An Unorthodox Orthodox Judaism: Benjamin Stein’s Rabbi Löw

In public appearances and interviews, Stein thus presents himself as a strictly observant Jew. On the one hand, this aligns the author with the long tradition of Orthodox Judaism in Germany before the Holocaust, including the neo-Orthodox revival of the late nineteenth century,2See Breuer, Modernity within Tradition. with the largely Orthodox survivors who refounded the community after 19453See Cohen-Weisz, Jewish Life, especially 181–88. and dominated it until relatively recently,4See Wolffsohn, “Jews in Divided Germany and Beyond,” especially 28. and with the growing presence once again of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews today, including many new arrivals from the United States.5See Brenner, “A New German Jewry?,” especially 425. On the other hand, it positions him against the more liberal and even secular versions of Jewish practice that have emerged with large-scale immigration from the former Soviet Union but also from the United States and Israel, and following the recent revival of Reform Judaism in the country where it originated in the mid-nineteenth century.6See Cohen-Weisz, Jewish Life, especially 181–88.

Stein’s self-staging as an Orthodox Jew very obviously intervenes in key debates—and controversies—animating the community in Germany and Jews across the diaspora more generally, namely whether a patrilineal heritage is “sufficient” to count as a Jew, how and by which branch of Judaism conversion is recognized, and to what extent halachic conformity defines Jewish identity. (The history of the small Jewish community in the GDR, and of the Jews who opted for the Soviet zone after 1945, is a more marginal discourse.7See Wolffsohn, “Jews in Divided Germany.” It features in Mirna Funk’s 2015 novel Winternähe/Near winter, which is discussed in chapter 2.) Stein’s response to these fundamental questions dividing the community seems to be that a Jewish identity is expressed through Jewish actions rather than simply inherited and inhabited. In an interview with the German-Nigerian journalist Iljoma Mangold about his 2010 novel Die Leinwand (The canvas)—a postmodern metafiction that references Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fake Holocaust memoirs8See Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair.—the author comments:

As Katja Garloff notes, Stein’s project is to “broaden the range of Jewish identities, and especially religious identities, that can be expressed in German-language literature,” with “an emphasis on the ways that Jewish law structures the everyday life of observant Jews and sets them apart from non-Jews.”10Garloff, “The Power of Paratext,” 141. As will become evident from the analysis of Das Alphabet des Rabbi Löw (2014) that follows, however, Stein’s enterprise is radical not only because it inserts a religious and even Orthodox voice into a secular literary tradition. In declaring that Jewishness is derived not from halachic principles and not even from Holocaust memory but rather from a gesture of self-enactment, the author implies a rearticulation of Jewish identity that is as transgressive as it is pragmatic. Rabbi Löw’s kabbalistic rewriting of family history, then, elaborates an unorthodox Orthodox Judaism that—precisely through its scandalous inversion of religious and cultural injunctions—reinvigorates and reinvents Jewish identity to respond to the modern-day reality of assimilation, intermarriage, and near-extermination.

In 2014, Stein reissued Das Alphabet des Juda Liva, first published in 1995, as Das Alphabet des Rabbi Löw.11What follows is an extensive rewriting of my article in The Modern Language Review, from 2021. See Taberner, “Redemption.” A side-by-side comparison of the two versions confirms his assertion in an editorial notice at the conclusion of the 2014 version that the changes are chiefly “shortenings and corrections” of an unwieldy, even overwritten debut novel.12Stein, Rabbi Löw, 285. Hereafter RL. It is likely that both publisher and author were keen to insert an out-of-print novel that had been largely overlooked into what, by then, had become a significant revival of German Jewish literature. At the same time, Rabbi Löw stands out on account of its unusually intense exploration of the intricacies of Jewish faith, theological debate, and ritual practice.

