Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien e. V.
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The essay compares the dichotomous concepts of corporeality and spirituality in Judaism and Christianity. Through the ages, deviations from normative principles of beliefs could be discerned in both religions. These can be attributed either to the somewhat confrontational interaction between Jews and Christians in the Medieval urban environment or to the impact of Hellenic civilization on both monotheistic religions. Out of this dynamic impact emerged Christian art with a predilection to expressed corporeality, whereas Jewish religiosity found its artistic expression in a spiritual noniconographical mode. A genuine Jewish art and iconography could develop only after a certain degree of assimilation and secularization. Marc Chagall was the first protagonist of a mature expression of Jewish iconography.
Yoel Hoffmann is an Israeli writer born in 1937 in Brasov (Kronstadt), Romania. Brought up in a German-speaking family, already in his first book, Sefer Yosef (1989), he conveys the voice of German-speaking immigrants in Israel (the “Katschen” story, 1986) and that of the East European Jewish community in Berlin in the late 1930s, on the verge of the Second World War. His works are crammed with characters of Jews from Germany gripped by the memory of the language they abandoned following their emigration to Palestine in the 1930s. The classic one is the character of Bernhard, in the eponymous work. The current article focuses on the representation and elaboration of Hoffmann’s unique creation, in a language influenced by his deep identification with Zen Buddhism on the one hand, and his attraction to the modernist, Western style of stream of consciousness on the other. In central sections of his works, Hoffman presents his entire literary corpus as a type of explicit, allusive, or secret Holocaust literature, and invites his readers and his critics to decode the allusions and expose the secret in this theme, a surprising statement in relation to Hoffmann’s work and its analysis so far. Hoffmann represents the Holocaust as a collective Israeli trauma for which his literary fiction creates a special catalogue of representative characters. In the creation of a catalogue, and particularly one that simultaneously classifies and individualizes, Hoffmann’s project resembles the monumental 1920s cataloguing project by the celebrated German photographer August Sander (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts). Hoffmann included photographs from this project in his works, and even chose some of them for the covers of his books. The article examines the implicit relationships between these two creative artists as conferring a meaning so far not considered in the research of the Holocaust theme in Yoel Hoffmann’s writings.