SOURCE: Grossman, Jeffrey. “Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology: The Problem of Pluralism and the Absolute Difference of National Character—Or, Where Do the Jews Fit In?” German Studies Review 20, no. 1 (February 1997): 23-47.

[In the following essay, Grossman stresses the connection between Humboldt's political and cultural ideas and his theories of language, asserting that this relationship also informed Humboldt's attitude towards Jews in Germany.]

In 1918, Max Kohler wrote of Wilhelm von Humboldt: “[It] may well be that, if he had remained in active political life, the reactionary forces would have been unable to check Jewish emancipation in Germany so long and so sweepingly.”¹ Apparently describing a very different figure, Paul Lawrence Rose, who attacks the entire redemptive aspect of German liberal and progressive tradition, concludes that “Humboldt never really disagreed with his wife's hope that ‘in fifty years, the Jews will be exterminated as Jews.’”² Various observers have written on Humboldt's relation to Jews and have come to equally various conclusions.³ They have, more significantly, rarely, if ever, addressed the conceptual framework at work in Humboldt's thought, a conceptual framework that finds its fullest expression in his writings on language, but which is also operative in his political, social, and cultural ideologies.⁴ Yet, only by examining how that conceptual framework or underlying structure of thought, which informed Humboldt's practices as a statesman, striving and failing to create a unified Germany at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, attempting as an educational reformer to implement his theory of Bildung, and seeking as a linguistic theoretician to define the relationship of language to mentality and the elusive notion of “national character,” can we begin to make sense of Humboldt's apparently contradictory relationship to Jews and Jewish culture in Germany.

In this article, I will not argue that a static and unchanging conceptual framework informed all aspects of Humboldt's life and work, but that there is a continuity between his views of politics, culture, nation, and language, in which Bildung (formation) and the desire for a closed system of proper forms have a central mediating function. In the political sphere, this desire translates into Humboldt's hopes for a stable national cultural order and informs his approach to Jewish existence in German society, but it is Humboldt's linguistic theory, and particularly his construction of a hierarchy of languages and an absolute difference between their mentalities (Ansichten), that provides the most elaborate articulation of this desire.

For historians of linguistic thought, Humboldt occupies a transitional position, for he was the first linguistic theorist to assert the “continuously ‘dynamic’ character of languages.”⁵ Yet, Humboldt's linguistic studies, like those of Franz Bopp, the Schlegels, and the Brothers Grimm, attempted to understand the relationship between language, culture, and knowledge. Humboldt, according to Roy Harris and Talbot Taylor, was also the first linguistic theoretician to assert that languages expressed the mentalities of different peoples, a theory, they argue, that ultimately resembles a racialist view of language.⁶ At the same time, his concern with the cultural expressions enabled through different languages is one which a major Yiddish linguist defends as an advocacy of linguistic pluralism.⁷ Addressing different concerns, Noam Chomsky finds parallels between Humboldt's linguistic theory (for example, the concept of idiolects) and his defense of individual rights against any strong intervention of the state (in his Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu Bestimmen [1792] and other occasional writings).⁸ Although Chomsky does not provide a detailed examination of this relationship, this point, along with Humboldt's other notions of language, gains significance—and begs inquiry—especially in light of the complex cultural context and the simultaneous ongoing efforts at consolidation of state power taking place in the Prussia of Humboldt's time.

Thus, linguists have certainly taken an interest in the larger social issues connected with Humboldt's theories, though, like historians, without coming to anything like a consensus. They have, moreover, generally not ventured into the larger historical context—which invariably leads us back to questions of nation and the state, the first being a term notoriously resistant to any consistent definition.⁹ The concept of nation was certainly no more—and perhaps far less—stable in Humboldt's time. How Humboldt sought to define it and to influence its development in Germany is, however, central to understanding how he viewed the Jews and the place of Jewish culture in Germany.

LANGUAGE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPEAN JEWISH CULTURE

Until the late eighteenth century Jews in Germany and Jews in Eastern Europe constituted a single larger Ashkenazic Jewish community. Although some differences existed between these groups, they nevertheless participated in the same larger cultural system. Jacob Katz has described this cultural system as an autonomous community within central and Eastern Europe.¹⁰ A fundamental feature of this community was its internal bilingualism, in which Yiddish functioned as the low-cultural vernacular, while Hebrew, the language of high culture, was used for intellectual and religious writings and for prayer.¹¹ Most men could read Yiddish and at least some Hebrew, while many women and children read Yiddish.¹² This situation changed in Germany—though not in Eastern Europe—with the onset of the Enlightenment, which promoted the emancipation of Jews while simultaneously calling upon them to seek civil and self-improvement through its own ideal of Bildung.¹³ Not surprisingly, Bildung came to include a specific relationship to language, which for Herder, for example, contributed to the development of a people and served as the expression of that people's Geist.¹⁴ For Jews, Bildung came to mean, among other things, speaking standard German, against which Yiddish came to be viewed not so much as an undeveloped dialect, but rather as a corrupt and morally corruptive impure mixture of languages.¹⁵ It is in this connection that Moses Mendelssohn, who spoke and wrote Yiddish, made his oft-cited comment: “Ich fürchte, dieser Jargon hat nicht wenig zur Unsittlichkeit des gemeinen Mannes beigetragen; und verspreche mir sehr gute Wirkung von dem unter meinen Brüdern seit einiger Zeit aufkommenden Gebrauch der reinen deutschen Mundart.”¹⁶ In Mendelssohn's view and that of other Jewish proponents of the Enlightenment (Maskilim), Yiddish was thus a language devoid of culture (Bildung) and respectability (Sittlichkeit). This antipathy among Jews toward the Yiddish language reflected an acceptance of the dominant culture's evaluation of that language, but it is less certain that it represented a desire to assimilate fully and altogether relinquish Jewish cultural affiliations. There is no doubt that Jews in Germany embraced many aspects of the Enlightenment and sought to reform Jewish culture. The question is where their own view of Jewish culture and its needs for reform coincided with and differed from those of non-Jewish advocates of Jewish reform. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, East European proponents of the Enlightenment who wrote in Yiddish, for example, accepted that they were writing in a language devoid of culture, but nevertheless viewed the language as a medium for spreading Enlightenment values—with the result that Yiddish ultimately underwent a transvaluation by the late nineteenth century in, for example, the work of writers such as Shalom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. In Germany, however, civil emancipation was to be accompanied by cultural reform and gradual linguistic change from Yiddish to German, a process that took several generations.