Stein’s novel tells of its protagonist Rottenstein’s self-transformation from a regular German student with distant Jewish roots into a model of strict religious observance, via a crash course in Kabbalah and Hebrew numerology in Prague and Budapest.13For Kabbalah in contemporary popular culture, see Myers, “Kabbalah in the Modern Era.” Most conspicuously, this involves a series of literally incredible encounters with the resurrected sixteenth-century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Löw and his adolescent son, who doubles as the wildly eccentric Jewish mystic’s Golem. (According to legend, Rabbi Löw fashioned the original Golem from clay to protect Prague’s Jews from the attacks of gentiles.)14See Idel, Golem. At the same time, Rottenstein’s emergence as an Orthodox Jew also requires a confrontation with family history. This is recounted in a disjointed, episodic manner by the novel’s two narrators, Jacoby and Bergcowicz, who may or may not be one and the same person.

Liva/Rabbi Löw begins with a framing narrative involving two non-Jewish Germans, Bergcowicz and his girlfriend Sheary, who pay Jacoby a bottle of vodka to appear each Tuesday evening at their Berlin flat and to relate the adventures of his friend Rottenstein, specifically Rottenstein’s journey to Prague and Budapest to “become” an Orthodox Jew. Bergcowicz speculates that Jacoby’s choice of alcohol could identify him as a Russian: “Seinen Trinkgewohnheiten nach hätte er Russe sein müssen” (given his drinking habits, he must have been a Russian; RL, 13). His accent, however, marks him as Berlin-born. Nevertheless, the reader is likely to make a connection to the mass arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union, which had just got underway as the novel was first published in 1995 and which by the time of its rerelease in 2014 had transformed Jewish demography in today’s Germany. As in Altaras’s titos brille, the implication may be that Russian Jews have appropriated the legacy of the postwar community. After only a few weeks, however, Jacoby self-ignites in the mental asylum of the Charité hospital. This story-before-the story is related retrospectively, following the opening lines of the novel, which tell of the arrival of a telegram notifying Bergcowicz and Sheary of Jacoby’s combustion and instructing them to contact his lawyer. This they do, and Bergcowicz takes over the narration, drawing on newspaper cuttings, video cassettes, and voice recordings that Jacoby has purportedly bequeathed to him. What follows is a labyrinth of intersecting narratives set in Berlin, Prague, and Budapest, extracts from the Kabbalah and the Aggadah, and allusions to the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and the prophet Elijah. In essence, however, the underlying theme is Alex Rottenstein’s family history, though frequent shifts across time and place mean that it is for the reader to reconstruct the relationships and the chronology set out below.15Stein includes a family tree on his website: https://turmsegler.net/alphabet/languages/en/index.html. Last accessed July 25, 2024.

Rottenstein’s grandfather Max Regensburger flees Nazi Germany in 1933 with his mother Anna after his communist father is murdered by brownshirts. In Prague, Max is briefly taken in by an adolescent Czech girl, Lydia, and her father, before he travels on to meet Anna in Moscow. He returns twelve years later in 1945, now a young man, and impregnates Lydia, after which he settles in East Germany, where he becomes a high-ranking official. (Anna’s family history is told in a lengthy excursus. Her father is a “circus Jew”16In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews—and Romani people—were often involved as owners of or artists in circuses. See Hödl, Entangled Entertainers. while she joins the Jewish middle class by marrying the son of an undertaker.) Lydia, it transpires, is a seraph—­angel—as is her daughter Mirijam, conceived with Max, and as is Eva, who is born half a year after Mirijam’s tryst with Jaroslav Vonka, the non-­Jewish son of a local innkeeper. (Angels, apparently, are born at six months; RL, 102–3.) Jaroslav flees to avoid the fate that befalls men who abandon female angels—combustion—but he later turns up in Berlin, now named Slosil, with an axe in his head. On cremation, he sits upright, his body bursts into flame, and his soul escapes into Alex Rottenstein, aged twelve (the age Jewish boys enter adulthood) and living with his great-uncle Franz, Max’s older brother, who had survived the war in Paris. The young Rottenstein subsequently develops an interest in the Jewish texts in Franz’s library. (His grandmother Inge, whom Max married in the GDR, was not Jewish and therefore—halachically—neither is his mother Marianne nor Rottenstein himself.) Years later, Rottenstein travels to Prague, where he meets his distant cousin Eva in the corner shop owned by her uncle, Jiri Procházka. Predictably, Rottenstein sleeps with Eva, abandons her, and is burned to death. Except that he is also a witness to his own immolation, levitated outside his blazing apartment by the very same Procházka, a.k.a. Rabbi Löw of Prague. (Procházka also features as the Ein Sof, the infinity that is G-D, just as most other characters appear in different guises, and with different names.) Rottenstein studies the Talmud in Budapest, makes aliyah to Jerusalem, and here his story, as assembled by Jacoby, ends. Bergcowicz, however, continues to narrate on his own account. He has Rottenstein return to Berlin on Pesach (Passover) with the prophet Elijah—Jacoby—to prove the “truth” of the Jewish ritual to the woefully non-observant Jewish community. In a final twist, Bergcowicz insinuates that he is in fact Rottenstein, and the Messiah, even as the ambulance pulls up, presumably to transport him to the mental hospital at the Charité (RL, 279).

