘Odysseus’ Scar’’) Auerbach refers to
‘‘1942’’ as the date of the ‘‘current war’’ (gegenwärtiger Krieg). ‘‘1942’’ thus marks
the time of Mimesis’s first chapter, its historical date, its jetzt, ‘‘now’’. The English
translation omits the date ‘‘1942’’ and replaces the ‘‘current war’’ with the ‘‘last
war.’’ The reading of Mimesis should, however, recall its original date.
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bach’s work, yet without arguing for their preference in terms of origins
or identities.
In the first part of the essay, following a short biographical introduction, I discuss three examples that demonstrate the complexities of his
project: first, Auerbach’s interpretation of figura as a literary mode of
representation that has a theological dimension and which embodies messianic potential; second, Auerbach’s remarks on Shakespeare’s Shylock,
the Jewish pariah, which are interwoven in his readings of Shakespeare’s
royal dramas; and third, his modernist approach to literature that is based
on the philology of the fragment (the scene, the broken piece, the quotation, the foreign word). In the second part of the essay I discuss Auerbach’s interpretation of the Akeda and argue about how the theological
dimension of the biblical story—the secret, the silence, the hidden, and
the unrepresentable dimension—is transformed into the realm of literature. Finally, I offer a short comparative reading of Auerbach, Kierkegaard, Derrida, and Levinas on the question of Abraham’s silence. Through
these correspondences, the radical potential of Aurebach’s interpretation
will be illuminated and ‘‘fulfilled.’’
PHILOLOGY, THE S C AR
Erich Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1892 to a family of Jewish origin.
He received his education at the Französische Gymnasium in Berlin
(1900–10) and later studied law at Berlin University from 1910 to 1913.
His dissertation was devoted to program of reform in German penal law.8
However, already during his law studies, as Auerbach reports in an autobiographical note,9 he became interested in philosophy, art history, and
Romantic literature. Clear evidence of this can be found in his 1913 legal
dissertation. In one of the footnotes, Auerbach mentions Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza as ‘‘examples’’ of the exclusion of free will ‘‘for the
person who finds himself under somebody else’s influence.’’10 Cervantes’
protagonists, the fools who appear in the margins of Auerbach’s legal
project, can be understood to prefigure his literary project.11
During the First World War Auerbach served in the German army.
He was sent to the Western Front, where he fought in northern France.
8. Karlheinz Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin: Spurensicherung und ein Porträt,’’ Erich Auerbach, 204–5.
9. Auerbach, ‘‘Der Marburger CV,’’ in Erich Auerbach, 199.
10. Quoted in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’’ 28.
11. The double background and the dialectic of law and literature were notably characteristic of German biographies of life and letters ranging from Goethe,
the brothers Grimm, and E. T. A Hoffmann to Franz Kafka.
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In April 1918 he was seriously wounded and spent eight months in a
military hospital.12 After his recovery he returned to the University of
Berlin and continued his studies in philosophy and Romance philology.
In 1921 he completed a second dissertation, The Technique of the Early
Renaissance Novella in Italy and France. One of Auerbach’s first publications, however, was his translation into German of Giambattista Vico’s
The New Science. His studies of Vico’s work determined his views on ‘‘aesthetic historism.’’13 Between 1923 and 1929 Auerbach worked as a librarian at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, where he first met Walter
Benjamin. In 1929, after the publication of his habilitation, Dante: A Poet
of the Profane World, he was appointed as a professor in the philological
department of the University of Marburg. After the rise of the Nazis and
anti-Jewish legislation, his position was rescinded and he left in 1936.14
He found shelter at the State University of Istanbul in Turkey where he
became involved in academic reforms in the field of foreign language and
literature. In 1947 Auerbach left Istanbul and emigrated to the United
States. His initial appointment was at Penn State University and later at
Yale, where he remained until his death in 1957. Auerbach’s studies of
Romance philology and European literature were bound up with the
experience of the Great War, with reflections on loss and crisis, and later
with the consciousness of exile. Auerbach entered the field of philology
as a ‘‘wounded body.’’ Mimesis recalls the scar.15
F I G U R A: LI T E R ATU R E AN D M E S S I A N I S M
Mimesis contains twenty chapters on different works of Western literature. The book begins with a discussion on the Homeric poems and the
biblical story and continues with a survey of Romantic literature, the
Roland poem, and the Christian theater. It includes readings of Dante’s
12. Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’ 204.
13. On Auerbach’s reception of Vico and his ‘‘historicist’’ view, see his essay
‘‘Vico and Aesthetic Historism,’’ in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
(New York, 1959), 183–98.
14. On Auerbach’s dismissal and his departure from the University of Marburg, see Gumbrecht, ‘‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’’ 14–19. Auerbach
returned to Germany for a short visit in summer 1937. A report on this trip was
made in the 1990s by his son. See Clemens Auerbach, ‘‘Summer 1937,’’ in Erich
Auerbach, 495–500.
15. In a letter to Werner Krauss in December 1946, Auerbach recalls the traumatic experience of the First World War and mourns the loss of his close friends
and colleagues in the war. For him, he writes to Krauss, ‘‘the First World War,
although it cannot be compared with the Second, was likewise terrible.’’ Quoted
in Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’ 204–5.
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Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and works by Rabelais, Montaigne,
Shakespeare, Racine, and Cervantes, and it also considers Schiller and
Goethe, Voltaire, Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert. Mimesis ends with a
chapter on modernism that deals mainly with Virginia Woolf, Marcel
Proust, and James Joyce. This is Auerbach’s canon: a gallery of works
and readings that demonstrate the history of representation in European
literature. By discussing these ‘‘examples,’’ Auerbach shows how each
period reframed the realistic narrative according to its social and cultural
conditions. In addition, Auerbach explores the historical development of
the concept of representation and its affinity to the process of secularization in Western civilization. Each chapter of Mimesis includes a critical
review and close reading of several scenes, literary fragments, and quotations that demonstrate different narratological strategies, poetic structures, and styles. According to Auerbach, realism is the representation of
the historical, concrete aspects of the human being. However, realism is
not simply the mirror of reality but rather a complex, sophisticated,
ironic, and inverted perspective of representation. In realism, the sublime
is revealed from the ordinary, the sacred from the profane. The tragic is
bound up with the comic, the magnificent with the grotesque and the
metaphysical with the sensual. Realism is the art of mixed styles.
Auerbach demonstrates his model of representation with the concept
figura to which he dedicates his 1938 essay.16 In this essay he discusses
the Hellenistic and Christian genealogies of figura and analyzes its philological and theological implications. Figura is the way in which a historic
figure, an event or a character in the present, a figure of concrete time
and space, not only signifies reality but also embodies and prefigures
‘‘something still to come’’—the future, the other.17 Figura is thus a discourse of an opening: the present remains here ‘‘open and points to something still concealed.’’ In the Christian view, however, the future, the
‘‘coming,’’ which is hidden in the present, is essentially holy and redemptive.18 In the Christian scheme figura is also the anticipation of the messianic order. Auerbach mainly identifies the origin of the Christian figural
interpretation with the enterprise of St. Paul. In Paul’s readings of the
Bible, Auerbach writes, the Old Testament became ‘‘from beginning to
end a promise and prefiguration of Christ.’’ As a whole, only here, in
Christ’s appearance and in the Gospel, is the Old Testament ‘‘fulfilled’’
16. Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans.
