“Was Goethe a Jew too?”

When you do a search of our library catalog for Goethe you could get this idea: 70 hits for works by or about the German poet (by contrast, Schiller only gets 16). And until a few years ago the impressive 1867 Cotta’schen edition of Goethe appeared in our permanent exhibition. Many people used to ask the visitor’s desk: “Was Goethe Jewish?” No, he wasn’t. But for many Jews he was the paragon of German culture, and his works symbolized membership in the German educated middle-class.

a bust of Goethe and books in the museum

Former Goethe installation in the permanent exhibition
© Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Marion Roßner

A few months ago, the Richard M. Meyer Foundation gave us more than 100 books by and about Richard M. Meyer himself. The son of a banker, art collector, and man of letters was a Goethe scholar. Meyer never acquired a proper professorship, but his 1895 biography of Goethe won awards and was published again and again – as a single volume, in multiple volumes, as a people’s edition and a reserved edition. According to the biography, Goethe saw “nationalities merely as transitional forms” (Volksausgabe [People’s Edition] 1913, p. 352). Statements like this illustrate the dilemma of German-Jewish assimilation during that period. If a Jewish reader of Goethe placed the poet’s cosmopolitanism in the foreground, he exposed himself to the accusation of misunderstanding the German essence of his writings. But when he explicitly recognized just this quality in Goethe’s language, his very right to have a say was contested.

As Meyer emphasized, the German “intellectual hero” did in fact employ the idea of a world literature, as well as biblical references, too: He compared the Faustian pact with the devil with the “basic motif of the wager” from the Book of Job (ibid, p.343; not included in the first edition, cf. p.356).  And yet Goethe wasn’t a “ticket of admission” (Heine) to German culture: Richard M. Meyer was never baptized. He died in 1914 of cerebral apoplexy. His wife Estella, to whom the Goethe biography is dedicated, was murdered in July of 1942.

We would like you to know that we have moved into the new Academy building, with a reading room outfitted with fast computers, bright desk lamps, and a copy machine. If we sparked your interest in the Jewish reception of Goethe: please come by!

Bernhard Jensen, Library

Comment by Greg Chiasson on 13. January 2015 at 20:51

May I ask you to provide a transliteration plus a translation of the title in Hebrew script at the top of the page?
I am a beginning student in Hebrew.

Comment by Mirjam Wenzel on 15. January 2015 at 23:53

Dear Greg,
thank you for your question. The Hebrew word “Blogerim” at the top of each page means bloggers. I wish you all the best for your studies, Mirjam

Comment by Carey Adina Karmel on 18. August 2015 at 22:06

What a fascinating story of literary reception and the cultural & religious tensions in German society.

I’m an American in London writing a PhD .. Will hope to come by.

Comment by Bjas Simon on 22. February 2016 at 22:55

??? If you appreciate Goethe, you may find Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht Op.60, winter soltice
delightfully interesting where Mendelssohn employs Goethe’s poetry. Highlighting tension between the Druids and the all too judgmental Christians, the Druids sing, “Lets scare them with the Devil they themselves created!”

Comment by Tom Storm on 1. April 2019 at 03:28

I’m unsure about Goethe – more specifically how to accommodate his thoughts and writings in light of his anti-semitic prejudices. My question is – can bigots and racists have non race-related thoughts or ideas worthy of consideration and acceptance? For example, if a Nazi scientist had developed a drug that would cure cancer – should we ignore it – assign it to the garbage heap because of prejudice? Should Wagner’s music be regarded as not worthy of performing because of his late-in-life resentment of Jewish influence on music? Is Charles Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist justification for burning his books? Should you refuse to buy a Ford automobile because of Henry Ford’s anti-semitism? What set me on this path was a Goethe quote (“The coward only threatens when he is safe.”) in the motion-picture DENIAL (Rachel Weisz) about a legal battle between David Irving, a Holocaust denier and Deborah Lipstadt who called him a liar.

Comment by Judy C.Navon-Dreyfuss on 12. October 2019 at 13:02

“Was Goethe a Jew too?”
I often take names,+ geni and am totally surprised by the results.
I was reading about Faust + Goethe, entered Johann Wolfgang von Goethe geni and got the following: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Judy C.Navon-Dreyfuss’s
85th cousin 14 times removed( this via my mother): a blood relationship tree

(Via my father)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Judy C.Navon-Dreyfuss’s first cousin thrice removed’s wife’s great aunt’s husband’s wife’s great nephew’s wife’s brother’s wife’s second great uncle.( this is via my father)=in-law relationship tree

Looks to me that Goethe was very Jewish.Maybe he denied it, or society prefers to deny it.Is it only from intellectual curiosity that he read ,researched,wrote alot about the Old Testament etc? Possibly trying to know,understand his roots?Accept or deny them? My knowledge of Goethe is limited, but due to the above question “Was Goethe a Jew too?”my curiosity was aroused.

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