The (relatively scant) scholarly literature on the novel’s 1995 iteration as Das Alphabet des Juda Liva largely follows the contours of the plot summary given above and frames Stein’s first work as an indictment of assimilation and as an injunction to return to a more authentic Jewish practice. Cathy Gelbin, for example, argues that “Stein configures assimilation as a false ideal ultimately leading to the fires of the Shoah” even as “the consumerism brought to post-socialist Prague by fun-­seeking Western youths merely appears as the last manifestation of the ‘real’ world.”17Gelbin, “The Monster Returns,” 23. Dorothee Gelhard, similarly, explores the allusions to Jewish mysticism—including the power of the Hebrew alphabet to instigate tikkun olam (“repair of the world”)—and argues that the novel presents a kabbalistic critique of Enlightenment reason.18Gelhard, Mit dem Gesicht nach vorne gewandt, 179. More generally, critics emphasize the abstruse plotline and complex form, including the lack of punctuation to mark direct speech; uncertainty as to who is speaking; multiple retellings of the same episode; characters who are in two places at once or in the wrong time entirely; the power of storytelling to create reality; and how the framing narrative finally collapses into the story within a story that it is supposed to enable.19See Bock-Lindenbeck, Letzte Welten, 231–49. See Oberwalleney, Heterogenes Schreiben.

Yet Gelhard also points to the overblown irony that suffuses and even drives the novel’s fabulistic exuberance, and specifically to how this throws into doubt its ostensible purpose of resurrecting an authentic—Orthodox—Jewish tradition.20Gelhard, Mit dem Gesicht nach vorne gewandt, 184. Certainly, the appearance of a resurrected Rabbi Löw in felt slippers (throughout), his Golem-son adorned with a red headband (throughout), and a self-combusting narrator, Jacoby, who dons a beret with the emblem of the elite Givati brigade of the Israeli Defense Forces and turns out to be the prophet Elijah (RL, 11, 263, 270)—all this provokes skepticism about how seriously the reader is expected to take Stein’s Jewish mysticism. Hardly mentioned in the existing scholarship, moreover, is the disclosure that Jacoby completed four semesters of Jewish Studies in Berlin (RL, 212). Benjamin Stein also read Jewish Studies in Berlin, and it is possible, and indeed probable, that the author is playing with what he has learned.

Irony is strongly associated with modernity, and indeed with the secular challenge to religious faith.21See Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Within Rabbi Löw’s no doubt sincere commitment to Jewish beliefs, therefore, it is also possible to glimpse more worldly, even profane concerns that certainly disrupt the novel’s kabbalistic esotericism, as Gelhard puts it, but which are also expressed through it, as we shall see. In what follows, we examine how Rabbi Löw offers an unexpectedly pragmatic response to the fundamental dilemmas of German Jewish identity today: how to assert the continuity of Jewish faith and tradition when so much has been destroyed; how to be at home in Germany, and in German culture; and how to revive an authentic Judaism in a country where—for understandable reasons—Holocaust memory is more definitive than religious conviction and ritual practice. Even more than in titos brille and Sterndeutung, moreover, transgression is indispensable. Allusions to the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi invoke a subterranean tradition of deliberate sinfulness that, historically, has proliferated new Jewish life-worlds. In Rabbi Löw, it is argued, the impulse to defy authority and reinvent Jewish identity even appears, paradoxically, as quintessentially and even conventionally Jewish. Indeed, insofar as it frames transgression as the prerequisite for the reinvigoration of Jewish identity, the unorthodox Orthodox Judaism of Rabbi Löw may even anticipate the abundance of pluralistic and certainly non-halachic—patrilineal, Russian, queer, cosmopolitan, and even non-Jewish—Jewish practices in Germany today.