R. Manheim (New York, 1959),11–76.
17. Ibid., 58.
18. Ibid., 71–76.
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and achieves its complete, sacred meaning.19 Figura is thus a discourse of
an open text, in which, however, a messianic element is hidden: the
other—the different, the nonidentical, the yet-to-come, the future itself—
carries redemptive power. The other is not a ‘‘who,’’ it does not possess a
specific identity. The other is not to be identified but rather should be
understood as the possibility of not-being-the-same. In other words, the
other is the principle of becoming, the idea of permanent change that is
embedded in history. In Mimesis Auerbach gives a positive, progressive
interpretation to this movement (otherness, becoming other, new, different) in history, which is linked to, yet not exhausted by, the doctrine of
redemption. The messianic horizon of the Scriptures, as is represented in
Paul’s reading, demanded the denial of the original sacredness of the Old
Testament. According to Paul, Auerbach, writes, ‘‘the most important and
sacred events, sacraments and laws’’ of the Old Testament, are only ‘‘provisional forms and figurations of Christ and the Gospel.’’20 The Jewish
figures of sacredness are thus transformed into a ‘‘system of figural
prophecy.’’ A similar argument on the Christian interpretation of the Old
Testament is found also in Mimesis. In the second chapter of his book,
Auerbach discusses the enterprise of Paul, the apostle, whom he now
calls ‘‘a member of the Jewish Diaspora,’’21 a title which hints, perhaps
ironically, at Auerbach’s own situation as a German Jewish ‘‘apostle’’ of
literary criticism in Istanbul.22 Paul’s role in Auerbach’s view of literature
should not be ignored. Paul embodies the gaps-between and the belongingtogether of the Jewish, the Christian, and the Greek. His name hints at
the nexus of traditions from which the condition of literary representation
in the Western world was born. In Auerbach’s view, Paul is someone of
Jewish origin, yet, at the same time, he is not only (or no longer) a Jew
but also a Greek who becomes the Christian messenger to the gentiles.
Paul embodies the denial of Judaism (the revolt against rabbinic Judaism, and the revolt against Jewish law). The denial (or rejection) of the
Jewish tradition, however, led also to the opening of the monotheistic
tradition and its ‘‘fulfillment’’ in terms of literary representation. This is
the paradox of Paul’s role in Auerbach’s figural theory: it is a method of
19. Ibid., 51.
20. Ibid.
21. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48.
22. Compare with Said’s remark on the parallel between the apostle Paul, ‘‘a
diasporic Jew converted to Christ,’’ and Auerbach’s ‘‘own situation as a nonChristian explaining Christianity’s achievement.’’ The Christian achievement
implied here by Said is the doctrine of figural representation that led to the creation of European literature (Said, ‘‘Introduction’’, xvii–xviii).
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denial through which the literary potential of the Jewish tradition was
brought about and gained its universal implications. Let us again reconstruct the path of this argument in Mimesis. Paul’s missionary work
among the gentiles and his need for ‘‘detachment from the special preconceptions of the Jewish world’’ led, Auerbach writes, to a radicalization of
the Jewish tradition by playing down the Old Testament as ‘‘popular
history.’’ The Hebrew Bible was now assumed to embody ‘‘a series of
figures’’ that mainly anticipate the coming of Christ. This figural interpretation entailed, however, paying a grave price, namely, ‘‘the danger,’’
Auerbach writes, that the ‘‘visual element’’ and the ‘‘sensory substance’’
of the biblical stories ‘‘might succumb under the dense texture of [figural]
meaning.’’23 Auerbach demonstrates his arguments with the figural representations of the wound: Adam’s side-wound, out of which Eve, ‘‘the first
woman, mankind’s primordial mother,’’ was created; and Christ’s sidewound, out of which the Church, ‘‘the mother of all men after the spirit,’’
was born.24 It is the wound that demonstrates the possibilities of figura—
the possibilities of the literary form itself. The Christian figurations of
the wound, which deny the concrete, sensual elements of the original
occurrence, became abstract. This is the danger of figura becoming purely
‘‘allegorical’’ or merely ‘‘symbolic’’ when rejecting the historical reality of
the biblical events.25 Here, if one likes, Auerbach defends the Old Testament from the distortions of the Christian interpretation, yet without of
course rejecting figura itself. Auerbach possibly attempts to save the figural reading of the Old Testament from the dogmatic views of incarnation
and from the Paulian hostility toward Judaism, the reason being that
figura is the way to open the monotheistic text as a subject-matter of
literature. Figura constitutes the opening of monotheism and the transformation of the Hebrew Bible into progressive discourses of literary representation. Here, with figura, literature begins. And figura, we recall, is
originally the ‘‘shape’’ of a wound, a side-cut, a ‘‘scar.’’
In Auerbach’s view, figural interpretation represents a foundational
movement in world literature. The figural movement is bidirectional: first,
horizontal—the text is reinterpreted time and again in new historical contexts and moves endlessly forward; and second, vertical—the text is reinterpreted in theological contexts and moves upward, toward redemptive
fulfillment. The figural interpretation thus endows literature with a ‘‘messianic’’ horizon, the hope for salvation. This theological dimension, the
23. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48.
24. Ibid., 48–49.
25. Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ 68.
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messianic potential of the figural interpretation, is now transformed into
and imprinted on the history of Western literature. The openness of the
literary text, the fact that its figures can always represent something different, yet to come, nonidentical, is ‘‘redemptive.’’ According to this interpretation, the messianic horizon that literature inherits from the Judaic
Christian tradition is not merely apocalyptic and does not demand the
end of history; it is not the last day (the Day of Judgment) but rather the
other day that carries the hope for fulfillment in the realm of time.
Figura that was reborn in the nexus of Judaism and Christianity (in
the framework of the Greek culture and language) embodies in Auerbach’s view one of the conditions of the literary project in the West. It is
thus difficult, in my view, to attempt to separate the ‘‘Jewish’’ from the
‘‘Christian’’ in Auerbach’s reading. If there is a ‘‘Jewish’’ point of view
in Auerbach’s project, it involves also its denial, its doubling, its radical
transformation. Auerbach’s ‘‘Jewish’’ point of view depends also on
maintaining distance from the origin, and from knowledge and experience
of tradition. And yet Auerbach never seems to accept the thesis that Jewish sources are doomed to disappear in the Christian framework. There
is a sense of resistance in Auerbach’s reading of the Bible that moves
beyond the figural reading back to history. When Auerbach returns in
the epilogue of his work to discuss briefly the role of figural reading in
Mimesis,26 he remains faithful to this pattern, namely, recognizing the
power of figura as a foundational structure of literary representation, yet
marking the historical movement that shaped modern realism. Auerbach’s
own project, I argue, does not escape this tension between the historical
and the allegorical. Rather, it gives it a new, urgent interpretation, dated
as ‘‘1942.’’
My argument on the messianic horizon that literature inherits from the
Judaic Christian world thus does not imply the identification of literature
with Judaism (or with Christianity) but rather hints at the opening of
tradition, and its fulfillment through otherness (becoming other, nonidentical, different).27 I will return to discuss this dialectic of Judaism and
Christianity and the paradox of tradition in Auerbach’s work below.
In Mimesis Auerbach identifies the climax of the figural discourse in
26. Auerbach, Mimesis, 554–55.
27. I am following Said’s insight on the unsolved tension between Judaism
and Christianity in Auerbach’s writing. My understanding of Auerbach’s project,
however, is different from Said’s view, which stresses the Christian essence of
Auerbach’s figural method, which governs also Mimesis (‘‘Introduction’’, xxii). I
find Auerbach’s reading of the Akeda to be figural, but not identical with the
Christian view. For further discussion see below.
