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Book Review: Theodore Rippey (ed.): The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch

thought from Plato to Kant’ (p. 111). Unsurprisingly, Rosenstock stresses that sympathetic paraphrase does not indicate assent (p. 119). But while recognizing the weaknesses in Goldberg’s arcane philosophy, he deems it to have been ‘a powerful and imaginative response to the emerging ideology of state-based racism in Weimar Germany’ (p. 119) and the means whereby Israel might have been able to transform itself into ‘the metaphysical folk group’, i.e. ‘the vehicle for the final goal of history – when the totality of humanity will embody the image of God’. In Chapter 4 (pp. 118–61), Professor Rosenstock elaborates Goldberg’s ideas via a detailed discussion of Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer that the average gentile reader will find hard to understand. In doing so, he stresses, however, that ‘Goldberg [was] not claiming Jewish racial superiority’ but arguing that the Jews had ‘rejected racial gods for the one universal God’ in order to preserve their cultural identity and sense of mission down the ages (p. 155). Chapter 5 (pp. 162–203) begins with an explanation of the differences between Goldberg’s and Scholem’s understanding of Jewish history that caused such hostility between them (pp. 163–73) and the relationship between Walter Benjamin and the Goldberg circle (pp. 178–81). The rest of the chapter is taken up by a disquisition on Goldberg’s book (1935) on the Sephardic Torah scholar Moses Maimonides (1135– 1204). It begins with ‘a broad overview of the history of Judaism’ (p. 181) before focusing more sharply on Maimonides’ philosophy and substituting 14 propositions of Goldberg’s own devising (pp. 184–92) – which culminate in the assertion that God ‘wants humanity to work together with him to build a new tabernacle where his glory can dwell in the midst of the world’ (p. 189) – for Maimonides’ ‘thirteen articles of faith’. The modern secular reader may find Goldberg the esoteric mystagogue at best hard to follow and at worst not worth following because of his obscurity. So it is worth emphasizing that Chapter 5 is comparatively accessible for gentiles and non-specialists and administers the coup de grâce to the idea that Goldberg can be ‘aligned with the reactionary political philosophies of [Carl] Schmitt and [Martin] Heidegger’ (p. 197). Conversely, Goldberg’s historical optimism may be obscure, but it permits Professor Rosenstock to liken him to a ‘Jewish Hegel breaking into the static nature of Kant’s conditions’ for whom ‘the goal of creation is to allow God’s infinite power to find expression within the finite realm so that his justice can be reconciled with his omnipotence’ (p. 192). Or, in other words, Professor Rosenstock has assured Goldberg of a well-defined place in modern German-Jewish cultural history, and it will be a long time before another scholar has the patience and specialist knowledge to better his magisterial work.