Assimilation and Jewish Theory

Dissertation project by Sylvia Jaworski

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the project "Imitation - Assimilation - Transformation"

This dissertation project raises the question of how assimilation could be understood in the religious discourse context of Jewish modernity. The work examines in more detail the negotiation of the possibilities and limits of assimilation in religious discourse in literary and journalistic texts using the example of the transcultural borderland of German (Western Jewish) and Polish (Eastern Jewish) culture.
A first, general product of this discourse is the invention of a "Jewish theology", which can be understood as the result not only of religious reform but also of a complex assimilation process in the field of religion. The other aspects of religious assimilation as well as the associated debates then - seemingly paradoxically - do not take up primary theological questions, but are transferred to or played out on four non-religious levels of negotiation: on a political, a physical, an aesthetic and a scientific level. These assimilatory shifts and transfers away from the primarily religious become plausible when they are understood, with the help of cultural studies theories of translation, as secularisation phenomena: as politicisation, profanation, aestheticisation and scientification of religion. Assimilation and secularisation thus behave as analogous processes: They are processes of transformation of religion between dissolution and transformation. It is precisely the non-existent linearity of assimilation that makes it possible to ascribe ambivalent and hybrid forms to the assimilation process in the religious sphere as well.
This complexity of phenomena of assimilation between religion, politics, art and science will be examined in the planned work using the significant example of the mutual perception of German and Polish Jewry.