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Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s poetry is filled with grotesque figures,
secular themes, historical allusions, popular phrases, and short and natural structures of expression. Dante’s profane figures are interwoven, however, in a metanarrative that maintains the Christian belief in the unity of
the divine order and the existence of God’s plan.28 The thesis of the Comedy is that ‘‘earthly phenomena are on the whole merely figural, and
requiring fulfillment.’’29 The protagonists of the Comedy, who appear in
the world of beyond, thus express the ‘‘sum and the result’’ of all their
actions and can tell the ‘‘decisive aspects’’ of their life and character on
earth. The heroes of the Jenseitsrealistik, ‘‘realism in the beyond,’’30 the
residents of hell, are thus the authentic poets of the profane order.
‘‘Here,’’ Auerbach writes, ‘‘we face the astounding paradox of what is
called Dante’s realism.’’31 The realistic representation of the profane
world, the sensual, open, changeable perspective of reality, is the work of
figures that live in a changeless, timeless, sacred realm. This is the paradox, the secret of figura. It is important to recall that in Auerbach’s view
Dante’s work is essentially ‘‘Christian’’ but in itself is also a new creation
that brings about the mixed style and other poetic textures that should
not merely be identified with the Christian doctrine of incarnation.
Dante’s Comedy, Auerbach writes, is a challenge and even a danger to the
classical figural interpretation of Christianity: it makes the Christian figural interpretation ‘‘a reality and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it.’’32 The Comedy moves against and beyond the divine order by
realizing the figural image of the human. In this sense Dante’s work
already marks the secular movement in European literature.
Dante’s legacy—the rich and colorful style, the dialogue between the
tragic and the comic, the divine and the profane, the range of voices and
accents—is imprinted also in the geistigen Wirbel, the ‘‘intellectual whirlpool,’’ of Rabelais.33 Rabelais’s world, Auerbach writes, is a realistic universe, a real present, a world of here and now, bound up with erotic
laugher, jokes, ironic views of utopia and parodies of science and medicine, law, and religion. Rabelais’s stories lack any Christian moral or
theological lesson. Their wisdom is revealed in the play of fools. A similar
tendency governs Boccaccio’s Decameron. His stories are scenes of everyday life. They describe erotic experiences that are released from the bur28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
Auerbach, Mimesis, 194–95.
Ibid., 196.
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 191.
Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 272.
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den of belief and morality. Boccaccio is the herald of secular literature.
His work is an enterprise of desires and senses, his message is the ‘‘ethics
of love.’’34 From this world figura already seems to disappear. Unlike
Dante’s Comedy, Boccaccio’s realism avoids the figural: ‘‘Boccaccio’s characters live on earth and only on earth.’’35
Realism thus reflects the experience of secularization. It represents a
world governed by rapid transformations of standpoints and gives voice
to sensual perceptions, discourses of desire, and dialogues of everyday
life. The subject matter of realism is the coming-into-being. Its perspective is irony, its heroes are the fools. However, the fundamental shape,
the ur-form, the origin of realism, is theological. Figura is the original
structure of representation that was ‘‘secularized,’’ that is, emptied, and
turned on its head in modernity. Mimesis still recalls the traces and the
scars of its origins.
READING HAMLET WITH SHYLOCK ( THE ‘ ‘GERMAN,’’ THE ‘ ‘JEW’’)
The profane discourse, the irony, and the performance of the fool are
imprinted also in the theater of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, Auerbach writes, is a master of the mixed style who incorporated comic elements in his tragedies and intertwined the sublime and the low, the
beautiful and the creaturely body.36 The tragic hero in Shakespeare’s
plays is still of aristocratic origin, but in every Lear or Hamlet a fool
is hidden.37 The tragic play is interrupted by grotesque scenes, ironical
speeches, discourses of cynical reason, reflections of doubt and weariness.
No Christian order governs Shakespeare’s world but rather the secular
perspectives and movements of early modern time that was still free from
the burdens of rationalism.38 Auerbach thus reads Hamlet as a symptom
of the secular age. In Shakespeare’s drama one experiences the leap from
Christianity to humanism, from myth to physiological drama, from ‘‘fate’’
to ‘‘character.’’ In his chapter on Shakespeare’s drama, Auerbach
includes also a few remarks about The Merchant of Venice and its protagonist, Shylock, the ‘‘pariah.’’39 Shylock, he writes, is an outsider who
stands on the edge of his genre: ‘‘His character is a temptation to tragic
overemphasis,’’ for Shylock does not lack ‘‘problematic depth,’’ ‘‘power
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
Ibid., 228.
Ibid., 224.
Ibid., 313–15.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 323–24.
Ibid., 314.
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and passion, and strength of expression.’’40 However, Shylock is not a
typical tragic protagonist. He is rather characterized in the play as a ‘‘low
figure, unworthy of tragic treatment.’’41 His appearance is replete with
irony and mockery. By the end of the play he is ‘‘forgotten and abandoned.’’ Shylock, this tragic-comic protagonist, a figure of mixed styles,
a hybrid, a person who embodies foreignness, is also an echo of ‘‘great
humanitarian ideas, especially those which most deeply moved and influenced later centuries.’’42 Shylock is the foreign portrait of European
humanism. His drama, Auerbach argues, is not of social class and does
not give voice to an abstract, metaphysical tragedy but is rather ‘‘actual’’
or ‘‘immediate.’’ For ‘‘the pariah Shylock does not appeal to natural right
(Recht) but to customary wrong (Unrecht),’’ Auerbach writes, and ‘‘what
a dynamic immediacy there is in such a bitter, tragic irony.’’43 The reference to the dynamische Aktualität, ‘‘the dynamic immediacy’’ of Shylock’s
tragedy, should be read here twice: first, as a reference to the fact to
which Shylock gives his voice in Shakespeare’s play—the appeal against
an actual injustice; and second, as a hint at the urgent ‘‘actuality’’ of the
pariah, namely, Shylock’s ‘‘actuality’’ reflected in the 1940s—his urgency
as a figuration of the banished Jewish body.44
Auerbach’s reading of Shylock’s role is interwoven with his readings
of Hamlet. In Germany, Hamlet, was the theatrical character subject to
the most philosophical, philological, and dramaturgical interpretation.
The translations of Hamlet, its performances, and its receptions were considered from the time of Wieland and Schlegel also as cultural decisions.
Hamlet was received as a paradigm of cultural identity: ‘‘Hamlet is Germany.’’45 Auerbach recalls in his discussion the significant reception in
Germany of Goethe’s Hamlet. In his novel Wilhelm Meister—Die Lehrjahre,
Johann Wolfgang Goethe introduced Hamlet as a model for the German
Bildung. Hamlet is discussed by Goethe as a dramaturgical model of subjectivity, a paradigm of identity, and a principle of representation. In
Goethe’s novel, Hamlet is a subject of mimetic desire, which, however,
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 315.
42. Ibid., 314.
43. Ibid., 325.
44. Compare with Richards, ‘‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as Meditation on the
Shoah,’’ 78–80.
45. For a short discussion of Hamlet’s reception as a dramaturgical model and
as a paradigm of cultural identity in Germany, see Walter Muschg, ‘‘Deutschland
ist Hamlet,’’ in Der deutsche Shakespeare, ed. R. Grimm, W. Jäggi, H. Oesch (Basel,
1965), 10–29.
