Excerpt

The peculiarity of the German situation since the emancipation of the Jews had been that so far as Judaism creatively or disruptively entered the German language, it always had done so—unlike in France and especially in England—in a progressive, if not revolutionary sense. The circle that formed around Stefan George during the course of the [18]90s offered the Jews for the first time the possibility of placing their conservative tendencies in a fertile relation to Germanness.—Walter Benjamin, “Juden in der deutschen Kultur”¹