EDUCATIONAL REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF BILDUNG

Wilhelm von Humboldt developed his theories of language, his thoughts on the role of the state and on civil rights for Jews in a period of deep structural and institutional change in Germany. Most significantly, perhaps, the emerging Prussian state, in which Humboldt served as an administrator, had begun to challenge the institutions of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.¹⁷ With the decline of influence of the old Habsburg Reich, the Prussian state sought to consolidate and concentrate power within its institutions and geographical borders. It was, however, not only the locus of power that shifted at this time, but also the way power operated in society. Reforms of the Prussian legal system, for example, represented an attempt to overcome “universalist communities of justice like the old Reich” as well as “local islands of custom, privilege and special status”—including cities, guilds, corporate institutions, and religious communities.¹⁸ These reforms thus also led to a transformation of the Jewish community, which had until then been a largely self-governing community.¹⁹ The reform and reorganization of institutions “sought to create a new kind of man, a citizen—what, significantly enough, Germans called a Staatsbürger—who would exist outside the particularist confines of family caste, or community” and whose creation would involve reforms in education and the eventual emergence of a Bildungsbürgertum.²⁰

The concept of Bildung informed much of the debate on the emancipation of Jews, but it also mediated between Humboldt's theories of culture, his political practices, and his theory of language. Understanding Humboldt's view of Jewish culture and language thus presupposes an understanding of how he conceived Bildung in theory and practice, a conceptualization that he elaborated when he restructured the Prussian educational system.²¹ After Napoleon's defeat of the Prussians at Jena in 1806, the reform party, led by Karl August von Hardenberg, Karl Freiherr von Stein, and Minister Karl von Altenstein, sought to reorganize the bureaucratically dominated Prussian state by combining the political and pedagogical definitions of Bildung. In this context, Humboldt restructured the educational system, thereby transforming Bildung “into a practical program of pedagogical reform in which the state would develop a system devoted to individual formation.”²² In 1777, the liberal administrator Christian Wilhelm von Dohm could still attribute to the state a role in political education in which human beings would develop their abilities and powers in order to fulfill their duties to the state bureaucracy and the law.²³ Only fifteen years later, in 1792, Wilhelm von Humboldt presented his version of the Neo-Humanist view. He argued that “Menschen bilden” does not mean to educate them “zu äußern Zwecken,” that the human being should not be sacrificed to the Bürger.²⁴ Unlike Herder before him, for example, Humboldt promoted the organic development of individuals and of nations, but opposed their organic linkage to the state, which he perceived as an apparatus that must be carefully regulated.²⁵

Influenced in the 1790s by Schiller, and favorably disposed to Goethe's denunciation of political action in Hermann und Dorothea, Humboldt became committed to Bildung as individual formation in the private and personal sphere.²⁶ Humboldt's approach to Bildung did not include a nationalist program, but he did envision the independent formation of individuals as a positive development for the nation.²⁷ Through his activities as chief of educational and ecclesiastical affairs, Humboldt sought school reforms that would allow for individual growth, and in his self-characterized attempts “to innoculate Germans with Greek spirit,” he introduced a classical curriculum into the Gymnasium, restructured the form of secondary education, and founded the new University of Berlin.²⁸ Despite his desire to promulgate an ideal of Bildung in which the state would play a very limited role allowing individuals maximum autonomy to form themselves, Humboldt found it impossible, according to one historian, to “resist using bureaucratic power to realize his cultural ideal.”²⁹ Humboldt ultimately resorted to bureaucratic power due to his conception of Bildung. In this conception, the uninhibited self-cultivation of the individual depended on the establishment of social bonds.³⁰ In his first semester at Frankfurt an der Oder, for example, Humboldt had formed with Henriette Herz a small society referred to as a Tugendbund, whose aim had been moral cultivation and mutual self-improvement.³¹ Later, Humboldt sought to limit the state's influence on the university, but he also came to see the state as a means for establishing those social bonds required for the process of Bildung. The university, as he envisioned it, should have served only as the institutional framework, receiving limited financial assistance from the state to establish the sciences at the start. The state would then allow the sciences to function autonomously, once they had been created.³² After the Prussian defeat at Jena, however, new nationalist tendencies, represented, for example, by the Burschenschaft movement, drew on the ideals of the Neo-Humanists.³³ The university came to serve the national ideals and the propagation of German culture. Humboldt managed to reconcile his opposition to extensive state power with his own nascent nationalism. The Neo-Humanist ideal of Bildung had emerged as part of the Enlightenment. It was that aspect of the Enlightenment, also taken over by German Classicism, that emphasized the study of antiquity and the cultivation of the individual for the good of all humanity. Humboldt maintained that the cultivation of individual citizens would ultimately better serve the purposes of the state.³⁴ He thus helped develop a program of national education that would fortify the absolutist Prussian state: “Bildung itself was subordinated, having abdicated its sovereignty to patriotism and political training.”³⁵ Thus, Humboldt's restructuring of the educational system ultimately helped those who sought to enlist Bildung in the service of the state.

In his Antrag auf Errichtung der Universität Berlin of July 1809, Humboldt presented the blueprints for establishing the University of Berlin and achieving this institutional consolidation. An institute of higher education would, Humboldt maintained, exert influence beyond the borders of the Prussian state, and galvanize the forces in Germany interested in Bildung and enlightenment. It would thereby encourage support for the reviving (Wiederaufblühen) German states, and provide German scholarship (Wissenschaft) with a sanctuary—especially at a time when “ein Theil Deutschlands vom Kriege verheert, ein andrer in fremder Sprache von fremden Gebietern beherrscht wird.”³⁶ Humboldt's interest in preserving German language and scholarship arose as a response to the destruction wrought by Napoleon's forces, which appeared to threaten not only the Prussian state (which employed him at that time as a diplomat), but also the institutions of German culture.³⁷ Significantly, however, Humboldt's response did not assume the far more chauvinistic style of Fichte or Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

Eventually, however, the concept of Bildung, independent of the organic national metaphor, became a means by which the Prussian bureaucracy increased its own status and political power. This “ideal gave the bureaucrats a sense of self-importance as rational, cultivated, and autonomous individuals, and thus new prestige and importance to the training and mode of thought required by their work.”³⁸ The ideal of Bildung replaced the old form of aristocracy based on the estate and genealogy with one based on the cultivation of the spirit.³⁹ After the defeat at Jena by Napoleon, it became the central concept around which the reform party of Stein, Hardenberg, and Alternstein sought to reorganize society.⁴⁰ These overall reforms of state, which included such redefinitions of cultural ideals, coincided with the legal emancipation of the Jews.

