Porter Auerbach

Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology

James I. Porter

I am Prussian and of the Jewish faith.—ERICH AUERBACH (1921)

Reading Erich Auerbach’s lead essay in Mimesis, one might well bestruck by the willful perversity of that piece. Its comparison between Greekculture (focused by Homer) and the Bible (focused by the Old Testament)seems rather pointed and polemical, though the reasons for this boldnessare anything but self-evident. Look closer and you will notice that the Jewsin that chapter are a little too Jewish, while the Greeks are a little too, well,. . . German. How could this be anything but a provocation? Inquire furtherinto the immediate historical and political background of “Odysseus’Scar,” and it will quickly emerge that Auerbach’s apparent perversity has agood claim to being real, as does his seeming urge to provocation, thoughoddly neither the Jewishness of the Old Testament as he presents it therenor the politics of his position have attracted anything near the attentionthey deserve.

A comparable provocativeness can, moreover, be detected in Auer-bach’s other works from before and after the publication of Mimesis(1946), notably in his vision of time and history, in his view of the Judeo-

Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (1920 –2007) in memoriamThis essay first arose out of a book project in progress entitled Homer: The Very Idea. For

assistance of various kinds I would like to express my gratitude to Sunil Agnani, DanielBoyarin, William Calder, Eric Downing, Jonathan Freedman, Tony Grafton, Anna Guillemin,Susannah Heschel, Michael Kicey, Karen Lawrence, Miriam Leonard, Peter Machinist, SusanMarchand, Helmut Muller-Sievers, Richard Neer, Martin Ostwald, Andy Stewart, MartinVialon, Silke Weineck, audiences at CUNY and the universities at Reading and Bristol, StephenFerguson and Meg Sherry Rich of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections atPrinceton University Library, and the members of the editorial board at Critical Inquiry.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008)

© 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/08/3501-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

115

Christian tradition, and in his distinctive take on the secular scholarship—the philology—that embraces all of these things. But it is in Mimesis thateverything comes to a head; it is here that Auerbach’s Jewishness spectac-ularly emerges, or rather, it is here that he discovers himself (or manifestshimself) in his philology as a Jew—as is only intelligible given the circum-stances of his life, his ousting from Germany, the persecution of Jews in hishomeland and abroad (he remained under surveillance even in Istanbul),and the sheer horrors of the war around him.

This, at least, is my interim finding in my own reading of Auerbach, ofwhich this essay represents a distillation. What follows is an attempt tolocate Auerbach in a particularly focused way through a close reading of“Odysseus’ Scar.” But the larger aim of my reading is to demythologizeAuerbach, whose image in today’s popular and scholarly consciousnessappears to be either colored by cliches (the lonely comparativist writingwithout the benefit of a library in a non-European land) or else hamperedby ignorance (misunderstandings about the meaning of figural interpre-tation for Auerbach, about the ways in which his earlier writings in factanticipate Mimesis, or about the range of his works and essays, many ofwhich remain untranslated and hence unread, at least in the English-speaking world, and all of which are generally underexploited). My pur-pose is therefore to resituate and to reconfigure the enchanted narrative ofAuerbach (1892–1957)—to move it away from the story of the deracinatedscholar in Istanbul and to restore it to that of the scholar rooted in Ger-many, the land from which he was exiled but which he never really left, notleast because it never left him. The local, German context, we shall see, isall-meaningful and all-determining.1

More than this, my essay is an attempt to trace the writing of a scholarat a moment of crisis in which he confronted his Jewishness as he never had(or had to) before and as he never would again in the aftermath of hiswartime publication, Mimesis. This coming to terms with his Jewish iden-tity is legible directly in all his work, as is a strong resistance to the tradi-

1. For the situation of Auerbach in Istanbul, see Kader Konuk, Mimesis in Istanbul: SecularHumanism and the Politics of Exile (forthcoming).

J A M E S I . P O R T E R teaches classics and comparative literature at the Universityof California, Irvine. He is the author of Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future(2000), The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (2000),and a forthcoming two-volume study on ancient Greek aesthetics. His currentprojects include Homer: The Very Idea and Time, History, and Literature: SelectedEssays of Erich Auerbach (forthcoming). His email is [email protected]

116 James I. Porter / Auerbach and Philology

tions that effaced Judaism or, at the very least, a powerful ambivalence towardsthem, both in this one work and in his writings leading up to it. Throughout,his position embodies what we might call a Jewish philology or a Judaizing ofphilology.2 His position is complex, but suffice it to say that it gradually evolvesas an ethical stance towards human history and human reality (as he conceivesthese), one that stands opposed to figurality, allegory, legend, ideality, andidyllic representation. His postwar writings represent a powerful synthesis ofhis views of history and philology. And while this final synthesis is perhapsmore Viconian than Jewish, at least outwardly, it is also the case that Auerbachmust think through his Judaizing of philology in order to arrive at a final visionthat appears in the end to be secular but that, given its point of origination, isnever fully secularized. Nor can Christianity, in Auerbach’s eyes, ever fully freeitself of its Jewish roots (for instance, the Old Testament). These larger vistaswill be touched on in the final section of this essay, the bulk of which will bedevoted to an exploration of Auerbach’s crisis in his Jewish identity at the timeof his Mimesis project.

1. Time/Date StampingLet us begin by asking a deliberately naıve question: Just when was

Auerbach’s seminal essay “Odysseus’ Scar” written? Behind that questionlurks another: How essential to its presentational strategy are the clues tothe dates that Auerbach’s essay, and the book that contains it, leaves out inthe open? Close readers of the English version will point to the brief andstartling parabasis that occurs towards the end of the essay in a lengthilydeveloped contrast between legend and history:

Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing;anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual menand groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism inGermany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before andduring the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historicalthemes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historicalcomprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individ-ual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; onlyseldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, com-paratively simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is sub-

2. I employ the term Judaizing somewhat faute de mieux. It is meant to conjure up twovulgar terms of art from the Nazi era: Verjudung, “making Jewish” or “Jewification” (signifyinga perceived threat of domination by Jews of Germans and German culture), which in turn hasits obverse in entjuden, “to deprive someone of their Jewishness” (noun form: Entjudung).Neither term is found in any contemporary German dictionary, yet both will appear below—ultimately, in a deliberate inversion of their Nazified meaning.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008 117

ject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly indanger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interestedparties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be com-posed only through the crudest simplification—with the result thatfriend and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write historyis so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions tothe technique of legend.3

I quote this passage at such length not only because of the personal noteit sounds in an otherwise Olympian treatment of Western literature butalso because of the echoes it sends reverberating through the rest of theessay. The alignment of Nazi Socialism with legend, and of both withsimplicity and surface, forces a pairing of these entities with the majorcontrast that Auerbach has been building in this section and indeedthroughout the essay, namely, that between Homeric epic and Jewish bib-lical narrative. The former is all surface, incapable of historical depth ortruth; it is the stuff of myth and legend. The latter is all depth and disturb-ing complication, even containing abysses, and it is shaped by history andhistorical truth. The alignment is telling. But more on that in a moment.

The passage is one of a handful containing temporal indices in a suite ofbrilliant literary critical essays (Mimesis) whose temporality is that of aquiet, historically bland, though not quite blind, philology, one that pro-ceeds slowly and methodically from Homer to Virginia Woolf, coveringmuch of the ground of literary history in between. The parting words of thevolume, contained in its afterword, are conciliatory and soothing. But, ifso, then they are at the same time touched with deep sadness: “I hope thatmy study will reach its readers— both my friends of former years, if they arestill alive, as well as all the others for whom it is intended. And may itcontribute to bringing together again those who have serenely preservedtheir love for our Western history [ohne Trubung bewahrt haben]” (Mi, p.557; M, p. 518; emphasis added; trans. mod.).

Trask’s translation strikingly transmutes the original in at least twoways (in addition to misconstruing the underlying syntax and more, butthat is another story).4 First, “ohne Trubung” suggests less serenity than adarkness that has been fended off; for “serenely” we should understand

3. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlandischen Literatur 2d ed.(Bern, 1959), pp. 22–23, hereafter abbreviated M; trans. Willard R. Trask under the title Mimesis:The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953; Princeton, N.J., 2003), pp. 19 –20,hereafter abbreviated Mi, emphasis added. See also the first edition of Auerbach, Mimesis:Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlandischen Literatur (Bern, 1946).

4. The printed English reads, nonsensically: “those whose love for our western history hasserenely persevered.” But even with “preserved” restored, the syntax has still been misrendered.


“without being clouded” or “undimmed.” Second, Auerbach’s originallanguage for “if they are still alive” addresses survival, not continued exis-tence (“friends of mine from former years who have survived [meineuberlebenden Freunde von einst]”), while it also implies an allusion tounnamed others who failed to survive. Either way, the remark is strangelyat odds with itself in its insistence that some, like Auerbach, have managedto preserve undimmed their love of Western history (and presumably alsoWestern literary history), despite their diasporic or otherwise riven con-dition (“bringing together again”) even as the same remark contains alament, an epitaph, and a reproach concerning the dead but not forgottenfriends from the past. Consequently, Auerbach’s remark does not so mucherase the final explicit temporal index in Mimesis, which appears earlier onthe same page, as it heightens it and darkens it: “I may also mention thatthe book was written during the war and at Istanbul.” In other words, whatthe English version misses (or alters) is the force of Auerbach’s comparisonin the closing lines of Mimesis, which we now see also contain an implicittemporal index. For with this parting remark, Auerbach is not saying that onegroup of friends outlived another group of friends. He is saying that one groupsurvived the war and another did not.5 Finally, the first of the contemporarytemporal indices in Mimesis appears in the front matter to the book that isprominently displayed in all of its editions: “Written [“in Istanbul” is added tothe English translation] between May 1942 and April 1945.”6

But what about the opening chapter, “Odysseus’ Scar”? Auerbach’s lan-guage is confusing. In the quotation from which I set out, the phrase, “thehistory which we are ourselves witnessing” suggests immediacy, while “be-fore and during the last war” suggests distance. Presumably this last phraserepresents a modification authorized by Auerbach once he had escaped theravages of war and permitted the book’s English publication in 1953, fouryears before his death—a modification and an erasure, for the German textcould not be more razor-sharp in its coordinates: “vor und wahrend des

5. Compare also Jesse M. Gellrich, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,” inLiterary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer(Stanford, Calif., 1996), p. 112. Auerbach would have kept abreast of friends who had eitherfallen victim to the Nazi regime or else nearly so, such as his close colleague from MarburgWerner Krauss; see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: ErichAuerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, pp. 14 –17; compareAuerbach, letter to Werner Krauss, 30 Jan. 1946, in Werner Krauss, Briefe 1922 bis 1976, ed. PeterJehle, Elisabeth Fillman, and Peter-Voler Springborn (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 204 –5,and Auerbach, letter to Walter Benjamin, 23 Sept. 1935, in Karlheinz Barck, “Funf Briefe ErichAuerbachs an Walter Benjamin in Paris,” Zeitschrift fur Germanistik 6 (1988): 689 –90.