It is Kabbalah that enables, as it were, the telling of what is in essence a tragically familiar story of assimilation, the horrors of the Holocaust, a survivor’s embrace of communism in the avowedly anti-fascist German Democratic Republic, and the third generation’s attempts to make sense of this history and to reconnect with its Jewish heritage. The magical realism of Kabbalah, therefore, provides a set of narrative devices that permit the novel’s various storytellers to initiate movements across time and place, to suggest connections between disparate events, and to justify the occasional “jähe Wendung” (abrupt turn; RL, 122) in the plot—and to entertain, even as what is being told is a tale of dislocation, mass murder, and trauma transmitted through the generations. Kabbalistic motifs such as the number twelve, for example, link the twelve simple letters of the Hebrew alphabet22See Mordell, “The Origin of Letters and Numerals,” especially 560. to Anna’s age when she was first kissed—by a twenty-year-old Italian, who introduces her, also with his roasted chestnuts, to the temptations of an assimilated life (RL, 165)—to Rottenstein’s age when he was impacted by Jaroslav’s spirit and began to be interested in his Jewish roots (RL, 251), to the adolescent Golem (RL, 252), and to the twelve years of National Socialism (RL, 196). Most important of all, however, is the kabbalistic notion of predetermination. Jacoby thus relates Rottenstein’s explanation of his witnessing of his own death: “Du glaubst nicht, dass es möglich ist, zur selben Zeit an verschiedenen Orten zu sein, aber sobald Bestimmung ins Spiel kommt, gibt es kein Jetzt, kein Später und kein Zuvor mehr.” (You don’t think that it’s possible to be in different places at the same time, but as soon as predetermination comes into play, there is no now, no later, and time before; RL, 88.) Predetermination, of course, both confirms the proposition that assimilation inevitably led to the crematoria of the Nazi death camps—also implied by the characters’ tendency to combust—and gives the novel’s various narrators significant latitude to collapse time and place, to their own advantage.

At the same time, the novel’s unabashed self-referentiality ensures that the reader cannot be ignorant of its artifice. Frequent interjections such as “Doch das wissen wir bereits” (we know that already, of course; RL, 114); irony-laden direct addresses to Bergcowicz and thus the reader: “Auch mir kam die Einsicht in die Zusammenhänge erst reichlich spät” (even I didn’t grasp how everything fitted together until much later; RL, 87); and insights into the intrinsic fictionality of the narrative—“Was ich erzähle, geschieht, nicht umgekehrt” (what I narrate, happens, and not the other way around; RL, 17)—all focus attention on the constructedness of the story, and storytelling more generally. As significant, however, are kabbalistic inconsistencies that are not functions of its time- and space-bending logic but rather hint that the reader should not overinterpret. For example, the anarchist “circle A” graffitied on a building is claimed to be the Hebrew letter Aleph (א) but is in truth only superficially similar (RL, 44). Similarly, Rabbi Löw asserts that he wrote the Sefer Yetsir and owns the only copy in existence, but the book of creation actually dates from around two centuries before Christ, with many versions since.23See Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah. Above all, it is an extended citation from the Aggadah—the body of rabbinical texts that explore the meanings, values, and ideas of religious life—that sounds a warning. Rabbi Löw introduces the story of the four rabbis who ascend into Pardes (heavenly orchard), the first of whom died from looking at the Divine Presence, the second lost his sanity, the third became a heretic, and the fourth the leading rabbinical figure of the era. No exposition is given, but the reader who seeks one in the academic literature will discover that most scholars agree that the legend is a warning not to deviate into mysticism.24See Sweeney, “Pardes.” For readers less well-versed in Jewish spirituality, the words of Jiri Procházka a.k.a. Rabbi Löw a.k.a. Ein Sof may serve as a more explicit caution: “Wo stehen wir? Vor oder hinter dem Spiegel? Neben oder mitten in der Geschichte? Ich rate Ihnen, sich vorzusehen. Am Ende geraten auch Sie in den Strudel.” (Where do we stand? In front of or behind the mirror? Next to or in the middle of the story/history. I would advise you to be careful. In the end, you too will end up being pulled into the vortex; RL, 88.)