A central issue in the debates on Jewish emancipation was the re-education of the Jews. While opponents of emancipation such as the theologian Johann David Michaelis and or Friedrich Traugott Hartmann, doubted that emancipation would have ennobling effects on the Jews, most early proponents of emancipation took a somewhat more optimistic view.⁴¹ In his treatise, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm maintained that the state should support both the emancipation and the re-education of the Jews, thus investing it with an educational function.⁴² Humboldt rejected the notion of a tutelary state, arguing that the state was “kein Erziehungs—sondern ein Rechtsinstitut.”⁴³ The state should thus unconditionally grant legal status to the Jews without first requiring their “moral improvement.” Although Humboldt played a central role in the intragovernmental debate that preceded the 1812 Prussian act of emancipation, he had to contend with the conservative opposition represented by the Justice Kircheizen. The conservative intervention resulted in Prussia granting only partial emancipation. Ironically, Jewish intellectuals who participated in the discussions on emancipation between 1806 and 1830 adhered to the doctrine of the tutelary state, which required “regeneration” of the Jews as the condition for granting legal rights. The only Jewish opposition to the tutelary state came from Moses Mendelssohn, who had argued twenty-five years before Humboldt for the unconditional granting of equality on the basis of natural rights alone. This opposition only reappeared in the 1830s, when Gabriel Riesser took up Mendelssohn's argument. Bildung thus became bound up with the idea of emancipation and citizenship.⁴⁴

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Humboldt and Hardenberg sought to achieve German unity and advocated a uniform solution to the problem of Jewish rights. The proposal would guarantee the rights granted under Napoleon's auspices and, in addition, introduce the Prussian model of emancipation from 1812. Jews, who enjoyed no such rights in the other smaller German states, supported these attempts.⁴⁵ Napoleon's return from Elba, however, placed Humboldt and Prussia in an awkward position of negotiation with the smaller states, which opposed the granting of rights, and many of which sought to rescind those granted by Napoleon. In order to galvanize support for renewed warfare against Napoleon, Hardenberg and Humboldt ultimately had to settle for a lesser political unity (a Staatenbund, as opposed to a Bundestaat).⁴⁶ As a result, Hardenberg and Humboldt's statute on Jewish emancipation, based on the Prussian model, was so rewritten as to reverse any positive influence it might have had on the position of the Jews.⁴⁷ This conservative turn thus delayed the entire process of emancipation. Thereafter, rights were granted slowly and variously throughout Germany during the nineteenth century.⁴⁸

HUMBOLDT'S ORGANICIST CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE

As noted earlier, a salient feature of Ashkenazic Jewish culture was its linguistic difference—in addition to the religious difference. Language, however, was becoming central at this time to the question of national self-definition, just as the promoters of Bildung—both Jewish and non-Jewish—simultaneously viewed the Jewish linguistic transformation as a necessary stage along their path into German culture and modernity. In his work, Humboldt frequently addressed the question of the relationship between language, nation, and cultural knowledge. Thus, we can grasp how Humboldt sought to define the German nation and the place of Jews within it by analyzing the relationship between language and nation in his linguistic thought. Language had already been important for Herder who stressed its relationship to Bildung and the Volksgeist.⁴⁹ Humboldt conceptualized Bildung differently from Herder, emphasizing individual formation. He was apparently less concerned with German Volksgeist than Herder, but he nevertheless relied on the organic dimension which he mentioned once in the July Antrag, and which became far more central to his theories of language and national character. Whereas he included in his writings passages referring to the formation of idiolects, a point which appeals to Chomsky, “national character,” for Humboldt, nevertheless leaves its imprint on languages.⁵⁰ His belief in the individuality of language seems also to represent an attempt to preserve for the individual a private realm only a few years after he institutionally consolidated Staat and Bildung.⁵¹

Despite the notorious difficulty of tracing the direct influences of philosophical thought on Wilhelm von Humboldt, who almost never cited philosophical sources when articulating his positions, he did apparently engage in contemporary intellectual discussions on the relationship of language, mind, and national character.⁵² In the 1820s, he corresponded with Franz Bopp, the professor of Sanskrit at the University of Berlin since 1821, and with A. W. Schlegel. In his writings, he occasionally provides direct reference to their linguistic influences and to those of Friedrich Schlegel and Alexander von Humboldt.⁵³ Humboldt, like Herder and other Romantic linguists, such as Bopp, the Schlegels, and Jacob Grimm, focused his studies on language as an organism. As opposed to language theories of the Classical period, language for Romantic linguistics receives an “irreducible expressive value.”⁵⁴ It does not so much represent by imitating or duplicating things, but becomes in itself, in its own grammatical forms, the expression of the consciousness of its speakers.⁵⁵ This emphasis on grammatical forms differed from Herder, who stressed the importance of language in its folk-cultural and literary manifestations. Michel Foucault describes the second consequence of the organic conceptualization of language found in Romantic linguistics:

language is no longer linked to civilizations by the level of learning to which they have attained (the delicacy of their representative grid, the multiplicity of the connections it is possible to establish between its elements), but by the mind of the peoples who have given rise to it, animate it, and are recognizable in it. Just as the living organism manifests, by its inner coherence, the functions that keep it alive, so language, in the whole architecture of its grammar, makes visible the fundamental will that keeps a whole people alive and gives it the power to speak a language belonging solely to itself.⁵⁶

This analytical emphasis on the architecture of the grammar of a language injected a more scientific (or scientistic) approach into the study of language itself as the expressive voice of a people's spirit than one will find in Herder's writings on the subject.⁵⁷

Friedrich Schlegel, among others, distinguished between two families of languages, Indo-European and Semitic. Rejecting the myth of the Tower of Babel, Schlegel put forth the notion of linguistic polygenesis.⁵⁸ Schlegel, moreover, linked language to race, by linking the polygenesis of language to contemporary polygenetic views of race (although adherence to the monogenetic development of humankind did not prevent racialists from developing their own variations on monogenism).⁵⁹ Schlegel echoed Herder in his assertion that language, Sitte and Denkart of peoples, are interwoven (“verwebt”).⁶⁰ Like Humboldt later on, Schlegel sought to demonstrate that mind (Geist or Geistigkeit) is rooted in the very components of language itself.⁶¹

Through his analyses of language types, based on the study of morphemes, A. W. Schlegel developed criteria for distinguishing between isolating, agglutinative or affixing, and inflected languages. He further differentiated inflected languages into synthetic (organic) and analytical, placing the synthetic languages on a higher level.⁶² Whereas analytical languages underwent a process of decay through time losing “ihre bedeutsamen Biegungen und Unterscheidungen,” he believed “daß die in hohem Grade synthetischen und organischen Sprachen in dieser Gestalt uralt gewesen und ohne Mischung geblieben seyn.”⁶³ German belonged, for him, to the class of synthetic organic languages, just as German culture had evolved organically into a synthetic whole, a Volk.