6. Front matter (verso of the title page): German 1st ed. (1946): “Mai 1942 bis April 1945”;thereafter: “Geschrieben zwischen Mai 1942 und April 1945”; English edition (1953; rpt. 2003):“Written in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945.”


gegenwartigen (1942) Krieges” (“before and during the present (1942)war”). And further below in the same passage, where the English reads, “asin the last war,” the German more pointedly reads, “wie jetzt durch denKrieg” (“as now, as a consequence of the war”). The original text thusleaves no doubt as to just how immediate the war was in the mind of theexiled Jewish scholar from Germany when he penned his famous essay onHomer and the Bible in Istanbul. For whatever reasons, these last namedtemporal indices have been altered from the English translation of “Odys-seus’ Scar.”7 As a result, the urgency of Auerbach’s essay, and of his argu-ment at the point of this alteration in the opening essay, has been bluntedto a considerable degree, but by no means completely.

What scars did the war leave on this essay and, indeed, on Auerbach’sview of Greek and classical literature? I want to show that Auerbach’sjuxtaposition of the two traditions, Homeric and Jewish, is a pointed andpolemical one and that it implies a powerful critique of the (characteristi-cally German) tradition of classical philology, which had constructed acertain reading of Homer that Auerbach then goes on to expose and dis-mantle in his essay. Nor is this all. In taking the particular stance that hedoes towards the Old Testament, Auerbach is also taking on contemporaryGerman biblical criticism, both academic and popular (or rather volkisch).So, while Mimesis at once advertises and occludes its historical and situa-tional indices, both in its original printing and in its later English edition,these indices were nevertheless written unmistakably into the very fabric ofthe opening essay, into its form, structure, and argument. Far from con-stituting a project in comparativism, thanks to which Auerbach would beremembered as the father of modern comparative literature, his juxtapo-sition of the two major literary and cultural traditions of the West createsa dissonance within the projects of reading, of classicism, of Biblical schol-arship, and of literary history and criticism—in short, of philology. Auer-bach ought to be remembered as the father of incomparative literature! Byindexing the present moment in his materials, Auerbach, the displacedGerman Jew in Istanbul, is historicizing philology. At the same time he is

7. There appear to be no traces of decision making in the files of correspondence in theholdings of the Princeton University Library; see C0728, folder 9, box 1, Princeton UniversityPress records, Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library. This is a mystery, as in a fewcases entire sentences are dropped from the English translation, which must surely have beenauthorized by Auerbach, and in others there are small but crucial changes, which may or maynot have resulted from consultation with him. One thing is certain: the Princeton files showthat Auerbach was very closely and painstakingly involved in the translation process, makingchanges to his own text, to Trask’s translation, and signing off on Trask’s renderings. Anyearlier correspondence, including the copy-edited manuscript and galleys, did not make it intothis archive. Their whereabouts, alas, are unknown.


inverting the political polarities of philology, not least by contrasting thetwo treatments (Homeric/biblical-Jewish) of time, truth, and revelation inthe two traditions that he is less comparing than he is critically pittingagainst each other. And he is undertaking all of this in opposition to theingrained tendencies of an anti-Semitic classical philology and in the con-text of efforts in Germany to de-Judaize Christianity. Auerbach is in asense Judaizing philology. That is, he is constructing a new oppositionalJewish philology.

One last clue that this is so comes in the epigraph to Mimesis, printed onthe title page of the German edition and on a separate page in the Englishtranslation and drawn from the first stanza of Andrew Marvell’s mid-seventeenth-century poem, “To His Coy Mistress”: “Had we but worldenough and time . . . .” It is the essay’s very first temporal index, though itscontemporary relevance is somewhat disguised. Read a few lines furtherinto the poem, and you will see that the reference in these lines is not onlyto a mistress refusing the advances of a lover (the speaking I) but also to herrefusing them with all the obstinacy of a Jew: “I would / Love you ten yearsbefore the flood: / And you should, if you please, refuse / Till the conver-sion of the Jews,” which is to say, until the end of time.8 Auerbach’s Mi-mesis is thus inscribed with a Jewish refusal from the very first word beforeyou turn to page one.

In what immediately follows, I will attempt to disentangle the variousthemes and problems I have just been touching on as they appear in Auer-bach’s work of exile or at least to make a start on such a reading. It is onethat could be sustained through the whole of Mimesis, but again my focuswill be on the opening essay, which in any case deserves the closest possiblescrutiny.

2. Entjudung: Decanonization of the Jewish Old TestamentThe passage we started out from above gives a first clue to the deeper

significance of “Odysseus’ Scar” and then embeds some of that essay’s

8. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith(London, 2003), ll. 7–10, p. 81. See also Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The ScholarlyImagination, Medieval to Modern (New York, 2002), pp. 256 –57, and Martin Vialon, “Had Webut World Enough and Time,” in Auerbach-Alphabet: Karlheinz (Carlo) Barck zum 70.Geburtstag, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Robert Stockhammer (Berlin, 2004), n. p. [13] onAuerbach’s use of the epigraph. See Smith’s commentary on “To His Coy Mistress” in ThePoems of Andrew Marvell, pp. 75–78, on the (still much disputed) meaning of “till theconversion of the Jews.” As Michael Kicey suggests (in a private communication), there is anundeniable emphasis on world here, indeed, on its extension to an absolute limit—to the end oftime. On the all-important theme of world, which appears elsewhere in Auerbach in the guiseof the earthly (das Irdische) and the this-worldly, see below.


terms and polarities into its political commentary (legend, surface, sim-plicity; history, complexity, contradiction). It takes more than a little te-merity for an exiled Jew writing in the throes of a Nazi-led world war to setup a comparison between Homer, claimed long ago by German philologyas the high priest of all classicism, and the older Bible, which Auerbachemphatically claims as a Jewish text and as the embodiment of Jewishspiritual tradition. These moves would have been more than simply con-troversial at the time. They would have been deeply provocative. Worsestill, merely to fasten onto the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–18) was tocourt disaster, a fact that Auerbach cannot have ignored. All this needs tobe explained.

In Germany during the 1920s and into the Nazi era, a debate was raging,above all in Lutheran Protestant circles, over the question whether the OldTestament belonged in the Christian Bible at all owing to its Jewish origins.To label the Old Testament Jewish was tantamount to a racial slur; the OldTestament was felt to be un-German and therefore to have no place in theGerman church. While pro-Nazi Protestant pastors, leading the swellingpopular movement of the Deutsche Christen, sought to banish the JewishOld Testament from the Bible, its defenders (some of them Catholic) werereduced to desperate and often specious arguments, claiming for instancethat the Old Testament was not a Jewish book but an anti-Jewish book,given the denunciations of Israel by the prophets, or that parts of it weregenuine while other parts were proto-Gospels.9 Figures among the Ger-man Christian intelligentsia such as Walter Grundmann and ReinholdKrause, mostly forgotten today, were instrumental in this battle against theOld Testament in the early 1930s, while on the Catholic side stood individ-uals like Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, who was on the surface concil-iatory but was in fact no less virulent than the Protestants he opposed.10

The Jews were being squeezed out from the middle.One scene that particularly drew the ire of the German Christians was

the binding of Isaac.11 Singled out by the church authorities in Schleswig-

9. Thanks to Susannah Heschel for invaluable help with this historical background and forsome of these formulations. See, further, Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German ChristianMovement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), pp. 142–71; John David Dawson,Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 1–2, 8 –9, 83– 84;Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London, 2004); andSusannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany(forthcoming).

10. See Michael von Faulhaber, Judentum, Christentum, Germanentum: Adventspredigten(Munich, 1933).

11. Compare ibid., p. 15: “I know the objections against the Old Testament concept of God:God demanded of Abraham a human sacrifice” (emphasis added).


Holstein as one reason among others to limit or prohibit the teaching ofthe Jewish Old Testament in schools in 1933, the episode was deemed too“un-German” (undeutsch) to be representative of religious faith.12 Nodoubt the echoes between human sacrifice and the Crucifixion, for whichJews were being blamed, only compounded the indigestibility of this onescene, which anyway had a fraught history among Christian interpreters.13

Auerbach does not overtly suggest this kind of connection in the essay, buthe does so in a later chapter.14 As he writes of the Isaac story in “Odysseus’Scar,” “everyone knows it [ein jeder kennt sie]” (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11), andindeed his choice of this scene in Mimesis seems overdetermined. By 1939an entire institute was formed to eliminate the Jewish influence on Ger-man church life (this was part of the institute’s name) under Grundmann’stutelage.15 Auerbach would have been exposed to these outrages. He wasdismissed from his post in October 1935 and left Germany the followingsummer, but returned once in 1937 and remained in touch with friends tothe extent that he could.16

Plainly, in this climate of anxiety no claim about the Bible could helpbut be politicized by the time that Auerbach was writing his essay in 1942,any more than writing about Homer in opposition to the Bible could initself avoid political engagement, given the nature of the German philo-logical tradition in classics alone. That tradition was itself thoroughly con-taminated by the Jewish Question from the time of F. A. Wolf ’s lectures onAltertumswissenschaft in the early nineteenth century in Berlin, whichfounded classics on the exclusion of the Near East and the Semitic tribes inparticular, to the second of Johann Droysen’s doctoral defense theses from1831, titled A doctrina Christiana Graecorum quam Iudaeorum religiopropius abest (The Religion of the Greeks Is Closer to the Christian Doc-trine Than the Religion of the Jews), and Droysen’s three-volume master-

12. Bergen, Twisted Cross, p. 144.13. See David Lerch, Isaaks Opferung christlich gedeutet: Eine auslegungsgeschichtliche

Untersuchung (Tubingen, 1950), and Isaaks Opferung (Gen. 22) in den Konfessionen und Mediender Fruhen Neuzeit, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger and Ulrich Heinen (Berlin, 2006). See tooKierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) and Hegel’s youthful anti-Semitic work, Der Geist desChristentums und sein Schicksal (1799), with the excellent discussion of the latter in MiriamLeonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Postwar French Thought (Oxford,2005), pp. 150 –52.