None of the above should be taken to dismiss the central importance of Stein’s allusions to Jewish mysticism. First and foremost, kabbalistic motifs suggest correspondences across historical disruptions, geographical dislocations, and other breaks in the real, e.g., assimilation, intermarriage, displacement, and genocide. This is what Elliot Wolfson describes as Kabbalah’s elaboration of time as “the repetition of the same as different in the renewal of the different as same.”25Wolfson, “Structure,” 156. Kabbalah appeals, then, insofar as it shapes a Jewish identity across disparate epochs and locations, and in spite of all the harms inflicted.26See Samuelson, “Kabbalah.” Its deployment in Rabbi Löw intimates repair—albeit of a purely symbolic kind.

At the same time, Kabbalah also predicts Rabbi Löw’s marked self-referentiality, foregrounding narrative uncertainty, the duplicity of the narrator/artist, and how storytelling itself may be morally suspect. This literariness frames a more specific and localized effort to restore what has been lost, even as it also highlights the ambivalence of both what was there before and what might be resurrected in the present. The novel not only describes a process of disentanglement and detachment, therefore—Rottenstein’s turning away from the secular and toward religious observance. It also intimates that its protagonist’s efforts to fathom “Wer ich bin” (who I am; RL, 73) necessarily involve a reiteration of the often painful but in some periods also productive German–Jewish encounter. In the end, Rabbi Löw’s allusions to the German and German Jewish literary traditions—and to their dynamic if always precarious mutual imbrication—may be a more concrete and indeed more radical rearticulation of modern-day German Jewish identity even than its advocacy of Orthodox Judaism.

Writing in 2008 on his blog Turmsegler, Stein reports how he had happened across an analysis of Juda Liva by the American Germanist Sander Gilman—and unceremoniously dismisses as “reiner Quatsch”27Stein, “Erstaunlicher Zufallsfund.” (absolute nonsense) Gilman’s claim to see echoes of an East German literary tradition with “a massive dose of Jewish mysticism.”28Gilman, Multiculturalism, 193. Certainly, such is the capaciousness of Juda Liva/Rabbi Löw that it might be possible to impute all manner of resonances. Yet the novel’s invitation to seek intertextual references may be precisely the point, notwithstanding its author’s likely staged refusal to admit any influences apart from Kabbalah. Where Gilman detects hints of the formally complex, highly self-referential Levins Mühle (Levin’s windmill; 1964) by the East German Lutheran author Johannes Bobrowski, and of Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (Jakob the liar; 1969)—the GDR’s “first Jewish novel”29Gilman, Multiculturalism, 193.—other readers will intuit other forebears. With its concern with the pitfalls of assimilation, for example, Rabbi Löw recalls the nineteenth-century German Jewish family novel,30See Robertson, The “Jewish Question,” 273–85. as does its depiction of colorful relatives whose intrusions evidence that entry to the bourgeoisie is uncomfortably recent. Elsewhere, the tone of a melancholically inflected thriller harks back to the exile literature of German and German Jewish writers who fled Nazism, such as Anna Seghers, whose name and best-known theme may even be invoked: “Dann kam das Signal des Schaffners, ein schrilles Pfeifen. Anna stieg in den Zug und fuhr ab. Was für ein Wort war das eigentlich? fragte sie sich, als der Zug den Bahnhof verließ. Ein Nichtsnirgends, ein Keinwort: Exil” (RL, 196). (Then came the conductor’s signal, a shrill whistle. Anna climbed into the train and set off. What kind of word was that actually, she asked herself, as the train left the station. A notnowhere, a non-word: exile.) At the same time, premonitions of “Aschenwege: grauweiß und übersät mit Knochen” (paths formed of ashes: gray-white and littered with bones; RL, 191), and of how Anna’s husband Hans was tortured and killed in a police cell (RL, 193), unmistakably recall the graphically disturbing Holocaust fiction of postwar writers such as Jean Améry or Edgar Hilsenrath.