Wilhelm von Humboldt adamantly rejected any notion of a dualistic origin of languages, and any strict division between agglutinative and inflected languages.⁶⁴ Instead, he noted that inflected languages emerged from those designated as agglutinative.⁶⁵ Humboldt also rejected the polygenetic thesis to explain the origins of different languages: “Alles Entstehen der Sprachen aus einander ist nur ein Anderswerden unter anderen Umständen.”⁶⁶ Nevertheless, he retained a hierarchical notion of languages, asserting that the more inflected the language, the more complete or perfect it was.⁶⁷ Sharing Herder's belief in entelechy (as an inner coherence), Humboldt drew connections between the development of languages driven teleologically by Kraft or energiea and the historical development of peoples:

Ja man muss, glaube ich, noch weiter gehen und darf nicht verkennen, dass die geistige Individualität eines Volkes zur Sprachbildung und zum formalen Denken (welche beide unzertrennlich zusammenhängen) vorzugsweise vor andren geeignet seyn kann. Ein solches Volk wird, wenn es ursprünglich, gleich allen übrigen, zugleich auf Agglutination und Flexion kommt, von der letzteren einen häufigeren und scharfsinnigen Gebrauch machen, die erstere schneller und fester in die letztere verwandeln, und früher den Weg der ersteren gänzlich verlassen. In anderen Fällen können äussere Umstände, Uebergänge einer Sprache in die andre, der Sprachbildung dieser schnelleren und höheren Schwung geben, so wie entgegengesetzte Einwirkungen Schuld seyn können, dass die Sprachen sich in schwerfälliger Unvollkommenheit fortschleppen.⁶⁸

On the basis of these observations, Humboldt concludes that the Chinese, whose language possesses “keine wahre grammatischen Formen” and the Copts (ancient Egyptians), whose language, like Chinese, eschewed grammatical forms, could nevertheless find other tools to compensate for this deficiency and produce lasting cultural achievements.⁶⁹ On the other hand, Sanskrit possessed “einen wahrhaften Bau grammatischer Formen, und zwar in einer solchen Vortreflichkeit und Vollständigkeit des Organismus, dass in dieser Rücksicht nur wenig später hinzugetreten ist.”⁷⁰ He places Semitic languages on a level just below Sanskrit, noting that Greek alone has achieved “die höchste Vollendung des Baues.”⁷¹ Thus, by analyzing the linguistic structures that underlie the diverse forms in which languages appear, Humboldt seeks to determine, according to certain teleological norms, which languages have achieved the level of organic development necessary for completeness.

Elsewhere, Humboldt refers to languages lacking this organic integrity, such as Spanish “Zigeunersprache” and German “Rotwelsch,” as linguistic mixtures of “sehr unedle[r] Art,” characterized by an “absichtliche Entstellung der Laute und Verdrehung der Bedeutungen.”⁷² This observation has significance for understanding contemporary attitudes toward Yiddish, which, as noted above, was also frequently described as an impure mixture. Yiddish, moreover, was frequently confused with Rotwelsch (or Gaunersprache). Rotwelsch, the language of the German underworld, contained words adopted from Yiddish thus feeding the stereotype that associated Jews and their language Judendeutsch or Jüdisch-Deutsch, as Yiddish was often called, with social corruption. This confusion dates back to Martin Luther's charge that “underworld language emanates from the Jews.”⁷³ Since Rotwelsch contained a Yiddish component, anti-Semitic literature frequently equated the two. The linguistic difference between the two languages was first systematically demonstrated by the German police chief and criminologist Avé-Lallement in his four-volume study, Das deutsche Gaunerthum (Leipzig, 1858-62).⁷⁴

LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER

In various writings of the 1820s, such as the fragment Ueber den Nationalcharakter der Sprachen (1820-21), his Ueber die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues (1827-29), and the Einleitung zur Kawi-Sprache, Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (1830-35), Humboldt articulated his theory, related to the notions of linguistic development described above, that “mehrere Sprachen” are in fact “mehrere Weltansichten.”⁷⁵ In the fragment on Nationalcharakter, Humboldt concludes that character differences inherent in languages become visible as “die Stimmung des Geistes, die Art des Denkens und des Empfindens,” that language exerts influence on subjectivity and that a language's particularity expresses itself in the “lebendigem Leben des Volks, und den Gattungen der Literatur.”⁷⁶ If, for Herder, language had served as the expression or product of national spirit, for Humboldt, it is language, itself, that produces national character.

Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues (1927-29),⁷⁷ considered by most critics to be a mere exercise for his later Einleitung zur Kawi-Sprache, in which many passages were taken over verbatim, in fact contains several points not discussed in the later, posthumously published, work.⁷⁸ In the early Verschiedenheit, Humboldt defines large tasks which general linguistics needs to address: (1) How does a particular language develop in a human being and enable him or her to understand things and concepts in the world, to communicate, and express him- or herself? (2) How are individual human beings and their world views stimulated and determined by their particular language?⁷⁹ In examining how a particular language forms human beings according to its own linguistic structure (Sprachbau), Humboldt suggests that language itself forms a basis for the mindset of a given nation.

The first question concerns the organism of language, whereas the second tries to account for the influences which nations and different generations exert upon one another.⁸⁰ Noting that all human beings share certain common qualities, he excludes language and adds: “Die Vertheilung des Menschengeschlechts nach Nationen ist nur seine Vertheilung nach Sprachen.”⁸¹ Yet, he will also define a nation as “eine durch eine bestimmte Sprache charakterisierte geistige Form der Menschheit, in Beziehung auf die idealische Totalitaet individualisirt,” formed by a Kraft transmitted from one generation to another and dependent on “physische[r] Abstammung.”⁸² Thus,

Wie mächtig Natur und Geschichte auf die Nationen einwirken, ist es doch immer jene innewohnende Kraft, welche die Wirkung aufnimmt und bestimmt, und nur dieselben Menschen, nicht Menschen überhaupt, würden unter denselben Umständen zu demjenigen geworden seyn, was wir jetzt an diesem oder jenem Volkstamm erblicken.⁸³

Elsewhere Humboldt will thoroughly reject any description of languages according to race, skin color, physical build, or physiognomy,⁸⁴ which, however, does not preclude for him the observation that

Die bestimmte nationelle Eigenthümlichkeit eines Hottentotten prägt sich gewiss auch in seiner Sprache aus, und da Alles im Menschen zusammenhängt, so hat auch die allgemeine Negernatur ihren, nur im Einzelnen nicht abzuschneidenden Antheil daran.⁸⁵

Following this observation, Humboldt nevertheless adamantly denies that language structures or forms vary with race.

