SOURCE: Barnouw, Dagmar. “Enlightenment, Identity, Transformation: Salomon Maimon and Rahel Varnhagen.” In The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse, edited by Klaus L. Berghahn, pp. 39-58. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

In the following essay, Barnouw claims that Varnhagen and Salomon Maiman, as German-Jewish writers, were influenced by both Enlightenment and Romantic concepts of identity and in particular the concepts of transformation, self-knowledge, and experience.

In the Western world Jews as a group have been perceived as particularly talented for modernity. Socialized into a mixed secular-religious culture that has valued symbolic activities, they have shown themselves to be skilled in abstraction, tolerant of change and, in certain situations, accepting of difference. They have been travelers who come and leave, strangers who negotiate the unfamiliar, connecting and exchanging across borders. If Ahasver, wandering through time without rest or change, is the old Urbild of Jewish...