Reaching further back, there are echoes throughout Rabbi Löw of the German intellectual and literary tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially the contest between reason and feeling. It may be too much to suppose that Jacoby is a latter-day Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi—the proponent of “philosophy of feeling” who rejected the proto-Enlightenment rationalism of the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish thinker Spinoza31This was the famous Spinoza-Streit of 1781, which pitted Jacobi against Moses Mendelsohn, the foremost proponent of the “Jewish Enlightenment” and an advocate of Spinoza’s thought. See Sutcliffe, “Quarreling over Spinoza,” especially 175–81.—but Rabbi Löw consistently encourages its reader to look for more or less concealed parallels. (Spinoza’s questioning of the Hebrew Bible caused him to be expelled from the community. The “other” seventeenth-century heresy was Sabbateanism, which undermined rabbinical authority through mystical transgression rather than reason—of which more later).32See Popkin, “Two Jewish Heresies.” The framing narrative, for example, reminds of a realist tradition in which this device exposes the subjectivity of a protagonist’s perspective and the gap between knowledge and superstition, as in Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter (The rider on the white horse; 1888).33See Heine, “Der Schimmelreiter.” In Stein’s novel, however, this distancing effect is undone once Bergcowicz takes over the storytelling and declares himself to be the Messiah. Elsewhere, German Romanticism’s rejection of the Enlightenment is suggested by the story of the young man on his journey to becoming a poet, in which a mundane reality is juxtaposed with allegorical insets gesturing toward higher meaning, such as in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, from 1802.34See Stone, “Being, Knowledge, and Nature in Novalis.” Again, the irony is palpable, as Rabbi Löw overdoes Romantic tropes such as medievalism, the female muse, and the male artist-genius.35See Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism.” Finally, the inclusion of an adolescent Golem no doubt sardonically references the long history of the German tradition’s appropriation of Jewish motifs. In her The Golem Returns (2011), Cathy Gelbin describes how Jewish and non-Jewish writers have turned to this figure in order to reflect on reason and unreason but also Jews’ “otherness.”36See Gelbin, The Golem Returns.

Above all, Rabbi Löw seems to allude to German literature of the early twentieth century, including a fascination with the city’s underworld—in the final section, Rottenstein descends into Berlin’s depths—and with the exotic, the erotic, and the unconscious.37See Gay, Weimar Culture. More specifically, a direct mention of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903) demonstrates that the novel’s scope extends beyond Jewish mysticism or even Jewish ritual. The twelve-year-old Rottenstein begins reading Tonio Kröger just after Jaroslav’s soul enters into him, and around the time that he begins to lust after his female classmates (RL, 203). Mann’s wife Katja Pringsheim was from an assimilated Jewish family, and Jewish characters feature in many of his works, often ambivalently.38There has long been a debate on whether Mann was antisemitic, especially in his early texts. See, for example, Gelber, “Thomas Mann and Anti-semitism” and Levesque, “The Double-Edged Sword.” For a more extensive discussion, see Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World. More specifically, Tonio Kröger’s dilemma—he is split between the poetic fantasy of his South American mother and the austere rationalism of his German father—clearly resonates with Rottenstein, as he navigates his family’s Jewish roots and fragile assimilation. (Rottenstein also devours stories of the Hindu deity Vishnu, just as Hermann Hesse and other early twentieth-century writers sought inspiration in the East.)39See Brown, “Toward a Perspective.” Yet Tonio Kröger, like much of Mann’s oeuvre,40See Meyers, Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes. is also about an artist figure, particularly the conflict between bourgeois self-restraint and the freedom to fantasize and even fabulate.