Obviously, the problem here is not one of malicious intent. Rather, Humboldt appears to be caught within a system of knowledge inherited with its prejudices (e.g., toward Africans) from the past. Changes in the fields of cultural research, particularly the rise of linguistic study and the organicist conception of language, influenced his views on language.⁸⁶ In the social-political context, he experienced the increasing consolidation of state power, which he reconciled with his ideal of Bildung as individual formation. He also experienced the threat to German culture posed by the imperialist Napoleonic wars, and the failure to achieve German unity at the Congress of Vienna, where, as noted above, he had played a major role. In the absence of an organically unified German nation-state, the linguist could nevertheless seek it, perhaps as an unconscious form of compensation, through the national character of languages. Where Herder before him failed with his emphasis on geography and the spirit of the people, Humboldt would supplant these concepts with the mentality of a people as generated by their language. Yet, with his organicist concept of languages, he is incapable of fully transcending racial ideologies (as the reference to Negernatur shows).⁸⁷

Rather than race, Humboldt argued, one should speak of nations as defined according to four categories: (1) common heritage and language (Abstammung, Sprache) (2) living together with the same customs and morals (Sitten) (3) possessing a civil constitution (bürgerliche Verfassung) (4) common deed (That) and common thought (Gedanke)—found in national history and literature.⁸⁸ The common spirit present does not so much influence these other dimensions, as complete them by enclosing them and binding them together.⁸⁹

Humboldt continues in Verschiedenheiten to work out the relations between language and peoples, indicating as well the influence of geography and the inseparability of a language from a Volk, its importance for the formation of a Volk, and the connections between a Volk, its Bildung and Sitten and its Ansicht (point of view), one of his most noteworthy—and for some, understandably, notorious—notions, which finds its final articulation in the more renowned Einleitung.⁹⁰ There, in his chapter on the “Charakter der Sprachen,” Humboldt revises somewhat his notion of Ansicht of languages. Whereas for Herder the spirit of a people depended on its geography,⁹¹Ansicht for Humboldt is woven together with the very components of language, its sound structure, syntax, and vocabulary.⁹² Humboldt, however, does not equate form—sometimes called innere Sprachform—with national character. Martin Manchester argues that structure in Humboldt is “a complex aggregate of rules and relationships operating in different areas (phonetic, syntactic, lexical) as well as across areas, coordinating them.”⁹³

By studying form, however, one can detect the inner character of language:

Man muss also, um die Verflechtung des Geistes in die Sprache genauer zu verfolgen, dennoch den grammatischen und lexicalischen Bau der letzteren gleichsam als den festen und äussern von dem inneren Charakter unterscheiden, der wie eine Seele in ihr wohnt und die Wirkung hervorbringt, mit welcher uns jede Sprache, so wie wir nur anfangen, ihrer mächtig zu werden, eigenthümlich ergreift. Es ist damit auf keine Weise gemeint, dass diese Wirkung dem äusseren Baue fremd sey.⁹⁴

Whereas earlier writings seemed to present “national character” as a result of linguistic variation, Humboldt's Einleitung emphasizes the importance of national character as original cause of, and a continued influence on, language variation.⁹⁵ This emphasis, however, invests Humboldt's language theory with a racialist aspect, since language—one of the main forms of cultural transmission—no longer constitutes or forms peoples so much as it expresses their absolute difference. Still, the racialist aspect of Humboldt's thought remains largely embedded in and partially obscured by the vocabulary of transcendental idealism on which he draws.⁹⁶ Such concepts as “innere Form der Sprache” or “Ansicht” do not describe physical or racial qualities, but generally serve the more abstract arguments about “mind” typical of idealism.

Humboldt never describes very specifically what the national character of a language looks like. Nevertheless, the language itself retains a color, characteristic sounds, and an Ansicht, all of which reveal its affinity with the people who speak it.⁹⁷ These language traits continue to influence their intellectual and cultural formation, or as the Gemässheit of Greek poetry demonstrates, the poetry and literary achievements of a people.⁹⁸ Unable to provide a systematic description of the national character of language, Humboldt attempts to produce evidence for it: hence, Greek grammatical forms appear as a result of the powerful Greek imagination and the “Zartheit des Schönheitssinnes,” whereas Latin lacks Greek's “üppige Lautfülle und grosse Freiheit der Phantasie” since the Romans were a “masculine,” “serious” nation with a mind oriented toward reality.⁹⁹ Elsewhere, Humboldt deploys an old stereotype about Semitic peoples: the “feine Unterscheidung zahlreicher Vocalmodificationen und Vocalstellungen” and their sensible application along with other features of the language displays the “Spitzfindigkeit” and “Scharfsinn” of the Arabs.¹⁰⁰ In many passages of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Herder sought to show the relationship between the geography and the spirit or mentality of a people. He provides, for example, the romanticized image of Arabs with sword and bow moving nobly on horseback through the desert. One might without too much effort find in Humboldt's remarks the translation onto the level of linguistic analysis of a world view that informs Herder's view of peoples and geography in the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit.¹⁰¹ It remains only to ask whether a clear line of distinction can be drawn between the concept of national character and racialism, and it is perhaps worth asking at what point the defense of cultural relativism and the advocacy of rights of self-determination mutate into the attempt to characterize whole peoples according to some sort of (pseudo-) scientific criteria.¹⁰²

HUMBOLDT AND THE PLACE OF THE JEWS

Humboldt's attempt to study the relationship between linguistics and national character is relevant here, if we wish to grasp how he entered the discourse of his time and what the historical meaning of his work has been. What was the relationship between his theory of language and his views of society, and specifically of the Jewish population living in Germany? How did he help to institutionalize a specific discourse relating language to national identity, and how did this institutionalization affect the development of national ideologies, or the reception of Humboldt's own writings and ideas over the last 175 years? Martin Manchester, who cites Humboldt's cautionary remarks about classifying nations through linguistic analysis shifts emphasis away from any interpretation indicating a racialist theory of language, whereas Harris and Talbot as well as Aarsleff detect a racialist theory and single it out for criticism. Ruth Römer has traced in great detail the various racialist, völkisch, and eventually National Socialist uses to which some of Humboldt's linguistic thought was put. Yet, the National Socialist reception of Humboldt, in particular, depends on a highly selective reading of his life and work, ignoring or regretting his liberal views on Jewish emancipation, which Römer acknowledges. Nevertheless, the organicist conception of the Volk or nation and the formulation of linguistic hierarchies provided material for reactionary forces.

Most linguistic theorists do not, however, seek to examine in detail how Humboldt's linguistic theory was related to his views on Jews and Jewish emancipation. Yet, the specific cultural-linguistic, in addition to strictly religious, status of Jews at the time formed part of the larger, often unstated context, in which Humboldt acted politically and developed his linguistic theory. Even if, in his theoretical work, Humboldt did not deal directly with the question of the Jewish linguistic context, his theories of language have relevance for understanding how he sought to define the place of Jews (and other nonnative German-speaking groups) in Germany society. This appears to be all the more the case, if we focus on the structures of thought that informed his approach to questions of linguistic, cultural, and social relations.