14. “For example, if an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring thesacrifice of Christ” (Mi, p. 73; M, p. 75).

15. See Walter Grundmann, Die Entjudung des religiosen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscherTheologie und Kirche (Weimar, 1939), and, generally, Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology:Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence onGerman Church Life,” Church History 63, no. 4 (1994): 587– 605.

16. See Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’” esp. pp. 15–19, 251 n. 27.


piece, Geschichte des Hellenismus (1836 – 43), which made similar claims, tothe activities of many of the leading scholars in classical studies during the1920s and 1930s, who appeared to be either dubiously conservative andsympathetic to National Socialist ideology or else were actively instrumen-tal to it.17 We will want to return to Auerbach’s stylization of Homer in thissame light below.

Nor could Auerbach keep private and professional politics apart, as hisautobiographical statement quoted in the epigraph to this essay, drawnfrom his published dissertation of 1921 (his appended Lebenslauf), sug-gests. Two telltale clues from his correspondence with Walter Benjaminshould suffice to indicate how inseparable philology and religious identitywere in Auerbach’s mind at the time. Here is the first, from the fall of 1935:“At Marburg [the university] I am completely surrounded by people whoare not of our origin (unserer Herkunft) [namely, who are not Jewish],whose conditions are entirely different [because they are not threatenedwith imminent dismissal]—and [nevertheless they] all think [in the end]the same way as I do [about the Nazi regime].”18 The second bit of evidencecomes from a report on his new digs in Istanbul a year later: “Spitzer leftme 7 German assistants, 6 of whom are Christian (christlicher Abkunft), allhaving emigrated in 1933, each excellent in his own way.”19 In other words,whenever Auerbach stepped into a department of romance philology, heknew exactly which side of the religious divide anyone stood on—and so,in all likelihood, did his colleagues, Christians and Jews alike. We shouldhardly be surprised, then, to find brief interludes like the following, from1932, on Voltaire’s “hatred of the Jews (Judenhaß), so ill-suited to an en-lightened mentality.”20 This bitter comment may be a remarkable and dar-

17. For background, see Anthony Grafton, “Juden und Griechen bei Friedrich AugustWolf,” in Friedrich August Wolf: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Reinhard Markner andGiuseppe Veltri (Stuttgart, 1999), pp. 9 –31; Arnaldo Momigliano, “J. G. Droysen betweenGreeks and Jews,” in A. D. Momigliano: Studies on Modern Scholarship, ed. G. W. Bowersockand T. J. Cornell (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 147– 61; James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of theFuture (Stanford, Calif., 2000), pp. 273– 86; and William M. Calder and Maximilian Braun,“‘Tell It Hitler! Ecco!’ Paul Friedlander on Werner Jaeger’s Paideia,” Quaderni di storia 22(Jan.–June 1996): 211– 48.

18. Auerbach, letter to Benjamin, 6 Oct. 1935, in Barck, “Funf Briefe Erich Auerbachs anWalter Benjamin in Paris,” p. 690; my supplements (confirmed by Barck and Martin Vialon).Auerbach’s immediate replacement is likely to have been an NSDAP member; see Gumbrecht,“‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’” p. 15.

19. Auerbach, letter to Benjamin, 3 Jan. 1937, in Barck, “Funf Briefe Erich Auerbachs anWalter Benjamin in Paris,” p. 692.

20. Auerbach, “Uber den historischen Ort Rousseaus” (1932), Gesammelte Aufsatze zurromanischen Philologie (Bern, 1967), p. 292. He further labels Voltaire’s attitude an “atavism” ofChristian apologetics (ibid.).


ing intrusion of racial politics into scholarship, yet it is hardly anaberration for Auerbach.

Against this background, Auerbach’s defiance—and one is tempted tosay defiantly pro-Jewish position (some early critics apparently did notshrink from labeling it “anti-Christian”)21—is unmistakable, not only inthe lead essay in Mimesis but also elsewhere, for instance in his famousessay on biblical reading, “Figura,” which was likewise composed in exile,and which resonates with the contemporary debates in Germany:

The Old Testament controversies of the ensuing period [namely, afterPaul’s intervention into Biblical exegesis] kept [Paul’s] conceptionand interpretation alive; true, the influence of the Judaeo-Christianswith their fidelity to the law soon diminished, but a new oppositioncame from those who wished either to exclude the Old Testament alto-gether or to interpret it only abstractly and allegorically—wherebyChristianity would necessarily have lost its conception of a providen-tial history, its intrinsic concreteness, and with these no doubt someof its immense persuasive power. In the struggle against those who de-spised the Old Testament and tried to despoil it of its meaning, the fig-ural method again proved its worth.22

The decanonization of the Old Testament under the German NationalSocialists, a process that would soon be called de-Judaization (Entjudung),had ancient and medieval precedents (Marcion in the second century, theCathari in the twelfth). Recent scholarship had kept that memory alive,especially thanks to the redoubtable biblical scholar and Marcion specialist(and latter-day Marcionite) from Berlin, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930),whose final monograph on Marcion was published in 1920 and again inexpanded form in 1924. Harnack, too, urged the decanonization of “thebook of the inferior, Jewish God.”23 Though Auerbach mentions Harnack(but not his work on Marcion) in his surviving writings, it is hard toimagine that he would have agreed with this verdict by Harnack, let alonewith the resurgence of Marcionism in contemporary Germany. Quite thecontrary.

To what extent is Auerbach’s essay on figura a meditation on the

21. “Several reviewers called the book . . . anti-Christian (antichristlich),” an idea thatAuerbach replies “was far removed” from his aims (Auerbach, “Epilegomena to Mimesis,”trans. Jan M. Ziolkowsi, in Mi., p. 570; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated “E”).

22. Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, trans.Ralph Mannheim (1938; New York, 1959), pp. 51–52.

23. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Darmstadt, 1960), p.224.


present-day status of the Jewish Old Testament and the strategies that hadeither preserved its ultimate meaning and dignity or that were seeking toabolish these? Unlike “Odysseus’ Scar,” “Figura” does not index itself inthe present. Yet its stance towards history as a touchstone of lived reality iscomparable to that of Mimesis. Far from being a defense of allegorism andits spiritual abstractions, the essay argues for the concrete reality of theJewish tradition and, only as a last resort, its figural interpretation.24 Whatis more, the passage just quoted is a powerful indictment of the Christianreduction of Judaic religion, by allegory, to a prelude to itself. The topicalironies of the last sentence (“those who despised the Old Testament andtried to despoil it of its meaning”) are unmistakable. They are typical ofAuerbach’s argumentative strategies in Mimesis, to which we can nowturn.

Given what we have seen, one could hardly expect the later essay to offeran impartial assessment of the two literatures it sets out to compare, and itdoes not do so. On the contrary, “Odysseus’ Scar” is heavily weighted andpolitically charged—not only in favor of the Jewish tradition but alsoagainst the Homeric tradition, as can be quickly indicated.25 A first set ofindices: Auerbach cites and analyzes the Hebrew original once (Hinne-ni)but never Homer’s Greek—a telling omission in itself.26 He knew no He-brew27 but plenty of Greek, as he could demonstrate elsewhere when hewanted to do so—for instance, later on in Mimesis itself, where he doesfinally quote and analyze Homer’s original Greek (see Mi, p. 108; M, p.106).28 In “Odysseus’ Scar” Auerbach had, in other words, to go out of hisway to suppress what he knew (Greek) and to foreground what he knewnext to nothing about (Hebrew) in order to make a point that is and is notphilological, not least because the argument he is making has as much to

24. See Auerbach, “Figura,” p. 50 (writing contra Pauline allegorical interpretation). Theconcrete reality of Jewish tradition is secured by the definition of figura as “something real andhistorical which announces something else that is also real and historical” (p. 29).

25. For the general point about this bias, which is rarely noticed, see Carl Landauer,“Mimesis and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing,” German Studies Review 11 (Feb. 1988): 92(though I do not accept his thesis about Auerbach’s self-mythologizing). See esp. JonathanFreedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America(New York, 2000), pp. 249 –50 n. 39, a prescient note.

26. Abraham “says, indeed: Here I am— but the Hebrew word means only something like‘behold me,’ and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but amoral position in respect to God” (Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10). The Hebrew transliteration is given onthe next page: “the words in which [Abraham] answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here” (Mi, p.9; M, p. 11).

27. Thanks to Martin Vialon for confirming this for me.28. Lerer, Error and the Academic Self, p. 225 also notices that not a single word of Greek

appears in the essay, but he fails to note the corresponding fact about Hebrew—possiblybecause he assumes that the Bible is merely “a foil” for Homer in Auerbach’s eyes (pp. 221, 239).


do with his own tacit attentiveness and inattentiveness to language as itdoes with any of the features of the languages in question. One suspects hisstrategy of neglect succeeded, to judge from the reactions of contemporaryclassicists; the imbalance could be sensed at the time even if its staging canonly be fully appreciated today. But more on this below. Second, he usesthe words Jewish or Israel and their equivalents nearly a dozen times, ca-sually but insistently—and, now we can see, provocatively, in a kind ofre-Jewification (Verjudung) of the biblical text.29 Further, and no less im-portant, in treating the Old Testament as a counterexample (Gegenbeispiel;see Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13), Auerbach is not so much offering a comparison as heis creating a stark contrast or, rather, as I want to show, an incommensu-rability that renders comparisons and contrasts moot. But, in order toappreciate the full reach of this countering of examples, we will need to getclear on the terms involved.

