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This article unpacks Margarete Susman’s political and theological arguments at the core of her reading of the Book of Job. As I show through a reading of her oeuvre, Susman rejects political projects that she takes to be based on eschatology such as political Zionism. However, Susman should not be viewed merely as a critic of Zionism. I argue that an analysis tuned to the historical circumstances of her writing should recognize her stance on the nation-building project in Palestine as ambivalent rather than antagonistic. Susman’s conception of the Jewish spirit as rooted in self-sacrifice allows her to appreciate the national aspirations at the core of the Zionist project while rejecting Zionism’s exclusion of other Jewish national projects. I contend that Susman’s understanding of Jewish messianism as immanent rather than teleological informs her ambivalence toward Zionism as well as her original vision of Jewish political action. I argue in closing that Susman’s theodicy offers a novel vision for Jewish ethics that is not limited to the historical moment of its formulation. Susman’s theodicy also resonates within contemporary debates on Jewish diaspora in providing a non-centralized vision of Jewish national projects.
Cultural heritage reconstructed - Compact Memory and the Frankfurt Digital Judaica Collection
(2014)
Compact Memory, the internet archive of German Jewish periodicals, provides free global internet access to the vast majority of German-Jewish newspapers and periodicals of the 19th and 20th century.
Jewish historical newspapers are the invaluable sources that supply direct and detailed information of the transformation process of Jewry and offer new insights into European Jewish history. The use of these historical sources however is extremely difficult, as complete sets of periodicals are very rarely to be found and they are scattered all over the world in different libraries and archives and in different physical formats (paper, microfilm).
Compact Memory contains the 110 most important Jewish German newspapers and periodicals in Central Europe in the period from 1806-1938, covering the complete range of religious, political, social, cultural and academic aspects of Jewish life. The texts are available partly as full-texts, processed by OCR, partly as graphic documents with corresponding index options. The database offers advanced search options, downloading and printing of articles. Thousands of essays of more than 10.000 individual contributors have been bibliographically indexed.
Compact Memory was established by the Judaica Division of the University Library Frankfurt am Main and in charge today in cooperation with the Aachen Chair of German-Jewish Literary History and the Cologne library Germania Judaica.
Compact Memory is one database within the Digital Collection Judaica which being part of Europeana and other digital portals offers resources for the reconstruction and representation of Jewish cultural heritage.