Abstract

This study is the beginning of a bigger project, trying to describe the relationship of texts by four Jewish writers, Moses Mendelssohn, Isaschar Falkensohn Behr, Salomon Maimon and Ephraim Kuh, to German eighteenth century literature. Jewish writers of the eighteenth century found themselves in a precarious political and linguistic situation: they could not openly criticize the German Enlightenment which was often rational and Christian at the same time. German was a second language for all of these authors. ;The single chapters consist of close readings of various texts of these authors, which point out the esoteric quality of at least Mendelssohn's Phaedon and his debate with Lavater and Maimon's Lebensgeschichte. The poems of Kuh and Behr are harder to analyze; it is very interesting to link them to the poetry of the eighteenth century and the discussion of subjectivity, but these connections are questionable as the poems are mostly mediocre. ;By discussing the reception of the texts at their time and rereading the texts, the dissertation points out that there is never just 'the reader' as literary criticism often assumes. Maimon and Mendelssohn explicitly refer to the tradition of esoteric writing and their texts discriminate between different kinds of readers. Their concept of text and reader present a significant alternative to the Enlightenment's dominant notion of a text