By Homer and what we would call the Homeric tradition Auerbachmeans us to understand first Homer and next the Greek mentality thatHomer embodies and then eventually passes on to Rome and into laterantiquity, as this was understood in modernity.30 Homer for Auerbach is notthe historical, original rhapsode. He is merely an emblem, ultimately, forthe uses to which Homer has been put in the course of his reception,particularly in the classicizing tradition in modern Germany and above allin the immediate contemporary present. In point of fact, Homer has noreal existence for Auerbach, any more than he did for Vico (or Wolf, forthat matter): he appears principally as an adjective—Homeric— or else asan equivalent expression for his poems or their style, which perform all theactions and claim all our attention. Ultimately, Homer and Homeric cometo stand for the whole of the classical past in Auerbach, under the sway, andenchantment, of its founding literary tradition.

By Jew and Jewish Auerbach is in the first instance pointing to a coun-tertradition to the Western classical tradition, but also to the Semitic Otherof the anti-Judaic and increasingly anti-Semitic tradition of classicism it-self. That is to say, he is pitting one cliche against another. Not to put toofine a point upon it, Auerbach virtually condemns the classical tradition toa kind of blindness inherited from “Homer’”s own; that tradition is an

29. “The (so-called) Elohist” (Mi, p. 8; M, p. 9); “the so-called Jahvist” (Mi, p. 12; M, p. 15);“the Jews” (this appears three times in one paragraph on Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10 alone); “the Jewishwriters” (Mi, p. 13; M, p. 15); “the Jewish view of man” (deleted from the English; M, p. 23); andso on.

30. Compare the essay’s close (Mi, p. 23; M, p. 26) and the sequel essay, esp. Mi, p. 38; M, p.41– 42. Auerbach does not actually use the term Homeric tradition; he merely invokes theconcept.


empty fiction celebrating shallow and empty fictions, while the Jewish tra-dition flourishes historically in the biblical past, circulating around a felthistorical reality (whether or not that reality is verifiable; such is the natureof belief [see Mi, p. 14; M, p. 16]), or at the very least one that is presentedas real (see Mi, p. 18; M, p. 21), and then as the memory of that past viewedfrom Auerbach’s present. Auerbach’s historicizing stance towards the Jew-ish Bible, like his “return” to the Old Testament itself (a striking if mo-mentary novelty in his scholarship), is very much in keeping with themodern European Haskalah, a Jewish secular movement, which since thenineteenth century if not earlier had accorded the Old Testament a new-found prominence as a text to be read and studied, as a reservoir of Jewishidentity, and “as a treasury of moral examples, but also as a history.” Crit-ical distance and identification worked hand in hand here.31 Moreover,historicizing claims about Auerbach’s “anachronistic” use of the termsJews and Judaism or about his mistaken simplification of either Jews orGreeks fall wide of the mark.32 The terms are perfectly legible in contem-porary biblical and classical scholarship and agitprop. Auerbach is simplyworking within the schematic frameworks of his own day in which suchterms, characterizations, and even cliches were commonplace, and he isgiving them one last rigorous—and critical—reduction.33

3. Verjudung: Greeks and Jews in “Odysseus’ Scar”That’s a lot to claim, so let me try to substantiate all this now in what

follows. Some of the details will be familiar, though I suspect that these willbecome increasingly unfamiliar as we proceed. In literary and stylistic

31. Yaacov Shavit, Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making ofthe Modern Secular Jew, trans. Chaya Naor and Niki Werner (London, 1997), p. 374; see pp.184 – 85, 263, 374 –75.The Bible thus supplanted rabbinic literature and Talmudic exegesis.Hermann Cohen is a near-contemporary parallel and a proximate one as well (he had aprominent following at Marburg). See his essays comparing the Jewish prophets and Plato,Judische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1924), 1:262– 83, 306 –30. Chapter 1 ofMimesis obviously fits into the same broad genre.

32. See David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” Comparative Literature 47 (Spring 1995): 112,and Gellrich, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,” p. 114. Both notice the“anachronism” of Jews but do not point to contemporary literature from the time. On Greeks,see the discussion of the philological critiques of Auerbach below. (Damrosch is, moreover,among the majority who read Auerbach as an exponent of Homeric classicism; see Damrosch,“Auerbach in Exile,” pp. 112–13.)

33. One telltale sign that he has done so is his otherwise outrageous claim that Homer’sepics cannot be allegorized or otherwise submitted to “interpretation”; they are too flat for this,they contain no meaning and no content, as he says in a rather savage (and possibly perverse)moment; see Mi, p. 13; M, p. 16. The claim rivals Plato’s condemnation of Homer’s lack ofcontent in the Ion. Here, Auerbach is merely being rigorously consistent; the poems mustremain superficial so as to be true to their identity as projections of modern German ideology(see below).


terms, the Odyssey is marked by a series of qualifiers that can be rattled off:the epic narrative is all foreground, no background, all surface, no depth;its action is clear and “uniformly illuminated” (Mi, p. 3; M, p. 5); appear-ances are “visible and palpable” (Mi, p. 6; M, p. 8); its narrative follows theprinciple of out of mind, out of place. What it doesn’t see it forgets, andonce it picks up the thread again, it returns to where things were left off asif no time had passed in between (this is now known as Zielinski’s Law).Hence, there is no past, no narrative perspective or depth, no layering, onlya perpetual sequence of present moments, each equally to hand, all equallysignificant.

The Old Testament is by contrast Homer’s photographic negative.Shrouded in mystery and obscurity, it is in fact marked by privatives andprivations, all of them deriving from the attributes of God, who is withoutform, without place, alone, “not there [nicht dort]” (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11).Actions take place in a purely abstract way, rigorously unqualified—“with-out an epithet” (ohne Epitheton), Auerbach writes (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11),using, and negating, a conscious Homericism (“epithets” [Epitheta]: Mi, p.17; M, p. 21)—voided of material and phenomenal character, silentlyrouted to their predestined goal, the way Abraham marches throughempty, blank space for three days to arrive at the sacrificial altar indicatedto him by Yahweh. The space Abraham moves through is that of an ab-stract moral universe, not one with spatial extension, while the time thatlapses is that of a symbolic eternity that finds its meaning in a retroactivefulfillment only. In place of the unbearable lightness of being from Homer,we have in the Bible only an oppressive intensity or “overwhelming sus-pense [druckende spannung]” (Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13), filled with terror, inde-terminacy, uncertainty, vacillation, and interruption, and all the more sofor everything’s being left unsaid; it is a Kafkaesque world. Where theHomeric epic is all foreground and appearances contain nothing morethan themselves, calmly (ruhig) and blissfully concealing nothing, patentlyrevealing themselves to be the fictions they are (see Mi, p. 13; M, p. 15), theBible is all background; meaning lies in the depths, forever receding anx-iously into obscurity and symbolism, into moral intensity, into truths,indeed into sublime abysses. So, too, Homer is simplicity itself, charming,always coherent, overseen by prudential divinities, while the Bible is rivenwith conflict and fraught with complication, disunity, and doubt, charac-terized by a lack of obvious coherence, and propelled by the search forultimate meaning and coherence.

Two more significant differences need to be stated. For here, differencesin style amount to differences in mentalities, a point that Auerbach’s sty-listic analysis, indeed his whole theory of style, is aimed to establish in any


event. First, where Homer’s fictions are horizontal, paratactic, static, andthe stuff of legend, the Jewish Bible is vertical, developmental, layered(geschichtet), and historical (geschichtlich).34 The difference is mirrored inthe characters of each literature. Homeric heroes are frozen in time, similarto the fixed epithets they wear like so many decorations; they do not de-velop; they do not even age (Auerbach cites the example of Odysseus).Biblical characters, by contrast, do develop and age. Battered by time andevents, they grow within; they mature: “Herein lies the reason why thegreat figures of the Old Testament are so much more fully developed, somuch more fraught with their own biographical past, so much more dis-tinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes,” and so on (Mi, p. 17; M,p. 20). They are thus deeply “historical” creatures, and their weatheredphysiognomies are merely the outward signs of their moral fortunes andmisfortunes (Mi, p. 18; M, p. 20).

Second, the Homeric delight in naıve fiction betrays a less enviable trait:a desire to cater to the audience, to win their affections, indeed, to flatterthem. Hence, Auerbach writes, while making an effortless glissando thatstarts off with a cliche of classicism:

Delight in physical [or sensuous] existence is everything to them, andtheir highest aim [ihr hochstes Streben] is to make that delight percep-tible to us . . . in order that we . . . may take pleasure in their mannerof enjoying their savory present. . . . And thus they bewitch us andingratiate themselves to us [schmeicheln sich bei uns ein] until we livewith them in the reality of their lives. . . . It does not matter whetherwe know that all this is only legend, “make-believe.” [Mi, p. 13; M, p.15; emphasis added]

The Homeric poems are like narcotics, intentionally so; they seek “to makeus forget our own reality for a few hours” (Mi, p. 15; M, p. 18)—and notonly our own reality but their own unreality, too.

The Hebrew Bible, on the contrary, is a tyrannical force that coerces itsreaders into compliance, unapologetically and without a trace of seduc-tion. And as such, as a coercive force, winning over the reader is hardly theobjective:

34. See Mi, p. 12; M, p. 14 –15 for the latter pairing. The English translation obscures theproximity of the terms by rendering the first with “stratified” and the latter with “story.”Compare also Mi, p. 23; M, p. 26: “die Phanomene des geschichtlichen Werdens und derVielschichtigkeit menschlicher Problematik” (“the phenomena of historical becoming and of the‘multilayeredness’ of the human problem”) (my emphasis). The other pairings are more familiarand obvious, but see Mi, p. 17; M, p. 19 in particular for the horizontal-vertical imagery.