Stein’s allusions to Franz Kafka are more oblique, but they are perceptible nonetheless. Kafka, of course, became increasingly interested in his Jewish heritage and in Jewish mysticism over the course of his short life but he was also plagued by anxiety about his vocation as a writer in the face of the demands of bourgeois conformity.41See Robertson, Kafka. (He was also a German-speaking Jew from Prague, a center of European Jewry42See Nekula, Kafka. and one of the settings for Rabbi Löw.) Cathy Gelbin argues that Stein invokes but also inverts Kafka’s most famous story, Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis; 1915), by acclaiming Jewish disassimilation rather than lamenting the “disintegration of the assimilating Western Jew,”43Gelbin, The Golem Returns, 162. but there may be a more intimate connection to another of Kafka’s texts. In the “Epilog” that concludes Rabbi Löw, therefore, Bergcowicz—the non-Jewish addressee of Jacoby’s account who takes over the narration, and later claims to be Rottenstein—describes his own nightmare in a manner that reminds of Der Prozess (The trial; 1925), with its themes of law, punishment, and internalized guilt. Bergcowicz receives notice that he should collect a package; he surmises that this will be his corrected manuscript for Rabbi Löw. At the post office, however, he is rebuffed by an unfamiliar official who claims that he is not in fact Bergcowicz. This seems to be confirmed when he checks his identity card and sees a different name. The next day he confronts the same official, who now has a second star on his epaulette, but this time Bergcowicz’s name is correct, and he wonders why he fled before. That same night, the official—with three stars—bursts into his bedroom with a group of officials and accuses him of falsifying his identity and trying to escape his just punishment (RL, 277). Bergcowicz is deposited in a prison cell and his book is burned, whereupon he alludes laconically to historical precedents: “He! Romane zu verbrennen, ist unmodern, sage ich.” (Hey. Burning novels is not at all modern; I said; RL, 277). Clearly, the epilogue mimics both Kafka’s technique—allegory, the protagonist’s limited perspective, and narrative uncertainty—and the Prague author’s themes: self-doubt, vulnerability, and the ambivalence of Jewish identity.

The fact that Rabbi Löw remains so profoundly inflected by German and German Jewish traditions until its very end suggests that, far from transcending these traditions, the novel instead incorporates and continues them. Certainly, the epilogue reinscribes a history of artistic self-reflection that reaches back at least to German Romanticism,44See Schmitz-Emans, “Der Roman.” and it is telling that the novel does not dwell on Mann’s supposed antisemitism, or indeed on antisemitism more generally in the German literary tradition—including Romanticism.45See Beiser, “Romantic Anti-semitism.” Instead, it is the mutual, if frequently uncomfortable imbrication of German and Jewish identities that Rottenstein surely reclaims when, toward the close of the novel, he reverses his aliyah to the Land of Israel and returns to Berlin. As the descendent of a gentile mother and grandmother, his highly unorthodox Orthodox Judaism simply acknowledges the reality that Jewish genealogies in Germany (and across Europe) were forever altered by assimilation and then almost destroyed by the Holocaust, and that repair requires definitional flexibility. Indeed, as is implied when he scolds the Jewish congregation for not crediting the prophet Elijah (who is always expected on Passover), it is belief that defines Jewishness rather than bloodline, and adherence to ritual should not erase German Jewish identity but become its foundation (RL, 265–70). Once he has delivered his message, Rottenstein self-­combusts on the Holocaust memorial that (in real life too) is placed in front of the community center in the Fasanenstraße (RL, 265–70). However, a young boy, Simon, is prepared to recognize what he has made out with his own ears and seen with his own eyes, offering some hope that German Jews might yet become observant. The name Simon derives from the Hebrew for “to hear” or “listener.”

Jacoby/Bergcowicz/Rottenstein’s transgression is threefold. First, he re-entangles German Jewish and German literary traditions and thereby unapologetically asserts their insoluble, if uncomfortable, intimacy—German modernity, to cite Todd Presner, is “always already German/Jewish modernity.”46See Presner, Mobile Modernity. Second, his return from Israel could be seen as a betrayal. Jews in the diaspora are bound to long for the promised land, and they certainly should not feel at home in Germany. Third, his self-styling as an Orthodox Jew is entirely non-halachic, given his lack of a Jewish mother. The contrast he implies between his “authentic Judaism” and the Berlin community is nothing less than scandalous, therefore. In fact, if Bergcowicz really is Rottenstein, then perhaps anyone can be an Orthodox Jew, even Germans. In the end, Rabbi Löw declines to confirm whether Bergcowicz’s Kafkaesque nightmare reveals his actual fraudulent appropriation of a Jewish identity or—conversely—the characteristic ambivalence that definitively proves that he really must be Jewish.