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has to be transformed and corrected in order to become suitable for the
German case.46 One of Hamlet’s disadvantages, in Goethe’s view, lies in
his inability to decide. Hamlet, Goethe argues, is weak and lacks character and morality.47 Auerbach refers to Goethe’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s play by arguing that Hamlet is a drama of a ‘‘strong character’’;
its protagonist possesses will, energy, and psychological depth.48 Thus
Hamlet’s doubts and weariness, Auerbach writes, cannot be explained by
a ‘‘lack of vitality.’’ In his view, as opposed to Goethe’s interpretation,
Hamlet should be understood as a demonic portrait of human strength, a
representation of the power not-to-decide.49
The discussion of Hamlet is one of the contexts in which Shylock is
introduced in Mimesis. Shylock, compared with Hamlet and other royal
protagonists in Shakespeare’s theater, is ‘‘an exception.’’50 He is a grotesque figure, an untragic protagonist elevated to a tragic conception of
being. If Hamlet embodies the fall of the tragic personage in Shakespeare’s drama into the ‘‘corporeal-creatural, the grotesque, and the
ambiguous’’ condition of the human existence,51 Shylock embodies the
opposite—the rise from the grotesque to the sublime. Shylock, ‘‘the
exception,’’ is thus an inverted Hamlet. This is how Mimesis attests to the
dialectic of representation, the uncanny reflection of the ‘‘German’’ and
the ‘‘Jew.’’ There is indeed an irony in reading Shylock as a ‘‘Jew,’’ as
much as understanding Hamlet as a ‘‘German.’’ We are dealing of course
with dramaturgical constructions, with literary reflections and cultural
images (partly negative, anti-Semitic ones). In Auerbach’s chapter these
images are real. For Auerbach the reading of Hamlet cannot be separated
from a reading of The Merchant of Venice; the image of Germanness cannot
be separated from its inverted, exceptional image—the image of the Jew.
In his remarks on Shylock Auerbach thus challenges the German
model of culture and undermines its harmony and its ‘‘beauty.’’ Shylock
is this ambivalent, tragicomic figure of a Jew, a body of oddness and
banishment that nevertheless incarnates dignity and the voice of humanitarian ideas. Should he not be seen as another portrait of Auerbach’s own
book? Mimesis, similar to Shylock, is an enterprise of exile, a book that
46. On Goethe’s interpretations of Hamlet as a paradigm of identity, see R.
Ellis Dye, ‘‘Wilhelm Meister and Hamlet, Identity and Difference,’’ Goethe Yearbook 6 (1992): 67–79.
47. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Werke, vol. 7) (Munich, 1981), 217–18.
48. Auerbach, Mimesis, 329.
49. Ibid., 327–30.
50. Ibid., 328.
51. Ibid.
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was written ‘‘outside.’’ Mimesis is the work of a pariah,52 an enterprise of
mixed styles, an integration of the tragic and the grotesque that draws
together the lost, foreign portraits of European humanism.
MODERNISM/MONOTHEISM: LITERATURE A ND FRAGMENTS
The final chapter of Mimesis deals with modernist versions of realism and
discusses the novels of Woolf, Proust, and Joyce. Auerbach defines here
what he considers the tendency of early twentieth-century literature,
namely, the rejection of metanarratives and ideological frameworks of
representation in favor of the fragmentation of being.53 The modernist
novel is a prose of small universes, a field of fragments and pessimistic
anecdotes. The new novel draws nets of subjective, private, and minor
memories. Not wisdom, but doubt; not knowledge, but riddles; not order,
but crisis—these are the forms of modernism. Modernist literature is a
‘‘symptom of . . . confusion and helplessness.’’54 However, ‘‘something
entirely different takes place here too.’’ In this literary field that carries
the scars of the period of the First World War, Auerbach seeks also perspectives of beauty and gestures of love, of the ‘‘wealth of reality and the
depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without
prejudice.’’55 It is conditio humana, the ‘‘elementary things which our lives
have in common,’’ that is illuminated here, in this field of fragments and
narratological ruins. Modernism embodies the inversion of figura—a ‘‘fulfillment’’ that does not lie in the unity of a divine order but rather in the
broken forms of being on earth.
Other than his final chapter’s discussion of a few examples of modernist literature, Auerbach does not deal with the radical avant-garde movements of his time. However, the way in which Auerbach reads the
European canon of literature hints at his modernist consciousness.56 The
technique of the fragment, the concept of the broken form, and the aesthetics of ‘‘ruins’’are imprinted also in his book. Auerbach acknowledges
his own modernist technique in a short passage in the final chapter of
52. On the pariah and its implications in the Jewish discourse of literature,
compare Hanna Arendt’s essay ‘‘The Jew as Pariah,’’ in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish
Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York, 1978), 67–90.
53. Auerbach, Mimesis, 549–51.
54. Ibid., 551.
55. Ibid., 552.
56. On Auerbach’s modernist consciousness, see Hayden White, ‘‘Auerbach’s
Literary History: The Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,’’ in Literary
History and the Challenge of Philology, 124–39; Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’
212–14.
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Mimesis. His book is now presented as an illustration of the modernist
approach to literature: the abandonment of the great syntheses, rejection
of the chronological treatment of literature, and the turn to ‘‘basic motifs,’’
‘‘few passages,’’ and short scenes.57 The philological methods that made
Mimesis possible are thus similar to those of the modernist writers. The
modernist consciousness of ‘‘miniatures’’ is internalized.
The fragment is a signature of crisis and loss. And the fragment is
‘‘real.’’ The way Auerbach perceives short cuts, selective pieces, ‘‘anecdotes,’’ and foreign words from the history of the novel embodies a ‘‘touch
of the real.’’58 The fragment is to reflect the essence of the historical experience. Auerbach’s method of representation does not deny the variety,
the randomness, the broken forms, and the imperfections of the real.
Rather, Mimesis recognizes the faults and the decadence of the human
enterprise. And yet, its insights remain faithful to the ‘‘wealth of reality
and the depth of life.’’
Auerbach’s method should not be separated from the modernist contexts of the German Jewish projects of literature that included the writings of authors and critics such as Karl Kraus, Alfred Kerr, Ernst Toller,
Walter Mehring, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Walter Benjamin. Similar to
Benjamin’s discourse of literature, Auerbach’s modernism is also based
on broken forms and ‘‘ruins’’ of historical consciousness and includes
figures of irony.59 However, modernist discourses of literature, from
Expressionism to Dada and the Epic theater, served the German Jewish
writers also as a medium of critical negotiations with tradition. Through
57. Auerbach, Mimesis, 548.
58. On Auerbach’s Mimesis and the historical consciousness of the ‘‘real’’ that
reveals itself in anecdotes and fragments, compare Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 31–48.
59. In this context Mimesis can perhaps be read parallel to Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in which figura reads equivalently to Benjamin’s
concept of allegory. See Jesse M. Gellrich, ‘‘Figura, Allegory, and the Question
of History,’’ in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, 107–23. For further
reading on Auerbach and Benjamin, see Robert Kahn, ‘‘Eine ‘List der Vorsehung’: Erich Auerbach und Walter Benjamin,’’ in Erich Auerbach, 153–66; Barck,
‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’ 208–12. It was Benjamin himself who hints at Auerbach’s modernism, when he refers, in his essay on Surrealism, to Auerbach’s
1929 book on Dante and his interpretations of medieval poetry that show how
‘‘surprisingly close’’ this poetry stands in its relation to the surrealist concept of
love (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.1 [Frankfurt am Main, 1980], 299).
In his book on Dante, Auerbach admits that his modernist approach to medieval
poetry is based on an ‘‘analogy’’ to contemporary discourses of crises in language
and literature.