The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s,it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scrip-ture stories . . . insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autoc-racy [Alleinherrschaft]. . . . The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s,court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us andenchant us—they seek to subject [unterwerfen] us, and if we refuse tobe subjected we are rebels. [Mi, pp. 14 –15; M, p. 17; emphasis added]

We can overhear in Auerbach’s description of the narrative style of theBible the religious and spiritual fervor of Judaism—its claims to monothe-ism, its exclusivity, its obstinacy, its vaulting universalism, its doctrines ofworldly and messianic promise, its arresting moral rigor.35 If we listen hardenough, we will also hear in this same account the voice of God addressingAbraham and then the bewildered but finally submissive response of Abra-ham. The choice of scene is symbolic and resonant (Alleinherrschaft cannothelp but conjure up another, darker kind of interpellation for a PrussianJew in 1942 and a radical uncertainty as to who exactly it was that issued hismarching orders—was it Hitler or God?), as is, of course, the very focus onAbraham, the exilic founder of the Jewish race (Gen. 12:1– 4).36

The contrast in this case would be with Odysseus’s nostos, or return,which is significantly scarred, but also with Odysseus’s violent repressionof his naming (by Eurycleia), in contrast to Abraham’s open acceptance ofhis naming (by God): “Here I am!” Not for nothing did Auerbach wish forhis essay to be remembered—literally scarred— by the word scar (Narbe)in the title, signaling a wound, a trauma, and a stigma, but also its conceal-ment and its hardened (if not healed) condition. But there is more toAuerbach’s essay than an allegory of exile and hoped-for return, not leastof all because it is unclear that an identification between Auerbach andOdysseus can be sustained. But let us return to Abraham.

Auerbach’s description of the scene of God’s call to Abraham and hisgradual weaving of it into his larger account of the Bible is nothing short ofbrilliant. The scene is, perforce, an illustration of the very subjection thatAuerbach is describing above. Only, here the coercion is filtered throughan abrupt and baffling interpellation:

35. Compare Peter Schafer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World(Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

36. Gen. 12:1: “Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and fromthy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.” About this passage,Robert Alter writes, “The divine imperative to head out for an unspecified place resembles, asRashi [a canonical French medieval commentator on the Old Testament] observes, God’sterrible call to Abraham in [Gen.] chapter 22” (Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation andCommentary [New York, 1996], p. 50 n. 1)—an insight that will not have escaped Auerbach.


“And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt [versuchte]Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, here I am!” [Gen.22:1]. Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer.Where are the two speakers? We are not told. . . . Nor are we told any-thing of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly [so schrecklich].. . . Unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some un-known height or depth and calls: Abraham! [Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10; em-phasis added]37

Auerbach first adduces the scene in the guise of a stylistic analysis. Buthe immediately raises the stakes when he goes on to observe that the Jewishconception of God that governs the laws of his unrepresentability, as here,is also directly related to the Jews’ deepest views and outlooks on the world,which is hardly a stylistic point: “The concept of God held by the Jews isless a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and rep-resenting things [ihre Auffasungs- und Darstellungsweise]” (Mi, p. 8; M, p.10). And so, too, the way Auerbach treats the scene is to set it up as an objectlesson in symptomatic reading, as a kind of Jewish philology of Jewish textsand their underlying Jewish spiritual mentality. The scene itself is verymuch an allegory of reading—not of reading pure and simple but of Jewishreading. More specifically, it is introduced as a way of illuminating Abra-ham’s reception of God’s terrible imperative, which is to say his baffled butfinally accepting response to it; everything else fades away into insignifi-cance, including the moment of sacrifice itself (see Mi, pp. 10 –11; M, pp.12–13). Pared down to its essentials like this, the scene represents a scene ofreading— of obscure and mysterious signs—while the essay presents uswith another scene of reading, that of one Jew (Auerbach) reading the wayanother Jew (Abraham) attempts to read God.

In between the two appeals from God, each deafening and harrowing,each equally abrupt and inexplicable, each requiring utter submission andmoral interpellation (or else unthinkable rebellion and exile), comes thestring of minimalist descriptions we have been discussing: the privations ofform, of local and spatial markers, the absence of landscape, the sheerabstraction of a moral action transpiring in the barest of outlines, inexo-rably, filled with oppressive suspense, and the silent aging of Abraham,bewildered at his having been so chosen. Again, all this stands in sharpcontrast to the Homeric poems, which, owing to their elaborate use of

37. The English translation cites the King James version; Auerbach pointedly cites Luther’sversion, which I have rendered here. On the heated politics of the Lutheran Bible during theNazi era, see Bergen, Twisted Cross, p. 147, and, for example, Grundmann, Die Entjudung desreligiosen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscher Theologie und Kirche, p. 10.


epithets, their thick description, and their multiple digressions, actually“prevent the reader from concentrating exclusively [einseitig] on a presentcrisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent theestablishment of an oppressive suspense” (Mi, p. 11; M, p. 12; trans. mod.;emphasis added). Reduced to an absolute minimum (of terror), the Bibleis tyrannical indeed, morally oppressive and tyrannical, while the Homericepics are not so much digressive as they act to dull one’s moral focusaltogether, at least on Auerbach’s strong reading of them.

So put, the Homeric epics appear in a somewhat less enviable light. Insheer comparative terms, Homer shrivels beside the Jewish Bible, which inturn excels in every way. As the essay progresses, the points in the Bible’sfavor mount up. Indeed, in Auerbach’s hands the Bible is destined to usurpthe classical labels of (Schillerian) “tragedy” and finally of “epic” itself (Mi,p. 11; M, p. 13). Summing up, Auerbach concludes, “the Old Testament, inso far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three do-mains [covered in the essay]: legend, historical reporting, and interpreta-tive historical theology,” whereas Homer is limited to legend only (Mi, p.21; M, p. 24), a limitation that, as we have seen, has ominous echoes of itsown. The Old Testament indeed spans creation to the end of time, but notso Homer; the former takes in not only history but also Weltgeschichte (seeMi, p. 16; M, p. 18) and not only world history but also history with moraland ethical significance, capable of the “imitation of real life,” which isafter all the thrust of Mimesis (Mi, p. 119; M, p. 116).

But where the truly radical thrust of Auerbach’s comparison comes tothe fore is where all comparisons cease to matter. For if you add up the twonotional columns in which the respective qualities of the two epics havebeen arrayed, it quickly becomes apparent that the Homeric and the bib-lical epics—the secular and Judeo-Christian bibles (already an eighteenth-century conceit)—are not merely incomparable, they are actuallyincommensurable; there is no common measure by which to gauge them.Thus, “scenes such as those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and hissons, between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, between Rebekah, Jacob, andEsau, and so on, are inconceivable [or unrepresentable: nicht vorstellbar] inthe Homeric style” (Mi, p. 22; M, p. 25). The point is phenomenologicaland not just stylistic. “Auffassungsweise” here discloses its full meaning. Itis not just that Homer’s style cannot encompass, and therefore cannotgrasp or know (“represent”), a deep and intimate degree of emotionalfreight. It is that such scenes and events would be opaque to Homer’scharacters and therefore also to the author of the epics himself: “compli-cations arise which would be utterly incomprehensible [unfaßbar] to theHomeric heroes.” The reason is that “the latter must have palpable [hand-


festen] and clearly expressible reasons for their conflicts and enmities, andthese work themselves out in free battles,” whereas the biblical heroes areforever rent by deep, smoldering conflicts involving moral dilemmas thatlie well below the surface (Mi, p. 22; M, p. 26). In its largest implications,Auerbach’s argument suggests the need to uncouple or at the very least torethink “Athens and Jerusalem,” a conceptual pairing that has dominatedWestern ideologies for centuries. But Auerbach has more immediate tar-gets in mind.

What we have in the contrast between the two epics is a contrast be-tween two conceptual schemes or psychologies that are being shown to bemutually untranslatable. Once again, the terms favor the Jewish case. Noris this all. The Homeric psychology that Auerbach unveils through hisnarrative analysis is symbolically charged, for it can be shown to match uppoint for point with the psychology that was conventionally ascribed toHomer and to Homer’s Greeks from the age of Winckelmann, Humboldt,and Schiller and then well into the nineteenth century and beyond.38 Itsdistinguishing traits are naıvete, simplicity, superficiality, sensuousness,and so on—in other words, traits that Nazi propagandists would embracein their image of the Greeks and then reapply to other aspects of contem-porary German identity, as for instance in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia(1938), with its bold celebration of classical forms, or in Ernst Buschor’sVom Sinn der griechischen Standbilder (On the Meaning of Classical Stat-ues) (1942), all following Hitler’s very own cues in Mein Kampf.39 Auer-bach’s Homer is in a sense a caricature of the inherited classicized Homer,itself a cliche familiar already to Nietzsche in the mid-nineteenth century;he is all surface, no depth, all foreground, momentary presence, clarity,brilliance, sensuousness, simplicity, tranquil appearance (pure phenom-enality), Apollonian.40 From one angle marmoreal, from another these

38. See Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, pp. 167–224.39. See George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New

York, 1996) for this and other examples; volume 1 of Werner Jaeger, Paideia: Die Formung desgriechischen Menschen, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1934), with the fascinating (and damning) marginalia byPaul Friedlander in his personal copy (on which, see Calder and Braun, “‘Tell It Hitler!Ecco!’”); Ernst Buschor, Vom Sinn der griechischen Standbilder (Berlin, 1942), esp. fig. 46;Andrew F. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 1:31,whose commentary on Buschor’s Nazism is invaluable; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. in 1(1925–27; Munich, 1942), pp. 453, 470; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edward Jephcott (1944; Stanford, Calif., 2002),pp. 36 –37; and, generally, Volker Losemann, “Classics in the Second World War,” in NaziGermany and the Humanities, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach (Oxford, 2007), pp.306 –39.

40. See Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (Stanford,Calif., 2000) and Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, pp. 225– 80. Nietzsche summed it allup in a note from 1869 –70, which Auerbach’s language echoes: “The ‘Hellenic’ since


features are somewhat disturbing, for what do they conceal? The brillianceof the present conceals the obscurity (Dunkel) of the past, which is dimlyfelt but never articulated (see Mi, p. 6; M, p. 8). For all its tranquility, thereis a compulsiveness to the Homeric narration, which restlessly moves fromforeground to foreground; it is driven by a need (Bedurfniss) (see Mi, p. 5;M, p. 7). Why? The retarding effect, while seemingly lacking a goal (see Mi,pp. 4; M, p. 6), acts like a diversion, in every sense of the word. Staked onpure pleasure, on the sheer pleasure of sensuous existence and aestheticplay, and on lies (see Mi, pp. 13, 14; M, p. 15, 16), the Homeric poems betraya less flattering side, as we saw. Now we can see one more of its attractions:disavowal. The Homeric world is ahistorical (another inherited cliche).41

Indeed, it represents a diversion from history and reality (“even when themost terrible things are occurring” [Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13]) and a flight intofictional legend and myth. Its resemblances to the current situation in NaziGermany are all too evident in Auerbach’s eyes; the allure of ideology, withits easy simplifications, is a dangerous path: “To write [true, complex]history [in times such as these, in 1942] is so difficult that most historiansare forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.”

