Role Model and Countermodel

Reviews / Votes

The study touches on several interesting aspects.... The German Jewish discovery of Jewish life in medieval Spain provides an intriguing perspective on a Jewish community in transition. * AJS Review * In this fluent, accessible and compelling study, Carsten Schapkow provides the first detailed survey of how German Jews, from Mendelssohn to Graetz, looked back to the Jews of medieval al-Andalus, and made use of this Iberian model in their collective memory and in debates over political emancipation and cultural pluralism. The 'Sephardic mystique', he shows, was considerably more complex and contentious than most historians have realized. Drawing on an extremely wide range of sources-political, historiographical, philosophical, and fictional-Schapkow's study elegantly weaves together these various strands of German Jewish cultural memory in the age of emancipation. -- Adam Sutcliffe, King's College London Carsten Schapkow's Role Model and Countermodel is the first encompassing monograph on the Ashkenazi reception of Sephardic History in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. The book is not only an important contribution to a better understanding of German Jewry, but also a vivid example of the much-too-often-neglected study of entanglements between Sephardic and Ashkenazi histories. -- Sina Rauschenbach, University of Potsdam While there have been a number of important articles in recent years on the nineteenth-century German Jewish fascination with the history and culture of their coreligionists in medieval Iberia, there has not been till now a detailed monographic analysis of the phenomenon. Carsten Schapkow has provided a wide-ranging, in-depth, and sophisticated survey of the creation and propagation of the Golden Age of Spain myth by the founding fathers of modern Judaic Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums) in Germany, the myth's adoption by popular writers, and its growth into an idealized model for how Jews might successfully assimilate into German society while still maintaining a distinctive Jewish identity. -- Norman A. Stillman, University of Oklahoma