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a modernist perspective, the question of monotheistic tradition, its dialectics of representation, its discourses of law and justice, its messianic figures and horizons of redemption were explored and transformed into
poetics of memory and justice. This is how the figures of the ‘‘broken
form’’—the fragment, the cut, the rupture—should be understood. The
fragment embodies a modernist consciousness of historical destruction. It
expresses the cognition of crisis and loss. However, in a few cases the
modernist fragment was also loaded with reflections on the monotheistic
tradition. The montage and the broken forms of Expressionism and
Dada, the modernist declarations against the image, the denial of beauty,
and the critical reflections of representation were presented also as an
echo of the monotheistic prohibition against the image and the idea of
an unrepresentable God.60 In this context the montage itself could be
understood as an ironic reflection of Shevirat ha-tsurot (the breaking of
the forms).61 Auerbach does not mention here the Mosaic Law and the
prohibition against the making of an image. It is also clear that Auerbach
was unfamiliar with the tradition that discusses the breaking of idols by
Abraham. However, the traces of the monotheistic tradition, the prohibition of images, and the poetics of fragments are revealed somewhere else
in his book. This brings us back to the beginning of Mimesis and to its
discussion of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.
THE A K E D A : TH E H E B R E W S I L E N C E ,
T H E SE C R E T OF LI T E R ATU R E
In its opening chapter, Mimesis offers a comparative reading of two scenes
from the Homeric epic and the Old Testament. Auerbach first reads the
60. Among the examples of modernist reflections of the Jewish prohibition
against the image, one recalls Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s discussions on the theological implications of Franz Kafka’s literature; the poetry of
Else Lasker-Schüler and her Expressionistic reflections of the biblical figures;
and Ernst Toller’s drama Die Wandlung (Transformations). Other examples are
rooted in the world of modern Hebrew literature—the poems and essays of Haim
Nacham Bialik and the stories of Shmuel Yosef Agnon.
61. Shevirat ha-tsurot, ‘‘the breaking of the forms,’’ tradition informs, is the
origin and essence of Abraham’s enterprise. The tradition attributes to Abraham
the revolt against the rites of the idols and the stars in his homeland as the constitutive gesture of monotheism. Abraham’s gesture thus seems already to imply (or
to prefigurate) the monotheistic prohibition against the making of an image:
(‘‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing
that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water
under the earth,’’ Exodus 20.4). On Abraham, his revolt against the rite of idols,
and the theological significance of his gesture of breaking the forms, see Moshe
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‘‘well-prepared and touching scene’’ on the return of the Greek hero
Odysseus in book 19 of the Odyssey, ‘‘the scene in which the old housekeeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by the scar on
his thigh.’’62 In this scene, Auerbach writes, ‘‘everything is visible.’’63 He
discusses the ‘‘direct discourse’’ of Penelope and Euryclea, the ‘‘orderly,
perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions,’’ in which
feelings, thoughts, and gestures are ‘‘wholly expressed.’’64 The exposure
of the scar on Odysseus’s thigh by the old housemaid, leads, however, to
Unterbrechung, ‘‘an interruption,’’ that is, the interpolation of a long passage on the visit of the young Odysseus to his grandfather Autolycus.
The digression tells of Odysseus’s welcome at the grandfather’s house,
the hunt in the morning, the struggle with the beast, the wound, and the
recovery. All this is ‘‘narrated again with such a complete externalization
of all the elements of the story and their interconnections as to leave
nothing in obscurity.’’65
The digression on Odysseus’s scar keeps the same element of representation that is imprinted in the main plot, ‘‘an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses’’: Hier ist die Narbe, ‘‘here is the
scar.’’66 Indeed, Auerbach writes, ‘‘the excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’s scar is not basically different’’ from other passages in the poem.67
The use of episodes and digressions is rather widespread in the Odyssey
and serves as the ‘‘retarding element’’ that dissolves dramatic tensions
and avoids suspense and anxiety. And yet it is a story in which a wounded
body serves as the opening scene in Auerbach’s book. The scar is the first
symbol of Mimesis. With this sign the question of representation is
opened. Furthermore, the scar is the signature of the subject. This is how
the Greek hero is recognized at home: ‘‘here is the scar.’’ Similar to
Christ, who on his return is recognized by the wounds of his crucifixion,
Odysseus’s identity is also hidden in his wound/scar. To represent or to
be represented means to explore the wound. Is it therefore accidental that
Auerbach’s 1938 essay ‘‘Figura’’ begins also with a reference to a wound?
The essay begins with a quotation of a fragment (the texture of a ‘‘cut,’’
a signature of crisis) by Marcus Pacuvius, a Roman tragic poet, in which
Ben Maimon, Sefer ha-mada‘ (The Book of Knowledge) (Jerusalem, 1992),
126–29.
62. Auerbach, Mimesis, 3.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 4.
66. Ibid., 6.
67. Ibid., 5.
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Auerbach finds the early and original meaning of figura as a ‘‘plastic
form.’’68 The Latin fragment tells about barbarica pestis, ‘‘an outlandish
plague’’ fashioned in nova figura, ‘‘unaccustomed shape.’’ This ‘‘outlandish
plague,’’ Auerbach writes in a footnote, ‘‘is probably the sting of a ray, by
which Odysseus was mortally wounded.’’69 The discussion on figura, the
‘‘shape,’’ the original form of literary representation, begins with a cut.
The second part of Auerbach’s opening discussion in Mimesis is dedicated to the biblical ‘‘account of the sacrifice of Isaac’’ from Genesis 22.
The scene, Auerbach notices, is silent, abstract, dark, and enigmatic.
Mount Moriah, the site of the Akeda, lacks clear descriptions of time and
place. Similarly, the Jewish God appears here from no-place. Unlike
Zeus or Poseidon, ‘‘he enters the scene from some unknown height or
depth and calls: Abraham!’’ (8). This is the first characteristic of the monotheistic being: its Ortlosigkeit, ‘‘the lack of habitation.’’ The second is the
Gestaltlosigkeit, ‘‘the lack of form.’’ The Jewish God ‘‘appears without
bodily form (yet he appears).’’70 Even in its early biblical appearances,
Auerbach argues, the Jewish God ‘‘was not fixed in form and content.’’71
The Jewish God has no form or image. The third characteristic of the
monotheistic being is its solitude: the Jewish God lives in Einsamkeit,
‘‘singleness.’’ Jewish monotheism is thus based on the figure of a formless, placeless, lonely being. The ‘‘lack of habitation, the lack of form and
the singleness’’ are also the merits of Abraham and Isaac. Like the Jewish
God, the biblical figures are also Gestaltlos. The biblical scene does not
reveal but rather covers the plot, concealing its figures and hiding their
actions. The biblical figures are not subjects of beauty but of ethical judgments. The Old Testament, according to Auerbach, does not deal with the
aesthetic representation of the world but rather with theological truths.72
The Homeric poem and the biblical story are introduced in the first
chapter of Mimesis in opposition. The former is sensual, simple, clear,
and well expressed. It exposes the body and reveals the scar but lacks
psychological depth and avoids conflicts. The latter is silent, fragmented,
and obscure, hiding the body and creating riddles of representation. Its
narration is allegorical and its implications are ethical. Biblical style is
sublime, and its complexities are tragic. Both biblical and epic styles,
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ 11.
Ibid., 229, n. 1.
Auerbach, Mimesis, 9.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 11–14.