Auerbach will have none of these concessions and therefore will makeno concessions to the historical blindnesses of Homer, construed in theway they are by Auerbach, which is to say, by the tradition he has squarelyin his sights. But if Auerbach’s project fails as a literary and philologicalcomparison from the very start owing to the way he has set up his two textsas incommensurable entities, it nevertheless succeeds critically and ethi-

Winckelmann: an intense superficialization (Verflachung). . . . Beauty and superficiality(Flachheit) in league, indeed necessary. Scandalous theory!” (quoted in Porter, Nietzsche and thePhilology of the Future, p. 251). He goes on to denigrate this kind of classicism with anunfortunate (and very un-Auerbachian) term in the next breath: “Judea!” (Friedrich Nietzsche,Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869 –1874, vol. 7 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli andMazzino Montinari [Berlin, 1999], p. 81). Remarkably, these Apollonian traits persistunchanged with Hermann Frankel’s account of Homer in his Dichtung und Philosophie desfruhen Griechentums: Eine Geschichte der griechischen Epik, Lyrik, und Prosa bis zur Mitte desfunften Jahrhunderts (1951; Munich, 1993), pp. 75–93.

41. For the cliche, see Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, pp. 192, 206, 222.Auerbach surely knew that Homer’s epics contain a strong sense of historical depth, evenprofundity, as for instance whenever they gesture to the distant past from the future (in thepoet’s present), as in the case of the ancient burial mound at Batieia (Iliad 2.811–14) or in thecase of the soon-to-be-vanished Achaean Wall (Iliad 12.3–33; compare 7.454–63—so the ancientGreek commentaries on the passage), or whenever they gesture to the uncertain future from theepic past (as in haunting epitaphic utterances spoken by characters: “Somebody will saysomeday, ‘So-and-so once fought here and died’”). See most recently Jonas Grethlein, DasGeschichtsbild der Ilias: Eine Untersuchung aus phanomenologischer und narratologischerPerspektive (Gottingen, 2006).


cally. Indeed, it is Auerbach’s finely discriminating ethical sensibility thatrenders the project of comparison and evaluation possible, albeit on anonliterary level. What is more, if his strategy of aligning himself withJewish biblical history and against the German present strikes us as un-usual today, it was in fact an obvious option for intellectuals who wereseeking to oppose the political realities of the time. Thomas Mann hadchosen to confront prevailing ideologies through his mere choice of sub-ject matter in his exilic epic narrative from 1933, Josef und seine Bruder. AndSigmund Freud had done the same with his rewriting of Jewish history inMoses and Monotheism (1934 –38), which likewise sought to disturb con-temporary ideologies of myth and religion,42 though it might be added thatthe actual twist in Freud’s essay lay in cutting the ground out from underthe National Socialists and their sympathizers and in showing how, unbe-knownst to themselves, “their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Chris-tians.”43 Of these three instances of strategic undoing, Freud’s isundoubtedly the most perverse, while Auerbach’s is the most subtly insis-tent yet straightforward in its reversals of accepted social and religiousvalues. Auerbach’s undermining of the classical ideal from within, by re-ducing Homer to a reflective surface with no access to itself and one that ismoreover denied all possible escapes in Dionysian ecstasy (see Mi, p. 14; M,p.16), is nevertheless as powerful an intervention into canonical Germanculture as any other from the time.44

One of the most appealing features of Auerbach’s essay is the exquisitehistorical consciousness that it discovers in the Jewish biblical narrative orelse that he ascribes to it. The Old Testament is drenched in history; this iswhat gives it its terrifying depth and verticality. It is “genuine” history, “dieechte Geschichte,” which is to say a history without “the tendency to asmoothing down and harmonizing of events . . . a simplification of mo-tives, . . . which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development,” but insteadactually brings to light “the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events,the psychological and factual cross-purposes”—the very sorts of things, inother words, that Homeric legend and Nazi propaganda would each dis-own and evade (Mi, p. 20; M, p. 23). And so it is now possible to see how in

42. See Eric Downing, After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and theTradition of Bildung (Detroit, 2006), pp. 169 –73 on both Mann and Freud, and p. 322 n. 33 onthe fantasy of the distinctness of Semites and Hellenes in the German racial consciousness at thefin-de-siecle (a boundary that Nietzsche was far more willing to breach).

43. Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, andJames Strachey, 11 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1969 –75), 9:539.

44. I should note that because Auerbach’s quarrel is strictly with the German traditions, hedoes not even implicitly allude to the Arnoldian concept of “Hebrews and Hellenes” inMimesis.


assuming the parti pris of the biblical drive to history, some of which issubsumed in his own attempt to historicize the Bible, Auerbach is at thesame time endorsing the critically minded imperative “Always histori-cize.” By investing the Old Testament narrative with perspectival depth,historical possibilities, and a quest for moral truth, not ingratiating andentertaining lies, Auerbach is inverting the modern edifice of philology; heis Judaizing it and thereby enacting a kind of philological revenge in thename of a tyrannical, terrifying, all-seeing but hidden Jewish god.

Nor should we ignore the methodological fierceness of Mimesis itself. Ina sense, what Auerbach is laying claim to in that work is nothing less thanAlleinherrschaft. There is a capriciousness to his position; he is every bit asarbitrary and demanding with his subject matter as is Yaweh imposing hiswill on Abraham (see Mi, pp. 556 –57; M, pp. 517–18). This may be no morethan a pose. But relative to his previous scholarship, which was modest bycomparison, Mimesis is a striking declaration by Auerbach of his totalmastery of Weltliteratur well beyond the confines of romance philology.He was plainly out to make a statement, a fierce, proud, and contumaciousone, in the teeth of the German establishment that had deprived him of hisLehrstuhl, library, and home.

The current attempts in some quarters to “correct” or “refute” Auer-bach’s philology miss the contextual premises of his essay entirely.45 Theattempts in other quarters to elevate Auerbach as the hero of a “secular”world literature, a critical tack begun by Edward Said, likewise serve toremove the sting from Auerbach’s pointed and even strongly Jewish criti-cal writing, while at the same time glossing over its unmistakable politicalcast in the context of German National Socialism—though again, the pol-itics of Auerbach’s wartime writing may be largely lost on his postwarreaders.46

45. For example, see Helmut Kuhn, “Literaturgeschichte als Geschichtsphilosophie,”review of Mimesis, by Auerbach, Philosophische Rundschau 11 (Feb. 1963): 222– 48; NormanAustin, “The Function of Digressions in the Iliad,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 7(Winter 1966): 295–312; Irene J. F. de Jong, “Eurykleia and Odysseus’s Scar: Odyssey19.393– 466,” Classical Quarterly 35, no. 2, n.s. (1985): 517–30; and Adolf Kohnken, “Die Narbedes Odysseus: Ein Beitrag zur homerisch-epischen Erzahltechnik,” in Homer: Die Dichtung undihre Deutung, ed. Joachim Latacz (Darmstadt, 1991), pp. 491–514. Mimesis met with an initialonslaught of criticism from German classicists, such as Ludwig Edelstein and Otto Regenbogen,as Auerbach notes in “E.” The more recent criticisms by philologists are in the same spirit,merely updated.

46. See Edward W. Said, “Secular Criticism,” The World, the Text, and the Critic(Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 5–9, “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition,” in Mi,pp. ix–xxxii, and “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World,” Boundary 2 31 (Summer 2004):11–34 — unless, that is, one accepts the attempted retrieval by Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach inIstanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical


4. The “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (1953)My argument is that the time and date stamp of “Odysseus’ Scar” is best

read off the essay itself, which is not to deny that there are abundant cluesin the remainder of Mimesis that point in the same direction, though nosingle essay is as powerfully telling or moving as the opening chapter. Butthere is one more document that leaves absolutely no doubt as to thetemporal indices of that essay and its encompassing work, namely, the“Epilegomena” that Auerbach published in 1953 from his new post at Yaleand in defense of Mimesis. Mimesis had come under a good deal of harshcriticism by reviewers, the most stinging example being that of Ernst Rob-ert Curtius, a fellow heavyweight romance philologist and exile after thewar (though he had sat out the war as an inner exile in Germany, a fact thatAuerbach never ceased to underscore), while a number of the criticismscame from the side of classical philologists of all places, as if Mimesis con-sisted in only the first three chapters (out of twenty). Curtius’s attacklikewise took the form of philological complaints and Kleinigkeiten,though it plainly disguised a larger and deeper antagonism between thesetwo titans in romance philology. Auerbach responded in kind, and tell-ingly. I won’t have space to dwell on this document but will instead restrictmyself to three points.

First, the piece opens with a magnificent salvo that reveals Auerbach’struest original aims, while also sidelining Curtius from the start (whoseobjections are evidently not deemed “substantial”): “classical literature istreated in my book above all as a counterexample (Gegenbeispiel)” (thesame term again), while the aim was to show “what classical literature doesnot possess”—with inescapably disturbing results (but no apologies aregiven) (“E,” p. 559; trans. mod.).47 Auerbach will return to Curtius’s ob-jections after a few pages and then will drop them just as suddenly when hemoves on to larger vistas in the final pages (Europe, history, Weltgeschichte,realism, style, method, and so on).

Second, at the end of the essay Auerbach goes on to clarify which clas-sical philology he has in mind: classical and then, more broadly, humanephilology in the tradition of “German romanticism and Hegel,” of the sort

Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95–125 and others who would “world” the humanism of Said’sreading of Auerbach, unconvincingly in my view.

47. Compare Mi, p. 119; M, p. 116: “In our earlier chapters we attempted to show that thefirst effect of the Judaeo-Christian manner of dealing with the events in the world of reality . . .brought about a dynamic movement in the basic conception of life, a swing of the pendulum inthe realms of morals and sociology, which went far beyond the classic-antique norm for theimitation of real life and living growth” (emphasis added).


that he absorbed in his youth: “Mimesis attempts to encompass Europe, butit is a German book, not only owing to its language. . . . It would never havebeen written without the influences that I experienced in my youth inGermany” (“E,” p. 571; emphasis added; trans. mod.).

