Morgenländischer Glanz

How did Orientalism condition German Jewish writing and its reception? Kathrin Wittler reconstructs the role of literary aesthetics in the transformation of Jewish traditions between 1750 and 1850. Covering a wide array of authors from Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Herz Wessely to Heinrich Heine and Fanny Lewald, Kathrin Wittler investigates literary experiments with different languages and scriptural systems and with varying poetic forms and rhetorical styles. Jewish authors, the literary analysis shows, defined the realm of their poetic imagination through figures of mediation between East and West, infusing their European standpoint with the splendor of the Orient.