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however, had a complementary constitutive influence on the history of
European literature.73
The riddles of the Jewish book, Auerbach argues, are bound up with
the Gestaltlosigkeit, ‘‘the formlessness’’ of the biblical figures. The fact that
Auerbach differentiates and discusses the Jewish origin as Gestaltlos is
significant. The discourses of Gestaltung, ‘‘figuration’’ or ‘‘forming,’’ have
been imprinted in German culture since the eighteenth century. The
form, which was discussed often as an aesthetic ideal, following Greek
models, had also political implications, forming German identity. In the
1930s and 1940s the discourse of the form gained radical interpretations
that were based on racial theories. In this context the Jewish origin was
represented as a source of deformations. The Jew was essentially considered as ‘‘formless.’’ Auerbach’s writing about the Jewish Gestaltlosigkeit
and his discussion of its theological implications and ethical merits can
thus be understood as a gesture of resistance in the field of German culture: Mimesis discusses the formlessness of the biblical protagonist against
the clear, well-expressed figures of the Homeric poems, responding here
to the German ideology and its worship of the Greek form.
Besides the formless appearance of the biblical figure, the story of the
Akeda is characterized by its silence. Auerbach writes:
The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not
serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts
—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives his command in direct discourse, but he leaves his
motives and his purpose unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what he has been told to do. The conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way to the place of sacrifice
is only an interruption of the heavy silence and makes it all the more
burdensome.74
The story of the Akeda is governed by ‘‘heavy silence.’’ Its protagonists
speak, however, even though their speech is not an expression or externalization of thoughts but rather only an indication of unspeakable
thoughts. The language in the biblical scene does not represent but rather
hints at the unrepresentable. This is the paradox of language in the story
of Abraham: in the Akeda even the spoken is silent. Auerbach does not
73. Ibid., 23.
74. Ibid., 11.
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discuss the ‘‘meaning’’ of this biblical silence. He does not attempt to
solve the mystery of Abraham’s thoughts and does not pretend to conceal
the hidden layers of the story. The unexpressed, the formless, and the
unspoken embody in his view the theological dimension of Judaism.
Judaism is a secret; its speech is silence; its expression is the unexpressed.
The Akeda embodies a secret. Its obscure and empty landscape, its
silent figures, its unexpressed background and hidden plot, its ‘‘mysterious,’’ ‘‘concealed meaning’’ require, Auerbach writes, ‘‘subtle investigation and interpretation.’’75 The biblical story of the one unrepresentable
God embodies not only Herrschaftsanspruch, ‘‘the claim to absolute authority,’’ but also Deutungsbedürfnis, ‘‘the need for interpretation.’’76 The monotheistic story that represents nothing, and avoids words and images, but
still claims theological authority is also a condition for the possibility of
interpretation. The Jewish origin, Auerbach writes, is forced to adopt
‘‘constant interpretative change’’77 in order to preserve its legitimization
and relevance. Here lies the foundation of the Jewish tradition itself—the
origin of study and exegesis (Talmud, midrash). However, Auerbach does
not refer here to the Jewish tradition and its frames of exegesis. He
ignores the role of aggadah and rather discusses its Christian counterparts, for the need for new interpretations of the Bible, Auerbach writes,
reaches beyond the ‘‘original Jewish-Israelitish realm’’ into the gentile
world. The interpretation of the Hebrew Bible became ‘‘a general method
of comprehending reality.’’78 This is how the secret of the Akeda and other
biblical scenes created ‘‘universal’’ institutions of interpretation, among
them European literature itself. The ‘‘interpretative transformation’’ of
the biblical narrative brings about the concept of an open text that will
become the essence of literature.
From a historical, theological, and poetical point of view, the ‘‘most
striking piece of interpretation’’ of the Old Testament, Auerbach writes,
was bound up with the emergence of Christianity and particularly with
Paul’s enterprise: ‘‘Paul and the church fathers’’ were seeking a new interpretation of the Jewish tradition as a ‘‘succession of figurers prognosticating the appearance of Christ, and assigning the Roman empire its proper
place in the divine plan of salvation.’’79 Here, with the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, we recall, figura—the foundational ‘‘shape’’
of literary discourse—was reborn.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Auerbach seems initially to follow the Christian path of interpretation.
He recalls the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament in Luther’s German
translation) but ignores rabbinic tradition and the archaic forms of Jewish literature. It is rather Paul who embodies in his view the most significant interpretation of the biblical sources. Paul is the first to transform
the Bible into ‘‘literature’’ (a popular story, a legend, an allegory). However, in his reading of the Akeda, Auerbach, who accepts figura as the
condition for the possibility of the literary interpretation, also turns from
the Christian preoccupation to discuss the original characteristics of the
Old Testament and its own literary implications. In his reading, the Jewish origin is not simply reduced to an anticipation or redemptive promise
but rather constitutes a different possibility of historical representation.80
The Bible, Auerbach argues, compared with the Homeric poems, ‘‘is less
unified,’’ but rather ‘‘pieced together.’’81 The Old Testament is made up
of fragments and pieces that lack unity. It shows ‘‘separateness and horizontal disconnection of stories and groups of stories in relation to one
another.’’ And yet all these pieces are held together strongly by a ‘‘vertical
connection’’ to God’s oneness. The story that embodies the monotheistic
thesis on the unity of God embodies disunity at the surface level. This
tension between vertical unity and horizontal disconnectedness endows
the Bible with the potential for reinterpretations. The literary potential of
the Bible is now discussed by Auerbach not only as a result of the Christian enterprise but rather as an initial, internal textual structure. Here
Auerbach reveals perhaps the other source of his philology of fragments.
In Auerbach’s view the structure of the biblical story is like the modernist
form: a fragment, a piece, a cut. Auerbach reads the Hebrew Bible as if
it were an ancient montage. Furthermore, the biblical story that conceals
bodies and plots and in itself is implicit in secrets and silence carries
also the foundations for a model of historical representation that suits the
complexities, contradictions, and conflicts of Europe/1942. ‘‘The rise of
80. Said, who stresses the Christian path in Auerbach’s reading of the Old
Testament, which is based on the possibilities of figural interpretation that is born
from the Christian doctrine of incarnation, also recognizes the fact that in Auerbach’s view the Jewish origin does not disappear despite the transformation it
suffers: ‘‘Auerbach is a firm believer in the dynamic transformations as well as
the deep sedimentations of history: yes, Judaism made Christianity possible
through Paul, but Judaism remains, and it remains different from Christianity’’
(Said, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xviiii). Said thus acknowledges the ‘‘sets of antinomies’’ in
Auerbach’s contexts of writing (the Jewish/the Christian, the German/the Turkish) that ‘‘never lose their oppositions to each other’’ (xviii).
81. Auerbach, Mimesis, 17.
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National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual people and
states before and during the [current (1942)] war,’’ he writes, are historical events that consist of a ‘‘great number of contradictory motives.’’82
The modernist writing of history thus demands a complex attitude, which
is essentially different from that of a legend.83 The Old Testament ‘‘comes
closer and closer to history’’ against the Homeric style that remains in the
realm of legend. The Bible implies a complex narrative and contains the
‘‘confused, contradictory multiplicity of events’’ which, according to
Auerbach, ‘‘true history reveals.’’84 The biblical story offers a structure of
historical representation that suits the stage of war and political catastrophe in Europe. The story of the sacrifice of Isaac and other biblical stories
are indeed prefigurations. However they are not anticipations of the
redemptive narrative of Christianity but rather embody the fragmentary
structure of historical representation, one that hints at the tragedies of the
1940s.
