Unsettling Difference

Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity

Unsettling Difference challenges the major-minor pattern that has framed discussions of German Jewish difference, focusing on instances that fall outside traditional understandings of minority culture. Exploring expressions of Jewish identity and difference in biblical-themed musical dramas and their literary sources, Adi Nester argues that the issue of Jewish difference should be treated as an aesthetic question in the first half of the twentieth century, even amid the rise of pseudoscientific theories about race and blood.

Drawing on the fraught, parallel histories of opera and the modern reception of the Hebrew Bible in Germany, both significant in debates at the time about the nature of Jewish separateness, Unsettling Difference shows how this discourse troubles concepts of Jewish marginality and (non-Jewish) German dominance. Through innovative readings of key works in this tradition—Rudolf Borchardt's poem, Das Buch Joram; Paul Ben-Haim's oratorio, Joram; Arnold Schoenberg's opera, Moses und Aron; Joseph Roth's novel, Hiob; and Eric Zeisl's opera, Hiob—Nester shows how these biblical adaptations foreground alternative notions of difference that rely on confusion, ambiguity, radical heterogeneity, excess, and repetition.

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