Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity

Adi Nester

Published by Cornell University Press 2025

Unsettling Difference

Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity

Adi Nester

In the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501779695

About this book

Unsettling Difference challenges the major-minor pattern that has framed discussions of German Jewish difference, focusing on instances that fall outside traditional understandings of minority culture. Exploring expressions of Jewish identity and difference in biblical-themed musical dramas and their literary sources, Adi Nester argues that the issue of Jewish difference should be treated as an aesthetic question in the first half of the twentieth century, even amid the rise of pseudoscientific theories about race and blood.

Drawing on the fraught, parallel histories of opera and the modern reception of the Hebrew Bible in Germany, both significant in debates at the time about the nature of Jewish separateness, Unsettling Difference shows how this discourse troubles concepts of Jewish marginality and (non-Jewish) German dominance. Through innovative readings of key works in this tradition—Rudolf Borchardt's poem, Das Buch Joram; Paul Ben-Haim's oratorio, Joram; Arnold Schoenberg's opera, Moses und Aron; Joseph Roth's novel, Hiob; and Eric Zeisl's opera, Hiob—Nester shows how these biblical adaptations foreground alternative notions of difference that rely on confusion, ambiguity, radical heterogeneity, excess, and repetition.

Author / Editor information

Adi Nester is Assistant Professor of German and Levine-Sklut Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

Abigail Gillman, author of A History of German Jewish Bible Translation:

Ambitious, sophisticated, and thought-provoking, Unsettling Difference interrogates the idea of German Jewish identity, a category frequently taken for granted but one that is now being challenged. Adi Nester's original contribution to this debate is that difference itself needs to be unsettled as much as identity does.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Note on Translation Publicly Available Download PDF	xii
Introduction: On Jewish Difference, the Bible, and the Great Artwork Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Rudolf Borchardt’s Das Buch Joram and the Restoration of a Biblical Language Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
2 Opening the Work: The German Oratorio and Paul Ben-Haim’s Joram Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
3 Moses and Aron Representing the People Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
4 On Being Superfluous: Integration and Excess in Joseph Roth’s Hiob Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
5 Inorganic Quotations: Revisiting Assimilation with Eric Zeisl’s Hiob Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Afterword: Identity and Difference beyond Dialectics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	248
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 294
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 11
- Images: 11
- Other: 11 b&w halftones
Keywords: opera; modernism; intellectual history; post-Wagner era; translation theory; antisemitic discourse; Hebrew; aesthetics

eBook

Published: January 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781501779695

Unsettling Difference

Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity

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