Introduction

THE HISTORY OF TENSIONS between German and East European Jews is well-known. Many studies have dealt with the subject in one capacity or another, and it is well established in popular opinion as well. One expression of these tensions was the attitude in Germany toward the Yiddish language, something conveyed, among other things, in the ways works of Yiddish literature were transmitted to German-speaking audiences. Early attempts at such transmission and translation tended, as a matter or course and without further reflection, to rewrite the shtetl as “ghetto,” presenting it as such even when other words might show up for the term in a given translation. Hence, while the translation by Stefania Goldenring of a volume of stories by Sholem Asch (1880–1957) published in 1907 renders “shtetl” as “Städtchen,” that usage is subordinated to the volume's title Bilder aus dem Ghetto. This problem went beyond just one volume. In a series of treatments and reviews written for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums Ludwig Geiger, the renowned German literary historian and sometime editor of the popular liberal journal, subsumed the works of Yiddish writers like I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem as well as Sholem Asch under the genre Ghettoliteratur. Although it was a “venerated genre” in the Allgemeine Zeitung, as Hans Otto Horch notes, the Ghettoliteratur designation did not prevent Geiger from contrasting a Yiddish writer like Asch with the more esteemed English writer Israel Zangwill, and concluding: “bei Asch ist alles fremd, die Welt in der er lebt und die er beschreibt, ist eine, die wir nicht kennen und in der uns, wenn wir in sie träten, der Atem verschlägt” (with Asch, everything is foreign, the world in which he lives and which he describes, is one that we do not know and which, were we to enter it, would take our breath would be taken away). Still, one also finds attempts to challenge this image of the shtetl as ghetto and its implications for mediating Yiddish culture. Those attempts found expression in other translations from Yiddish and in other reviews of the translations and critical assessments of Yiddish writing more generally.

IF ONE WORKS ON HEINE, one can scarcely get around the work of Jeffrey Sammons. By that I mean not only his groundbreaking study Heine, the Elusive Poet, but much that he has written in the years since. If Sammons has not addressed every single issue in Heine studies, he has undoubtedly read everything relevant to it. Moreover, lest one think this claim relevant only for the English-speaking world, one need only consult the important three-volume documentation of Heine's posthumous reception Heine und die Nachwelt (Heine and Posterity). Apart from its four hundred documents covering, in abridged form, circa 1800 pages, and its far more extensive bibliography, Heine und die Nachwelt contains three separate introductions totaling over 450 pages of text and notes. The index to this work, spread over three volumes, lists twenty-two references to Jeffrey Sammons, a number comparable to only one other North American scholar, Jost Hermand, who however hails from Germany and publishes mostly in German. Yet, the number of references alone, or the fact that Sammons is one of a half dozen North Americans listed from the last half-century and one of only a handful (besides Ruth Klüger, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Paul Peters, and Jost Hermand) to have a contribution included in the anthology, reveals less than the fact that the author-editors cite Sammons's views early in the preface, relying on him there and elsewhere to help frame and develop their overall project (HNW 1:6). There can be no doubt that Sammons is a “Heine insider.”

These considerations help to contextualize Sammons's self-deprecating remarks toward his conclusion: “I began to wonder whether as a foreigner I was an intruder in the discourse, whether my fussy complaints about the accuracy of interpretation and research, disputing the claims that Heine was an ironist who meant the opposite of what he said, grouching about the reshaping of him to suit our own values and convictions, have been relevant or appropriate.” His prominence alone within Heine und die Nachwelt should lay permanently to rest any such concerns.

I

THE MID TO LATE 1980S witnessed a powerful challenge to more traditional approaches to the study of Jews in Germany. Until that time such studies were dominated by two models, one of which tended to dwell apologetically on the Jewish contribution to modern German history while the other stressed alternatively the process of Jewish integration, assimilation, and emancipation into German society. In 1985, however, George Mosse published a collection of lectures titled German Jews Beyond Judaism which argued that, as they departed from traditional Jewish life, German Jews replaced religious practice with Bildung as the central principle around which they constructed their sense of Jewish identity. Taking up Mosse’s point, David Sorkin extended it to argue more comprehensively that between 1780 and the mid nineteenth century, there emerged a veritable German Jewish subculture, one that attested to a new cohesiveness in the Jewish community despite the widely divergent paths — from secularized to (neo-) orthodox — of Jewish entry into German culture and society. Though invisible to the Jews themselves, the institutions they founded and the particular symbolic value they attached to Bildung gave expression to this German Jewish subculture and community.

While acknowledging the power of this new model, this essay nonetheless seeks to question some of its assumptions.

Introduction

The WTO case brought by India in 2002 to challenge aspects of the European Communities' Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) brings fresh scrutiny to a policy area that has received little attention in recent years – trade preferences for developing countries. The idea for such preferences emerged from the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964. The ensuing negotiations led to Resolution 21(ii) at the second session of UNCTAD in 1968, acknowledging “unanimous agreement” in favor of the establishment of preferential arrangements. Tariff discrimination violates the most-favored nation (MFN) obligation of GATT Article I, however, and thus the legal authority for preferential tariff schemes had to await a GATT waiver of this obligation, which came in 1971. The waiver was to expire after 10 years, but the authority for preferences was extended by the GATT contracting parties Decision of November 28, 1979 on Differential and More Favorable Treatment, Reciprocity and Fuller Participation of Developing Countries, popularly known as the “Enabling Clause,” and now incorporated into the law of the WTO along with the GATT itself.

Although trade discrimination favoring developing countries is the essence of any GSP scheme, India's WTO complaint raised the question of what type of discrimination is permissible – must all developing countries be treated alike, or can preference-granting nations discriminate among them based on various sorts of criteria? The European system challenged by India afforded more generous preferences to the least-developed countries (LDCs), to developing nations that undertook certain measures to protect the environment and labor rights, and to 12 nations involved in efforts to combat drug trafficking.