In his letters to Caroline, Humboldt revealed many of his personal views about Jews in Germany. The letters do not have the complex theoretical form of his linguistic writings, but they nevertheless exhibit certain patterns of thinking that inform many of his notions about language. Thus, we may seek to discover the terms by which Humboldt grasped relations between Jews and Germans, and the ways his views of individual Jews may have informed, coincided with, or contradicted his views on the place of Jews and Jewish culture in German society. The issues he deals with in these letters also provide an additional framework in which to understand the central public statement he presented on the Jewish question, “Über den Entwurf zu einer neuen Konstitution für die Juden” (July 1809).

The difference between Caroline's and Wilhelm von Humboldt's attitudes toward Jews is well known. In these letters, for example, Caroline, unlike Humboldt, asserted her opposition to any rapid emancipation of the Jews. These views and her complaints about Jewish financial control, according to one Humboldt biographer, were “to earn her high marks from the National Socialist historians,” though she nevertheless maintained friendships with individual Jews.¹⁰³ Caroline's views should, of course, not be taken for those of Humboldt who more than once sought to explain to her his commitment to the idea of civil rights for Jews. His own views were, however, hardly indicative of an attitude as free of prejudice as the historian Max Kohler suggested earlier in this century.

Humboldt's commitment to Jewish civil rights, rooted in a “Jugendidee” he shared with his brother Alexander, had a less liberal side that suggests a desire to contain the problem of Jewish difference in the German context.¹⁰⁴ Thus, reporting on his efforts to realize this Jugendidee at the Congress of Vienna, Humboldt explained to Caroline that Jews in Prussia already had rights. Granting rights to Jews throughout Germany was desirable, since “sonst alle Juden zu uns hinströmen” (Humboldt, Briefe 4:565). Humboldt might simply be mildly mocking when he refers to her tirades about Jews as “göttlich.” He makes his own program more explicit a few lines later when he suggests ways for putting an end to Jewish economic practices: “Warum schlägt man nicht Mittel ein, andere Gewerbe unter ihnen zu befördern? … Der Staat brauchte sich in seinen Finanzen nicht so viel mit ihnen abzugeben, und das ist ein Hauptverderben” (Humboldt, Briefe 5: 228). Humboldt thus appears to concur with the view that there was something profoundly corrupt about “Jewish” behavior. Like other liberals, he differed from Caroline by maintaining that its correction could best be achieved through emancipatory policy and not through denial of rights.

Other utterances by Humboldt point more directly to the structures that guided his thinking about Jews in German society. Paul Sweet argues, for example, that Humboldt came to shun contact with Jews, about whom he wrote: “Ich liebe aber eigentlich auch nur die Juden en masse, en détail gehe ich ihnen sehr aus dem Wege” (Humboldt, Briefe 5:236). Humboldt was committed to Jewish equal rights because he could find “no rational basis for perpetuating ‘the old differences between Jews and Christians.’”¹⁰⁵ This reference to a rational basis only partly explains Humboldt's relationship to the subject, however. It does not, for example, explain why it was that he increasingly avoided contact with Jews. Humboldt's approach to language may provide an explanation.

As suggested earlier, Humboldt's attempts to analyze languages systematically led him to view languages as wholly integrated forms striving for their total completion. He establishes a linguistic hierarchy with the most integrated, completed languages at the apex. Individual languages, in his theory, have a one-to-one correspondence with specific mentalities and national characters. Mixed languages, like the spanische Zigeunersprache and Rotwelsch are corrupt linguistic forms—a point that may also prompt us to wonder how he views the mentalities expressed by such languages. Humboldt's view of languages as closed, if dynamic, systems and his attempts to relate them anthropologically to discrete mentalities and national characters does not quite hold up, however. As noted earlier, he ultimately fails to define precisely what the “national character” of a language is. His comments on language and race lead him into contradictory observations. His attempts to explain the relationship between Chinese language and culture lead to vague generalizations totally devoid of rigorous systematic analysis. It is only by acts of considerable mental gymnastics that such views can be reconciled with a rationalist approach to language. This way of thinking about language appears, however, to inform Humboldt's social and political views as well. Hannah Arendt's observation indeed seems accurate: “In happiness the world had become a closed ‘cosmos’ into which chance could no longer penetrate.”¹⁰⁶

Elsewhere, it appears that Humboldt would like to maintain the kind of clear and absolute distinctions between Jewish and German culture, which he seeks in language systems and their mentalities. Humboldt's account of being approached at the Congress of Vienna by an older Jewish man from Prague whose “Wesen mir ganz gut gefiel, da er nicht zu den neumodischen Juden gehört” has been cited as one of the factors motivating his positive activity on behalf of Jews (Humboldt, Briefe 5: 565-566). The comment further suggests, however, that despite his liberal political views, Humboldt was simultaneously attracted to a stable cultural order. He apparently preferred that that which was Jewish should remain distinct from that which was German or not Jewish. This cultural purism would explain, for example, his remarks about Rahel Levin Varnhagen who represents the type of modern Jew Humboldt found offensive:

Sie hat mich sehr agaciert, allein was soll man mit der Judenmamsell? Gentz versichert zwar noch immer, sie sei die geistreichste Frau auf Erde. Man muß auch des Geistes entbehren können. Ich bleibe also unerbittlich!!

(Humboldt, Briefe 4:80)

Humboldt makes more explicit his distaste for perversion of form and cultural mixing when he vents his abhorrence at the marriage of Rahel Levin to Varnhagen von Ense: “So kann sie noch einmal eine Gesandtenfrau und Excellenz werden. Es ist nichts, was der Jude nicht erreicht,” adding that “ihr Alter, ihre Kränklichkeit und der ganze Zuschnitt, den sie nun einmal ihrem Leben gegeben hat und selbst äußerlich, und die Sache ganz bürgerlich genommen, entgegen” (Humboldt, Briefe 4: 395). Varnhagen, tainted by his exposure to Jewish influences, does not appear in a much better light:

Ich hätte noch nichts gegen den sogenannten Jakobinismus von Varnhagen, wenn wahrer Ernst dabei wäre. Aber es ist mehr Eitelkeit, und ein taquines Wesen, die Leute zu ärgern und zu äffen. Dabei die Dame, der Stamm Levy, die Bundeslade!

(Humboldt, Briefe 5: 112)

It is not Humboldt's dislike for Rahel Varnhagen, in itself, that reveals his disdain for Jews, but the language by which he expresses that dislike: “Judenmamsell,” “nichts, was der Jude erreicht,” and so forth. Above all, Humboldt seems offended by the invasion of Jewish forms, the failure to maintain strict definition of boundaries and absolute distinctions. The mixed marriage is abhorrent because it violates the social forms that define a society in which Bildung should serve as a central ideal. Varnhagen's Jakobinian politics may be tolerable; his mixing with the tribe of Levy and his exposure to Jewish symbols like the Ark of the Covenant are not. Similarly, the entire form (“der ganze Zuschnitt”) that Rahel Varnhagen has given her life is unsuited to the bürgerlich view of life that informs the exponent of Bildung—though this is a view that Humboldt may well have shared with many others at least in the lofty spheres of high society and statesmanship.¹⁰⁷ Humboldt thus appears to find such transgressions of form and structure to be mentally and emotionally too disruptive: the intellectual stimulus of the geistreiche Rahel Varnhagen represents a challenge to form which Humboldt would rather do without.