The Jewish source thus does not disappear in Auerbach’s reading. His
view on the essence of biblical story remains figural but was not reduced
to a dogmatic Christian perspective. It would thus be wrong to try to
‘‘identify’’ Auerbach’s reading with Judaism (Jewish tradition, the ‘‘Jewish background’’), or to associate it exclusively with certain Christian
traditions.85 One should rather think of Auerbach’s project in terms of
modernist interpretation in which identities are revealed as mixed, unstable textures, and traditions are experienced from a distance, through a
process of radical transformation, denial, and openness. And yet the significance of the Jewish origin in Auerbach’s project is hinted at in the
first chapter of Mimesis with another minor yet essential sign: the first
foreign word quoted in Mimesis is from ancient Hebrew: the word Hineni,
82. Ibid., 19–20.
83. Ibid., 20.
84. Ibid.
85. Auerbach’s ability to borrow certain elements from Jewish tradition or
from Christianity and to mix them into a new, original view of literature and
culture attests, in my view, to the modernist sensibility of the German Jewish
author and hints at a certain historical urgency in which he was caught. I cannot
thus fully follow Martin Elsky’s intriguing suggestion of understanding Auerbach’s ‘‘universalism’’ as ‘‘Catholic,’’ but I would rather insist on the modernist
context in which Auerbach attempted to reinterpret the open text of literature
from the origins of monotheism. Auerbach’s attraction to Catholicism, as represented in his interpretations of strong emotions, is significant but secondary and
does not, in my view, exhaust the complexity of the Jewish-Christian dialectic in
his work nor his criticism of Bildung. Compare Martin Elsky, ‘‘Introduction to
Erich Auerbach, ‘Passio as Passion,’ ’’ Criticism 43.3 (2001): 285–88.
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‘‘behold me here,’’ cited from the story of the Akeda. It is the expression
of ‘‘obedience and readiness,’’ Auerbach writes, that indicates Abraham’s
‘‘moral position in respect to God.’’86 The poetics of foreign words in
Mimesis thus begins with the gesture of an ethical response, a silent movement that flows from Hebrew into the world of literature. The fact that
Auerbach introduces the question of representation through the complexities of the biblical story is significant. However, it is not that the decision
made by Auerbach to write about the Old Testament, and particularly
the scene of the binding of Isaac, should now be understood as a gesture
of ‘‘Jewish philology.’’87 It is also difficult, in my view, to understand
Auerbach’s project as ‘‘meditation on the Shoah’’ or to identify his writing
in Mimesis as allegories of the concrete events of the 1940s.88 I thus suggest a different conclusion: Auerbach’s reading of the Akeda, the way in
which he places the biblical scene in conjunction with but also in opposition to the Greek and the Christian wounded figures, his ambiguous
interpretations of figura after (and also with and against) Paul, his reading
of Shylock with Hamlet, and finally his way of discussing the monotheistic text as a condition for the possibility of dealing with the question of
literature in the 1940s, attest to the rips and the hyphens—the ‘‘scars’’ of
modernist consciousness of a German Jewish writer
ABRAHAM’S S ILENCE? READING AUERBACH IN DIALOGUE
(K IER KEGAARD, DE RRIDA, L EVINAS)
By way of conclusion, I will suggest here three short correspondences to
Auerbach’s discussion of the Akeda, three short ‘‘dialogues’’ on the biblical
scene and the question of literature. These dialogues are based on Kierkegaard’s, Levinas’s, and Derrida’s interpretations of the Abraham story.
The way in which Auerbach defines and differentiates the Jewish from
86. Auerbach, Mimesis, 8–9.
87. Compare with Porter’s provocative and brilliant analysis of Auerbach’s
reading of the Akeda as a gesture of ‘‘Jewish philology’’ which should be understood as an answer to ‘‘the decanonization of the Old Testament under the German National Socialists,’’ and therefore as an attempt to protect the Hebrew text
in the field of philological research against the predominance of the Greek in the
Germanic literary and cultural imagination (‘‘Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing
of Philology,’’ 124–25, 126, 134–36).
88. Richards’s reading of the Mimesis chapter of Adam and Eve as a critical
allegory of the French collaboration is brilliant, yet somewhat exaggerated in my
view. The same can be argued about the analogy Richards draws between Isaac’s
journey to Mount Moriah and the transportations of Jews to Treblinka and
Auschwitz. See Earl Jeffery Richards, ‘‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as Meditation
on the Shoah,’’ 71–78.
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the Greek in order to introduce the question of literature reminds us first
of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard writes about Abraham’s
‘‘movement of faith’’ in his silent journey to Mount Moriah. Abraham’s
experience, however, is wholly singular and escapes the universal categories of representation. His deeds cannot be shared or expressed. Abraham’s experience is not discursive; it does not seek general validity and
thus carries no moral meaning. The Akeda has no logical and therefore no
ethical meaning. It rather demands the ‘‘teleological suspension of the
ethical.’’89
Similar to Auerbach, who reads the Akeda beside the Homeric, Kierkegaard feels compelled to ‘‘compare’’ the biblical scene with a Greek example, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis.90 In the Greek tragedy, he argues, the
sacrifice has purpose and meaning. Agamemnon sacrifices his beloved
daughter, Iphigenia, in order to lead the Greek fleet to the war on Troy
and thus to serve the destiny of his nation. The tragic deed has a meaning
that can be shared and represented within the Greek community. The
sacrifice of Iphigenia belongs to the public sphere (the common, the universal, the polis) and therefore embodies a moral meaning: ‘‘The tragic
hero is still within the ethical.’’91 Unlike Iphigenia, the sacrifice of Isaac
has no telos, no meaning or purpose. Its depth is concealed in ancient
Hebrew.92 However, the secrets, the paradoxes, and the silence of the
biblical scene become a challenge for discourses of literature. It is Kierkegaard himself who offers in the beginning of his book four literary versions of the Akeda. His response to Abraham’s secret begins with the
gesture of narration—retelling the story. Moreover, the history of Western literature, from Greek tragedy to modern European drama, is read
in Kierkegaard’s book as a response to the biblical story. Literature is
introduced as a counterexample to the unspoken, concealed experience of
Abraham. Aesthetics (literature, poetry, and drama), Kierkegaard writes,
demands also hiddenness and silence. Aesthetics is understood as a ‘‘play
with the hidden,’’ a mode of recognition, an experience of revealing the
veiled.93 The poetical silence is a strategy of representation. The secret in
literature can be explained and finally can be put into words. Here lies
89. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong
(Princeton, N.J., 1983), 54–57.
90. Ibid., 57–60.
91. Ibid., 59.
92. Kierkegaard writes ironically on the paradox of Hebrew: ‘‘That man was
not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew,
he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham’’ (ibid., 9).
93. Ibid., 82–85.
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the gap between aesthetics (literature) and faith (the Akeda) which,
Kierkegaard writes, avoids a real analogy between the poetical silence
and the silence of Abraham.94 In its words and silence, literature marks
off the boundary of the other sphere—the sphere of faith in which silence
cannot be explained. In contrast with protagonists of literature, Abraham
truly cannot speak.95
In Kierkegaard’s book the question of literature appears not simply
after the biblical scene but also because of it and against it. A similar dialectic is found in Auerbach’s Mimesis. For Auerbach too, the need and the
possibility to discuss the question of literature is bound up with the
secrets of the Akeda, with the paradoxes of silence and the theological
demands for new interpretations of the biblical story. The possibilities of
discussing beauty and irony, exploring the tragic and the grotesque, the
demonic and the sublime, are related in both projects to the silent discourse of the Hebrew Bible.