Rottenstein is twice named as Sabbatai Zevi (RL, 225; RL, 239), the Sephardic rabbi from Symrna (now İzmir, Turkey), who in the late seventeenth century defied Jewish authorities, declared himself to be the Messiah, convulsed the Jewish world with the promise of redemption, was imprisoned by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, and finally committed apostasy by converting to Islam. (Rottenstein is referred to as Sabbatai Zevi Beth—Sabbatai Zevi Two). Yet the allusion to perhaps the most famous—or infamous—of Jewish heretics is sustained throughout. In the opening paragraphs, it is reported that Jacoby, the first narrator, prefers to be known as Nathan ben Gaza (RL, 9), and this is reiterated some 240 pages later (RL, 246). Nathan ben Gaza enthusiastically supported Sabbatai Zevi following his arrival in Jerusalem in 1663,47Goldish, “Sabbatai Zevi.” taking on the role of the prophet Elijah in confirming the imminent appearance of the Messiah for 1666—a pivotal year for millenarian movements of the time, including Christians48See Popkin, “Jewish Messianism.”—who would then usher in the restoration of Israel and the salvation of the world. Later, Nathan ben Gaza would propagate that Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam assisted in the messianic project of tikkun olam, whereby sparks of creation were spread as widely as possible in order to redeem the fallen world.49See Dweck, Dissident Rabbi, especially 227.

What Jacoby and Bergcowicz narrate, therefore, is not simply Rottenstein’s emergence as an Orthodox Jew. Rather—following Gershom Scholem’s groundbreaking article “Redemption through Sin”50Scholem, “Redemption through Sin.” See Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi. Scholem was also fascinated by Franz Kafka. See Moses and Wiskind-Elper, “Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka.” According to Paul Mendes-Flohr, Scholem considered Kafka to be “a secularized kabbalist.” See Mendes-Flohr, Gershom Scholem, 16–20. (1937)—what is more fundamentally at stake is the transgression of social and religious norms, and the emergence of new potentialities of Jewish identity as a result of transgression.51See Biale, Gershom Scholem. (Stein will have read Scholem’s essay in the course of his Jewish Studies program in Berlin.) For Scholem, the challenge to rabbinical authority initiated by the most likely bipolar Sabbatai Zevi opened the way to the orgiastic outrages of the eighteenth-century Frankist sect (including many converts to Catholicism)52Mandel, The Militant Messiah. and to the emergence of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, as well as Reform Judaism.53See Rapoport-Albert, ed., Hasidism Reappraised. Subsequently, Sabbateanism would be influential in secular reinterpretations of Jewish belief and practice too, including the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah),54See Maciejko, ed., Sabbatian Heresy. nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zionism,55See Shavit, “Realism and Messianism.” and revolutionary, socialist, and anarchist impulses.56See Millet, “Our Sabbatian Future.” In the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatean families—Dönme, or hidden Jews—contributed significantly to the modernizing movements that prepared the way for Atatürk’s creation of the Republic of Turkey.57See Baer, The Dönme.

In its reinvention of Orthodox Judaism for the modern day, Stein’s Rabbi Löw belongs to an established Jewish tradition of the transgression of norms for the sake of reconfirming and reinvigorating Judaism itself. As intellectual historian Benjamin Lazier argues, the dialectic of heresy means that “the freedom of transgression is made possible by the enduring force of the norms it disputes.”58Lazier, God Interrupted, 198. Even as it disrupts the conventions of Jewish life in Germany and across the diaspora, consequently, Rabbi Löw reimagines its future.59Of course, Rabbi Löw can be read quite differently. It is even possible to interpret the novel as a warning not to rely on innovators of new German Jewish identities whose motives may be less than pure. Jacoby delivers Jewish stories in weekly installments in exchange for a bottle of vodka. Rottenstein is driven by the fantasist’s delight in pure invention. And the non-Jewish German Bergcowicz takes over the narration once Jacoby has self-ignited and even suggests that it is his story. Jewish tales, Bergcowicz confesses, have an aphrodisiacal impact on his German girlfriend (RL, 12), and it may be that they both crave the release from inherited German guilt that could possibly be gained from “becoming a Jew.”