In this context, Humboldt's remarks about his youthful friend Henriette Herz gain significance. Humboldt explains his protests against the discrimination of Jewish doctors as an expression of “[der] letzten Funken meiner Pietät gegen die Herz, die aber fast auch christlich geworden ist” (Humboldt, Briefe 4: 260; my emphasis). This comment again gives expression to Humboldt's sense of commitment to the political principle of Jewish rights. If contrasted with his image of Rahel Varnhagen, it also reveals what kind of Jews Humboldt preferred, suggesting a desire to maintain a strict boundary between the culture of Jews and Germans. Henriette Herz has so thoroughly departed from Jewish culture and society as to seem totally immersed in the Christian world, whereas the Jewish “parvenu” Rahel Varnhagen becomes increasingly abhorrent to him (Humboldt, Briefe 138). The parvenu who defies social conventions and cultural norms, refusing to accept his or her assigned social status, becomes a disturbing figure. Jews are certainly not the only parvenus that Humboldt noticed, but if they enter into German society without fully shedding their Jewishness they become representations of precisely that element so disruptive of the closed cosmos of convention and Bildung that Humboldt desired. Humboldt therefore finds appealing the old-fashioned traditional Jew whose cultural difference places him completely outside the German cultural sphere and invests him with a measure of anthropological interest—though he would not necessarily want to socialize with him.¹⁰⁸ The other form of Jewish behavior, which did not hesitate to mix Jewish and German culture but remained unattuned to the gebildeten forms of high culture, appalled him. This form was represented by Rahel Varnhagen who traveled as a not fully assimilated Jew in gentile society. Henriette Herz, on the other hand, had the cultivation to become “fast auch christlich”—in Humboldt's mind at least.¹⁰⁹

CONCLUSION

Humboldt's writings on the state, along with his activities as an official promoting Jewish emancipation did not take him beyond the hope that emancipation would eventually lead to conversion.¹¹⁰ He adhered to the status quo liberal views first articulated by Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, which believed in the possibility of the Jews' “civil improvement.” Bildung, for Humboldt, was to be an individual process of formation and cultivation, but it was believed that ultimately the Jews should cultivate themselves right out of their “Jewishness.” Like Dohm, Humboldt was unwilling or unable to transcend the reigning prejudices toward the introduction of Jewish culture in German society. Thus, Humboldt advocated complete and unconditional emancipation of the Jews, but in his “Über den Entwurf zu einer neuen Konstitution für die Juden” (July 1809), he outlined the transformation of Jewish life that he hoped would come about:

Verschmelzung,
Zertrümmerung ihrer kirchlichen Form und
Ansiedlung;(111)

Ultimately, this process would raise the Jews from their corrupt, unsittlicher existence. Humboldt advocated it not because he sought to exclude the Jews on grounds of race, but because he sought to create a culturally and linguistically homogenous community defined by Bildung. The exclusion (and ultimate destruction) of Jewish culture would be undertaken for the sake of the cultivation and social integration of Jews as individuals.

Humboldt's views on language and German national culture have particular significance for the place of Jews in German society, but they also raise questions about nationalism and relations between dominant and non-dominant cultures, more generally. There is some irony in the fact that Humboldt was fascinated by foreign languages and cultures, but viewed as a threat the culture of a small minority in Germany—not more than 1.25 percent of the population—which should preferably disappear.

To raise this point is not to suggest that Jewish culture should or would not have undergone a transformation or that Jews should have remained in the “ghetto.” It is also not to enter upon the socio-linguistic question regarding the possible, hypothetical survival of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in Germany, if, so to speak, Wilhelm von Humboldt's views had only been different. The new form of society that had begun to emerge by Humboldt's time, the Enlightenment, secularization, the onset in the 1840s of the industrial revolution, and the ensuing social entropy all helped produce a new form of Jewry. But the terms by which the dominant culture defined the space for a minority culture within its borders, especially a relatively powerless, culturally identifiable group, have an impact on that group's chance to gain acceptance or, in some cases, even survive, especially when that group gains relative prosperity. To cite the late Ernest Gellner: “The disastrous and tragic consequences, in modern conditions, of the conjunction of economic superiority and cultural identifiability with political and military weakness, are too well known to require repetition. The consequences range from genocide to expulsion.”¹¹²

Humboldt cannot be held accountable for twentieth-century events no one could foresee. His classifying of languages hierarchically and according to absolute difference, his reliance on notions of “national character,” and his desire to ascribe it and discrete mentalities to specific languages nonetheless produced rather dubious criteria for making distinctions between diverse cultures, just as his distaste for the cultural mixing of the Jewish Rahel Varnhagen and the German Varnhagen von Ense reveals a darker side to his progressive views on Jewish emancipation.

The dilemma Humboldt's work raises, however, is that cultural and national survival speak to many groups, non-dominant and dominant alike. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson revealed how central language is to the idea of the nation, and how compelling national culture is to diverse groups, not least those groups that have endured domination by others, as did Germany during the Napoleonic wars. Noting the paucity of revolutions fought in the name of the international working class and the prevalence of those fought in the name of the nation, Anderson sought to answer the question: What is it about the nation that people are willing to die for it?¹¹³ The concept of the “imagined community” with which one can identify provided one possible answer.

The development of print culture enabled language to function as a means by which one person could identify with an entire populace (an imagined community) that he or she could never actually know.¹¹⁴ This identification, he suggests, has come to meet needs previously fulfilled by religious communities. This does not mean that the nation teleologically supersedes religion, but rather that knowledge and experience are now organized in such a way as to challenge the religious view of immortality, and to promote the sense of continuity with the nation—a national language, a national culture, and a national “body”—that continues to exist even after one's death.

Humboldt's approach to language, German national culture, and the place of Jews in German society brings these issues into focus. His desire to place strict boundaries between languages and cultures points to precisely those structures of thought or feeling that lurk behind the problems confronting regions where, in the twentieth century, ethnic cleansing contends with the desire for national survival. His liberal policies on Jewish emancipation point in the opposite direction. Humboldt, himself, never reconciled the two positions.

Notes

1. Max J. Kohler, Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna (1814-1815) and Aix-La-Chapelle (1818) (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1918), 70.

2. Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 83.

