The racialization of European identity in the 1930s excluded Jews of all stripes. Under National Socialism, Auerbach’s German-Jewish identity reached a crisis. He desperately tried to carve out a space for German Jews as cultural Christians. His classic Mimesis offered a blueprint for a Judeo-Christian European culture. Christian typology, or figura, was its pivot, the trope that wove together life and discourse until modern times, and provided the connecting thread of Western history. Cultural Protestantism formed Auerbach's education, and he had no traditional Jewish learning. He turned, in the 1930s, to Catholic traditions, and remained ignorant of Jewish typology. Yet, recent scholarship has insisted on regarding him as Jewish and on turning “Figura” and Mimesis into Jewish documents. “Judaizing” Auerbach drives ad absurdum the trend to crown German-acculturated Jews as Jewish European and marginalize traditional Jews. Auerbach was a cultural Christian. Europeans were beneficiaries of the ancient Hebrews, he thought, but Christianity took over their traditions, and they lost their vitality. The Holocaust was a European and not a Jewish tragedy. in his US exile, in cultural despair, Auerbach ended up upholding, with Hugh of St. Victor, Christian cosmopolitanism. Focusing on Jewish typology, this book journeys with Jacob and Jewish hope, and is a rejoinder to Auerbach.