Finishing up preparations for a talk on Mendelssohn, I turned to Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: Life of a Jewish Woman). I think it was Lilliana Weissberg who pointed out the original subtitle was Life of A Jewess, but I may be getting this detail wrong. Varnhagen’s story represents the effort of a German Jewess to escape from Judaism into society, the struggle for recognition as an individual, the effort to secure a little happiness in the bourgeois world, and the ultimate collapse of the German Jewish salon society around 1813 as German Jewish assimilation bangs up against the hard real social world.

Writing in 1933 and republished in 1957, Arendt can be read as presenting in Varnhagen and German-Jewish assimilation an opposition between “the human condition” and “the Jewish condition.” In complete opposition to the world of Enlightenment, figured here by Moses Mendelssohn, Rahel Varnhagen reads like a negative…