Third, the paragraph that closes the essay at the same time makes up forany deficiencies in temporal marking that Mimesis may appear to haveexhibited, whether now in 1953 or at the time of its publication after the warin 1946. Addressing one last objection, namely, that his book was too“time-bound” (zeitgebunden), “all too determined by the present” (what-ever that meant), Auerbach replies, “that, too, is intentional,” and he goeson to give his rationale first a quasi-philosophical justification that has todo with contextualizing one’s point of view and then a more hauntinglyopen-ended one in the essay’s final words. In the course of defendinghimself against the objection, it becomes obvious that Auerbach has al-ready answered the objection earlier, albeit implicitly. But an explicit re-sponse is warranted, one that links together themes he touched on earlier(Europe, his own formation or Bildung), in a paragraph that contains thememorable line or, rather, chastising reminder: “It is better to be con-sciously rather than unconsciously time-bound (zeitgebunden).” Then afinal envoi: “Mimesis is quite consciously a book that was written by aparticular person in a particular place at the start of the 1940s” (“E,” pp.573–74).48

5. Auerbach’s Jewish Philology and His Philosophy of HistoryWhat, one might well ask, are the larger consequences that follow from

this one episode in Auerbach’s life and from the kind of reading proposedhere? In closing, I want to indicate briefly how Auerbach’s Judaizing ofphilology was by no means a one-off from 1942. The first essay of Mimesisreverberates throughout the whole of that book, right through to the finalchapter on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), in which the contrastbetween the Bible and Homer suddenly reappears in a ringlike form. TheBible is not named, but its attributes are reintroduced, for instance, in theguise of stream of consciousness, which accedes to all manner of depths:Zeitentiefe (time-depths), Bewußtseinstiefe (depths of consciousness), and“a more actual, deeper lying, indeed even more real reality [ja sogar wirkli-chere Wirklichkeit].” There are, moreover, telecommunications with thedivine to be heard, in the form of disembodied voices “between heaven and

48. Auerbach’s political commitment persisted beyond exile. See Robert Fitzgerald,Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism, 1949 –1951 (Boston, 1985),chap. 1, for a resume of Auerbach’s first Gauss lectures on the “‘political’ theory of Pascal” (p.15) and the ensuing, often heated discussion at Princeton.


earth” (conveyed now by telephone) that, like Abraham’s connection toGod, are spatially and temporally unlocatable (Mi, pp. 540, 532; M, pp. 502,496; trans. mod.). All this contrasts with a surface reality that, as in the scarepisode of the Odyssey, is clearly demarcated both spatially and temporallyand that, Auerbach insists (and here he is explicit about the reference), thenovel eschews.49

But Auerbach’s Judaizing project also culminates a life of engagementswith religion, history, and literature that in retrospect can be shown to becompletely harmonious with the purposes of “Odysseus’ Scar.” The po-lemics of that essay may be sharper, more pitched, and more pointed thananything Auerbach wrote ever before, but there is much in common withhis earlier writing that deserves to be brought out, even at the essay’s mostpolemical core. Indeed, the main substantive theses of Mimesis were al-ready in place in Auerbach’s earliest publications from 1921 and 1929, fromhis dissertation to his Dante book, as was Auerbach’s Judaizing philology,which involves as much a methodological commitment as it does a set ofviews about time, literature, and history—and, more broadly, views abouthuman, this-worldly reality, that vast realm of complexly layered, oftenobscurely lit and conflicting motivations and impulses of the kind that heso deeply admires in the Jewish Old Testament.50 But, in order to show allof this, one would need to begin by examining Auerbach’s relationship toVico and Auerbach’s own evolving philosophy of history. A brief look is allthat can be afforded here.

From Vico, Auerbach derives an appreciation of the concrete, singular,and historical nature of historical reality, which is emphatically man-made. Indeed, Auerbach’s closing statement from his “Epilegomena” in1953, quite apart from its immediate personal and historical resonances,might as well have been a remark from The New Science (the 1744 thirdedition), which Auerbach cites in one of his many essays on Vico andwhich he renders thus: “The nature of [human or historical] things is

49. “Even in the case of the telephone scene [between Mr. Banks and “the enigma Mrs.Ramsay”] we have only an inexact indication of when it occurred” (Mi, p. 539; M, p. 501;emphasis added), which Auerbach contrasts with “the successive episodes of the story ofOdysseus’ youth” or “the footwashing scene” (Mi, p. 539; M, p. 501). Karen Lawrence suggestedto me that Auerbach might well have in mind here Stephen’s stream-of-consciousnessimagining of a telephone conversation with the biblical beyond in the Proteus chapter of Joyce’sUlysses, a la the Derridean Ulysses-gramophone motif: “Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha:nought, nought, one” (James Joyce, Ulysses, the 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson [Oxford, 1993], p.38).

50. Compare Auerbach, Zur Technik der Fruhrenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich(Heidelberg, 1921), p. 1. Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin, 1929) anticipatesthe thesis of Mimesis in its entirety; see esp. pp. 7, 113–15, 117, and 217–18; trans. Mannheimunder the title Dante: Poet of the Secular World (Chicago, 1961).


nothing else but their coming into existence at certain times and undercertain conditions.”51 A bit further on, Auerbach argues against historicalblindness by way of Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain: “Most of us are as littleconscious of our historicism as Monsieur Jourdain is of his prose” (“VC,”p. 252). Nothing could be further from the ideal of historical consciousnessthat Auerbach gladly inherited and adapted from Vico, the critical scienceof which he likewise learned from Vico to call “philology” and from which“arises the consciousness of the historically given (la coscienza del certo).”52

In Vico’s matrix, historical understanding, philosophy, and philology arevirtually interchangeable names for a methodical understanding of humanexistence that is bounded by time and experience, while history is enlarged“to such an extent that it comprehends the whole of social life” (“VC,” p.260). Enlarged, but also deepened, narrowed, and particularized, for, asAuerbach takes Vico’s argument, the point of historical understanding,which requires a philological act, is to grasp the concrete reality of humanevents in their “particular character” and in their outwardly radiating “in-terrelations,” which consist of further particulars (“VC,” p. 262). Concreteis one of Auerbach’s favorite analytical terms. It corresponds, no doubt, tocerto above and to the famous Ansatzphanomene or methodological start-ing points of analysis best known from Auerbach’s “Philology of WorldLiterature” (1952). These latter will in the best of cases provide an exampleof der konkrete Ansatz, the concrete point of departure, which is bothimmediately focused and interrelated with its larger context and is there-fore an excellent way to get hold of an object of study. Their antithesis,methodologically speaking, consists in bad points of departure, namely,abstract, high-level, and frequently vague concepts that are imposed fromabove and that grasp hold of nothing in particular.53 Each of the variousessays of Mimesis, for example, is formed around a different Ansatzpunkt.

Now, a regular synonym for concrete in Auerbach’s critical lexicon isearthly, as in the phrase “the fullness of the events of human life in earthlytime [in der irdischen Zeit].”54 Thus, in another lecture on Vico from 1931,Auerbach describes the material of history as “a meaningful whole [einSinnganzes], in which each individual event is multiply [mannigfach]

51. Auerbach, “Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism” (1958), Gesammelte Aufsatze zurromanischen Philologie, p. 260; emphasis added; hereafter abbreviated “VC.” Compare alsoAuerbach, Zur Technik der Fruhrenaissancenovelle, p. 1.

52. Auerbach, “Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie” (1936), Gesammelte Aufsatzezur romanischen Philologie, p. 241.

53. See Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952), Gesammelte Aufsatze zurromanischen Philologie, pp. 308, 309.

54. Auerbach, “Vico und Herder” (1931), Gesammelte Aufsatze zur romanischen Philologie,p. 222.


rooted and out of which it can find its interpretation,” even if such mean-ing is the fruit of a speculative act of reason, combined with guesswork,intuition, and trust in the rationality of reason and events and, ultimately,in that of humanity itself. Unsurprisingly, historical thinking for Auer-bach, which is grounded in the concrete and the particular, slides imper-ceptibly into the domain of the practical and the ethical (the praktisch-ethisch).55 Indeed, these domains never exist apart.

They never exist apart once “the historical perspective” has been dis-covered as such. One might say that the whole of Auerbach’s philologicaloeuvre is devoted to charting this discovery, which takes the form of aprogression from the classical to the Judeo-Christian to the modern viewof time. Such a trajectory involves two critical ruptures or breakdowns: thetransition from the classical era (typified by ahistorical myth) to the Chris-tian era (typified by closed, transcendental, vertical, providential, eternaltime),56 and the transition from the Christian to the modern, secular, andenlightened era (history in the proper, critical, and scientific sense). Whatmakes Auerbach’s picture of the rise of historical consciousness in theWest so difficult to grasp and, therefore, so endlessly fascinating are thetensions he discovers in it and that never cease to plague and imbalance it.There are at least three factors at work here, and these progress along achain, from the origins of history to their contemporary reflection back toand upon their origins again.

1. To judge from “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach may well begin by aligninghimself with Vico against Hegel in privileging the Jewish Old Testamentfor the way it documents the most ancient events in Western history (Cre-ation, the Flood, and so on), and to which in any case—like Vico anddefinitely unlike Hegel (young or old)— he accords a highly positive eval-uation. History, from this perspective, has its foundations in the Jewishnation. Christianity represents a tertiary phase (third in line after the clas-sical era).57

2. Wherever, upon closer inspection, the Judeo-Christian heritage pre-sents an unstable hyphenation of two religious traditions, Christianityturns out to be, as it were, inwardly hyphenated, torn by its attachments tothe here and the Beyond, to the flesh and the spirit. A tension is thus

55. See ibid.56. See ibid., p. 223.57. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of

Giambattista Vico (Princeton, N.J., 1999), pp. 234 –55, and especially p. 240 for the claim that theBible, especially the Old Testament, provides the narrative model of The New Science, which inany event begins its history with the Deluge. Compare also Auerbach, “Vico und Herder,” p.227.


detectable within the Christian perspective itself, as its proponents standawkwardly with one foot in this world and another in the Beyond—and,eventually, with one foot in Christianity and another in secular modernity.