Auerbach’s reading of the biblical scene follows central aspects of
Kierkegaard’s interpretation. Like Fear and Trembling, Mimesis is also
imprinted by Paul’s conception (figura).96 However, Auerbach is not
trapped in the discourse of faith and does not demand the suspension of
the ethical dimension. For Auerbach, we recall, Abraham’s experience,
his response to God’s call, is purely ethical. Auerbach also hints at the
price of the figural discussion and does not force a Christian reading on
the Akeda.
The correspondences between Kierkegaard and Auerbach on the question of Abraham’s silence and the birth of Western literature lead us also
to acknowledge Derrida’s reading that attributes the secrecy of the biblical scene, the riddle of the Akeda, the unspoken experience of Abraham, to
the world of literature. Following Kierkegaard’s reading, Derrida argues
about Abraham’s experience—the encounter with God, the silent
responses to his requests of sacrifice—that is wholly singular, intimate,
94. Ibid., 112.
95. Ibid., 113.
96. Kierkegaard’s interpretation, as Derrida points out, is essentially ‘‘evangelical’’: the concept of ‘‘fear and trembling’’ follows St. Paul’s idea of the work
toward salvation as it is introduced in the Letter to the Philippians (2.12). Kierkegaard’s text is based on the idea of faith that demands the suspension of the law
(‘‘the universal’’). And yet, Derrida writes, Kierkegaard’s Christian interpretation
‘‘does not necessarily exclude a Judaic or Islamic reading.’’ Rather, it marks the
secret, the paradox of all monotheistic traditions—the paradox of sharing/representing Abraham’s secret that cannot be shared/represented. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Whom to Give To,’’ in his The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. D.
Wills (Chicago, 2008), 56–59; 79–81.
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and thus carries no meaning that can be shared or represented.97 Abraham’s real test, he writes, is this test of secrecy—Abraham must keep his
encounter with God’s secret.98 The literary project, Derrida says, inherits
this experience, the silence of Abraham—the inability to tell, the necessity
to keep a secret.99 The literary project is defined by the ability not to tell
and thus to maintain an internal, autonomous, silent dimension that
escapes the readers. ‘‘Every text’’, Derrida writes, ‘‘that is consigned to
public space, that is relatively legible or intelligible, but whose content,
sense, referent, signatory, and addressee are not fully determinable realities [ . . . ] can become a literary project.’’100 Literature keeps a degree of
freedom, the right not to be defined or determined. This right of literature
to keep a secret, Derrida argues, is the heritage of Abraham—the heritage
of the Akeda.
Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s readings offer different yet parallel perspectives to Auerbach’s own interpretation of the Akeda. All three readings stress the structure of secrecy and the principle of silence and refer
to the unexposed, unrepresentable, hidden dimension of the biblical text
as a condition of/for literary discourse.
My discussion on the Akeda and literature requires a fourth critical
remark that highlights also the limits of Auerbach’s reading. Auerbach’s
ethical interpretation of Abraham’s experience, as opposed to the Greek
voyage, recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s comparison of Odysseus with Abraham and his discussion of the differences between their ‘‘movements.’’
The Greek, according to Levinas, embodies the ‘‘movement of return.’’
Odysseus finally returns home from his long journey; he comes back to
himself. His movement embodies the metaphysical structure of return
that reflects the Western consciousness of being-the-same.101 Odysseus
does not experience a real break with the self but rather brings subjectivity to its fulfillment, its self-realization. Abraham, however, ‘‘who leaves
his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land,’’ embodies a ‘‘movement
without return.’’ He travels toward the unknown, the nonidentical, the
other. Abraham’s movement thus hints at the ethical dimension of mono97. Derrida, ‘‘Literature in Secret,’’ The Gift of Death, 154–55.
98. Ibid., 122.
99. Ibid., 131–32.
100. Ibid., 131.
101. Philosophy is based on the ‘‘autonomy of consciousness, which finds itself
again in all its adventures, returning home to itself like Ulysses, who through all
his peregrinations is only on the way to his native island.’’ Emmanuel Levinas,
‘‘The Trace of the Other,’’ in Deconstruction in Context, ed. M. C. Taylor (Chicago,
1986), 346.
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theism—the movement from the self to the other. This movement is indicated by God’s call to Abraham in Genesis, Lech-Lecha, ‘‘Go forth’’—the
same call that brings him to Moriah.
Levinas’s commitment to the ethical dimension of the biblical story
leads him to oppose Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Akeda as stressing
silence and as denying the possibilities of ethical discourse in the biblical
scene.102 Kierkegaard, he argues, does not discuss the real meaning of the
Hebrew drama: God’s second call that forbids Abraham to perform a
human sacrifice—the call that leads him back to the ethical order. Of
Abraham’s obedience to the second call, Levinas writes, ‘‘that is the
essential.’’103 For Abraham’s real experience, he argues, is not of silence
but rather of language. Abraham’s encounter with God is interwoven
with networks of calls, dialogues, and negotiations. Levinas recalls the
conversation in which Abraham interceded on behalf of Sodom and
Gomorrah. In his view Abraham embodies the discourse of justice and
the language of the ethical order that is imprinted in Jewish tradition.
Levians thus rejects the secrecy and the paradox of silence and rather
traces the ethical implications of the biblical language.104 Abraham thus
speaks.105
Levinas, like Auerbach, offers a reading that acknowledges the call
of hineni, the Hebrew expression of ethical commitment. However, for
Auerbach the Hebrew word remains a foreign and therefore a silent
word. For one who stood far from the world of Jewish tradition and was
unfamiliar with sources other than the translations of the Bible, Abraham’s experience seems unspoken. For Levinas, who entered the world
of Jewish tradition through a different path and engaged Talmud and
midrash as the only way through which the Bible can be read and
revealed, the Hebrew word seems to speak aloud the essence of language
itself.106 Here perhaps lies a difference between two experiences of tradi102. Levinas, ‘‘A Propos of Kierkegaard vivant,’’ in Proper Names, trans. M. B.
Smith (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 76–77. On Levinas’s criticism of Kierkegaard and
the possibilities of a ‘‘dialogue’’ between them on questions of ethics and theology
see: J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood, eds., Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics,
Politics and Religion (Bloomington, Ind., 2008).
103. Levinas, ‘‘A Propos of Kierkegaard vivant,’’ 77.
104. Compare with Levinas’s remarks on Hebrew and its poetical implications
in his essay on Agnon: ‘‘Poetry and Resurrection: Notes on Agnon,’’ in Proper
Names, 7–16.
105. In midrash literature Abraham truly speaks and cries out his experience
of the Akeda. See, for example, Midrash tanhuma (parashat Va-yera, 18–23).
106. Levinas’s understanding of tradition is represented first and foremost in
his talmudic readings. See also his essay ‘‘Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,’’ in
Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. G. D. Mole (Bloomington,
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tion: the one cannot experience Judaism and its traditions except from a
distance, in translation, through Christian and German lenses; the other
attempts to return to the original discourses of Jewish tradition through
its own exegetical praxis. Both experiences of tradition are, however,
modernist in their nature and dialogical in their essence. The Jewish tradition is marked in both cases by an open text that carries ethical implications. These readings of the Akeda lead to productive approaches to the
question of representation, which also challenge and approve the idea of
literature.
Ind., 1994), 127–47. For further reading see Hilary Putnam, ‘‘Levinas and Judaism,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi
(Cambridge, 2002), 33–62.
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