3. Auerbach’s narrative of “prehistorical” events, which is to say ofevents prior to the discovery of modern historical consciousness duringthe Enlightenment, is inevitably infected with his own and others’ modernhistorical consciousness, with the dual result that no event from the past isever untouched by its historical narration (retrospectively speaking, “forus”), nor is it ever entirely clear from whose perspective events are beingnarrated at any given time. There is clearly a sense, too, in which historicalconsciousness is allowed even to premodern agents— but in what exactsense? Auerbach’s narratives are thus inherently unstable (albeit produc-tively so).

The first of these three sources of tension works against the predomi-nantly Christian narrative that fills so many of Auerbach’s publishedpages. This resistance lies at the kernel of Auerbach’s Jewish philologicalstance, which is also reflected in the second source of tension above andupon which his writings most often dwell. The third source, while it signalsAuerbach’s own modernity (his own historical location on this side of thesecular divide), nevertheless bears signs of potential ambivalence. The riseof historical consciousness inevitably has to pass through an initial Jewishmoment. Must it also supersede this moment? The question haunts all ofAuerbach’s writings.

Appearing to be absorbed for the most part with questions of Christianliterary meaning, Auerbach’s writings can in fact be shown to documentand, indeed, to revel in the gradual unfolding crisis within Christianity. Acase in point is his essay “On the Historical Place of Rousseau” (1932).Auerbach depicts Rousseau as a transitional figure on the cusp of moder-nity, as a Christian in crisis, or better yet as a post-Christian neuroticcaught in a double bind between faith and reason on the threshold ofmodernity and bewildered by competing allegiances to the Church and tothe Enlightenment. Rousseau’s “crisis of Christianity” nevertheless doesbetray something symptomatic about Christians generally in Auerbach’sview, and not only in their “critical epochs” such as the one through whichRousseau exemplarily lived, namely, that “insecurity in the earthly world [inder irdischen Welt] is a Christian motif.”58 If so, then another way of de-scribing Auerbach’s overarching vision of history, as this can be deduced

58. Auerbach, “Uber den historischen Ort Rousseaus,” Gesammelte Aufsatze zurromanischen Philologie, p. 293; emphasis added. Later, Auerbach dates “the beginning of thecrisis of European Christianity” to a “very early” period—indeed, to the very “flowering” ofChristianity itself (p. 295). Christianity, in other words, was constitutionally in crisis. Compare


from his writings between 1921 and 1958, is that it is precisely about theovercoming of this insecurity and the coming to terms with the earthly,secular world. Earthly (irdisch) is the operative word in the title Dante: Poetof the Earthly World (1929); the book spells out a massive dissonance in theChristian poetics and worldview of the first great vernacular poet of theItalian language, the poet to whom Auerbach kept returning in his laterwritings as an epochal and symbolic touchstone.

But Auerbach has more than a historiographical investment in docu-menting what today would be called a historical turn. What matters toAuerbach in the end are the this-worldly elements of reality, its human,earthly side, that constitute the source of every value, be it historical orethical or, as is most often the case, both of these together, indivisiblycombined. And so, in tracing the rise of historical consciousness, Auer-bach is at the same time tracing something like the historical grounding ofautonomous—in Vico’s sense, man-made— ethical consciousness.

And yet a certain amount of willful perversity cannot but be involved insuch a project for the simple reason that to read Christianity in this way isto read it, so to speak, against the grain and from two directions at once.First, it is to read Christianity with a view to its eventual unseating as areligious force and its secularization in the modern world—its “Entchris-tung” or de-Christianization—as it gave way to modern historical subjec-tivity.59 Second, it is to trace the emergence of Christianity out of the Jewishbiblical tradition, which no amount of interpretation, exegesis, allegoresis,persecution, or history could ever erase. In a word, Christianity was Jewishbefore it was ever Christian, and it never becomes un-Jewish even after itstransformation into Christianity. In a very real sense, the historicity ofChrist—who was as much a Jew as an incarnation of God for Auerbachand as much a historical, earthly figure conflicted with doubt (Spannung)as a spiritual one (Christ was “a concrete event, . . . a central fact of worldhistory”)60—is the guarantor, and scandal, for both claims on Auerbach’sapproach. “Figura” is only one of the way stations en route to this philo-

also Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages,trans. Mannheim (1958; Princeton, N.J., 1993), p. 337.

59. See Auerbach, Das franzosische Publikum des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1933), pp. 46, 47.In “Uber den historischen Ort Rousseaus,” pp. 292, 294, Auerbach uses “Entchristlichung” and“entchristlichen.” See also Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, pp. 212–18.

60. Auerbach, Dante, p. 14: even “Christ himself lived in continuous conflict [Spannung]”about his calling, thus exemplifying Christian ambivalence (see p. 16). “The history [or story:Geschichte] of Christ,” the source of “tragic realism,” is said by Auerbach to have arisen out of“God’s devotion to earthly reality” (Auerbach, “Romantik und Realismus,” Neue Jahrbucher furWissenschaft und Jugendbildung 9, no. 2 [1933]: 153; emphasis added).


logical apprehension of a historical reality; figural readings reinforce thehistorical reality of the Jewish past they would undo. And Mimesis bringshome the same point in another, no less striking fashion:

As a result of this claim to absolute authority [of the Old Testament],the [Jewish] method of interpretation spread to traditions other thanthe Jewish. . . . The need for interpretation reaches out beyond theoriginal Jewish-Israelite realm of reality—for example to Assyrian,Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a deter-mined sense becomes a general method of comprehending reality[Wirklichkeitsauffassung]. . . . The most striking piece of interpreta-tion of this sort occurred in the first century of the Christian era, inconsequence of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles: Paul and the ChurchFathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession offigures prognosticating the appearance of Christ. . . . Thus while, onthe one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as com-plete truth with a claim to sole authority [Alleinherrschaft], on theother hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretativechange in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant andactive development with the life of man in Europe. [Mi, p. 16; M, pp.18 –19; trans. mod; emphasis added]

In other words, the Jewish tradition persists even as it adapts and changes,dynamically; and what it diffuses is an entire vision—a Jewish vision— ofreality (Wirklichkeitsauffassung).

All of Auerbach’s writings leading up to Mimesis trace this pattern—with one significant difference. In his earlier work (Das franzosische Pub-likum, “Rousseau,” Dante, “Figura”), Auerbach’s discussions of the OldTestament were driven by a concern for its subordination to Christiandoctrine and for the unfolding of the Judeo-Christian literary heritage as ahyphenated totality, so much so that one might never suspect a Jewishparti pris by its author. Not so in Mimesis, where for the first (and last) timein his life Auerbach’s attention to the Old Testament and its Jewish char-acter is undivided, even unremitting. “Odysseus’ Scar” thus stands out as aradical departure in Auerbach’s oeuvre. A radical departure, but it is also aclue to unraveling what was always available to see in his writings. For, inhindsight, it is possible to recognize how Auerbach, from the very first, wasalways practicing a Jewish philology. History and circumstances merelycaught up with him. Rousseau’s crisis lay just around the corner. And thenthe Nazi seizure of power, the expulsion of the Jews, and Turkish exile.

The result is that history and historical consciousness, wherever theysubsequently appear in the sequel in Mimesis, do so under the sign of the


Old Testament and its Jewishness. And the philology that sets out to capturethis historicity, which Auerbach variously calls mimesis and the represen-tation of reality in Western literature even in his earliest writings, is a Jewishphilology. It matters little if modern historical consciousness, historicallyspeaking, derived from a secularization of biblical thinking, as we sawearlier. For the other half of the story is the twofold nature of this evolu-tion, its double determination; historical consciousness unfolded in thecourse of its religious evolution, starting with its Judaic traditions, on the wayto its secularization. Indeed, what the religious stage of this developmentbrought to historical consciousness were two of its most essential features,each linked to the other: its sense of mutability over time and its practical-ethical awareness, without which it would collapse into shallow positivism.Both of these, fully palpable in the analysis of the Old Testament in“Odysseus’ Scar,” are “the fruit of [man’s] history on earth.”61

By way of comparison, we might consider the final lines of “Giambat-tista Vico und die Idee der Philologie,” which are exemplary in settingAuerbach’s vision of history apart from the grasp of mere historical facts,but also from some harmless and pretty form of secular humanism:

It will be useful to recall that Vico understood the commonality ofhumankind [das Gemeinsam-Menschliche] not in a cultivated, enlight-ened, and progressive sense, but rather in the whole, huge, and terrify-ing [schrecklichen] reality of history. He saw historical man as a whole,and he saw that he was himself a man in order to understand this[larger entity, historical] man. He did not form an image of historicalman after his own image; he did not discover himself in the other;rather, he discovered the other in himself; he discovered himself, theman, in history, and [in this way] the long buried powers of our na-ture were laid bare before him. That is his humanity: something deeperand more dangerous than that which one usually understands by theword. But in spite of this, or rather precisely because of this, he dis-covered the commonality of man, and he held on to it firmly.62

Auerbach’s view of historical reality, with its plunging verticalities (a la theOld Testament in “Odysseus’ Scar”), is full of terror and of beautiful po-tential as well. It might well be called Abrahamic.

For the same reasons, Auerbach regards To the Lighthouse as a work thatis filled with a rich, contradictory (one is tempted to say, biblical) historicalconsciousness informed by “the time of the first World War and after,”

61. Auerbach, Dante, p. 142.62. Auerbach, “Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie,” p. 241; emphasis added.


including “fascism” (Mi, pp. 551, 550; M, pp. 512, 511). Consequently, thework is not so much suffused with dark cultural pessimism (which alsohappens to be the conventional reading of Auerbach’s postwar posture) asit is brimming with more complex emotions (see Mi, p. 549; M, p. 511).While “it breathes an air of vague and hopeless sadness[,] . . . [it is] filledwith good and genuine love” (Mi, pp. 551–52; M, p. 513). Whatever doubt itmay harbor towards life is counterbalanced by the concrete realism ofdiscrete objects—such as the stocking that Mrs. Ramsay is knitting—andindividual occurrences, which, though random, trigger a chain of reflec-tions that take on a life of their own. “And in the process something newand elemental appear[s]: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depthof life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without preju-dice” (Mi, p. 552; M, p. 513). Thus, out of the horror and wreckage of worldwar, whether the first or the second, Auerbach nonetheless finds some-thing positive to lay claim to and grasp hold of—indeed, nothing less thanthe very condition of historical consciousness itself, namely, life: Isaacrestored.


Porter Auerbach

Documents

Transcript of Porter Auerbach