3. In addition to Kohler and Rose, see Ismar Freund, Die Emanzipation der Juden in Preußen (Berlin: Poppelauer, 1912), 2:149-162; Salo Baron, Die Judenfrage auf dem Wiener Kongress, 81-84; Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner, trans. Miriam Kochen, 293-96; Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) 76-78, 106; Paul Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978-80, 2 vols), 2: 203-8; Peter Honigmann, “Alexander von Humboldt's Verhältnis zu Juden,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 76 (1987): 21-34, esp. 24.

4. Humboldt scholarship tends to adhere to a division of labor that corresponds to disciplines of history, on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. The genre of intellectual biography, which seeks to treat the life work of its subject, appears to be the main exception to this division. See, for example, the biography by Rudolf Haym which seeks to draw connections between Humboldt's language theory and his activities in the national-political context, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Lebensbild und Charakteristik (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1965; Neudruck der Ausgabe 1856), esp. 249-54, 429-33.

5. Roy Harris and Talbot J. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure, Routledge History of Linguistic Thought Series (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), xvii. An excellent treatment of W. v. Humboldt's linguistic thought is Hans Aarsleff's introduction to the translation of Humboldt's major work, On Language, The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vii-lxv.

6. Harris and Taylor, xvii.

7. Joshua Fishman, Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective (Philadelphia, and Clevendon, England: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 1989), 568.

8. Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, Studies in Language (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1966), 24. Many of the views that Chomsky expresses in this book have been challenged by other historians of linguistic theory. See, especially, Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 100-119.

9. There is a vast literature on the perplexing subject of a nations and nationalism and a considerable amount of theoretical unclarity. For this study, the works of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson are perhaps most instructive. Despite their different approaches, both authors agree: nations are invented; see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; New York: Verson, 1991 [2nd revised edition]); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

10. Katz, 7-10.

11. Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, Spec. issue of Poetics Today 11,1 (1990): 121-23.

12. Yiddish literature up to this time consisted largely of popular folk literature and educational religious literature written primarily for women and children, although it is now generally recognized that many men, especially the less educated, also read the literature. The Hebrew language and prayers also strongly influenced the development of Yiddish while Yiddish exerted some influence on Hebrew as well. Max Weinreich argues, moreover, that Yiddish played a more central role in Jewish life than other vernaculars in other European life, since it served along with Hebrew as the language of education, whereas in Germany, for example, students studied in Latin, not in German, at least until the late eighteenth century; see Maks Vaynraykh, Geshikhte fun der yidisher sprakh (New York: YIVO, 1973), 1: 251-63.

13. The concept of Bildung has a long and important history in Germany, undergoing several theoretical revisions, and playing an important institutional and sociocultural role from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century; see Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” Geschichtliche-Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, et al. (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972). George Mosse and David Sorkin have both argued that the conditions and cultural context invested Bildung with an especially important role in the cultural transformation of Jews in Germany. George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985) and “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), 1-16; David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

14. See, for example, Herder's remarks in the Abhandlung vom Ursprung der Sprache, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker, 1985) 1: 803, 805, and Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie (1782-83). Johann Gottfried Herder, Herders Sämmtliche Werke, 33 vols., ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1917), 11: 225.

15. Sander Gilman has written extensively on the stereotype of Jews speaking a corrupt language. See Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and more recently, his Inscribing the Other (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 51-59.

16. Moses Mendelsohn, Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe (F. Bamberger et al., 1971), 13:80.

17. James Sheehan, German History: 1770-1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20-24.

18. Sheehan, 71.

19. On the transformation of the Jewish community in this period, see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973); and David Sorkin, The Transformation of Germany Jewry, 1780-1840 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

20. Sheehan, 71.

21. The following discussion of Humboldt's position on Bildung is indebted to David Sorkin's treatment especially in his article, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791-1810,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 55-73; see Sorkin, Transformation, 30-33; W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Clemens Menze, Die Bildungsreform Wilhelm von Humboldts (Hannover: Schroeder, 1975).

22. Sorkin, Transformation, 31; see also Sheehan, 299-304.

23. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner et al. (Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 1972ff.), 513.

24. Quoted in Vierhaus, 520; see Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, 5 vols. (Darmstadt: J. C. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1960-65), 1: 76-78, 108.

25. On Herder, see F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 86; and his Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 254-55.

26. Paul R. Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, 2 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978-80), 1:162-72; Sheehan, 364.

27. Liberal German historians such as Rudolf Haym and Friedrich Meinecke have interpreted Humboldt's role in the institutionalization of Bildung as consistent both with nationalist concerns and with Stein's attempts to reorganize the Prussian state (cf. Haym, 254, 262-69, Meinecke, 34-48, 138-47). David Sorkin argues convincingly that Humboldt saw the nation in terms of “social bonds” and sought originally to maintain relative autonomy of educational institutions from state tutelage, “Humboldt,” 55-73.

28. Quoted in Sheehan, 365.

29. Sheehan, 365.

30. Humboldt, 1:64-65; cf. Sorkin, “Humboldt,” 62-63.

31. Bruford, 5.

32. Menze, 309-10.

33. McClelland, 146-47

34. Sorkin, “Humboldt,” 64.

35. Sorkin, “Humboldt,” 71; Sheehan, 365; Menze, 292-300; on Fichte, see also McClelland, 124-52.

36. Humboldt, 4:114

37. Sheehan, 364

38. Sorkin, Transformation, 31.

39. Sorkin, Transformation, 31.

40. Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 201-10.

41. On objections to Jewish emancipation, see Katz, Ghetto 81-103; on Michaelis and Hartmann, see esp., 89-95.

42. Thus, Dohm wrote of the state: “[es] müßte … ein besonderes angelegnes Geschäft einer weisen Regierung seyn, für die sittliche Bildung und Aufklärung der Juden zu sorgen.” See his Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Hildersheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1973, reprint of Berlin and Stettin, 1781-83), 1:120; see also Katz, 64-69, 127-28; Sorkin, 24-25.

43. Freund, 2:149-52; Sorkin, Transformation, 32; see also Katz, 57-79. A major opponent of emancipation, Minister of Justice Kircheizen, argued against the notion that freedom would have ennobling effects on the Jews.

44. See Sorkin, Transformation, 21-33; cf. Mosse, Beyond Judaism, 7-10.

45. Sorkin, Transformation, 33.

46. Sorkin, Transformation, 34; Sheehan, 403.

47. Baron, 146-70; 181-84.

48. Reinhard Rürup, “The Tortuous and Thorny Path to Legal Equality: ‘Jew Laws’ and Emancipatory Legislation in Germany from the Late Eighteenth Century.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): 3-33.

49. It is important to note that German scholarship has often overestimated Herder's influence on Humboldt, whose theories of language exhibit influences of ideas circulating in France in the late eighteenth century (Aarsleff, Locke, 339-43). Manchester and Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, however, oppose Aarsleff's assertion that Herder exerted virtually no influence on Humboldt. They maintain that Humboldt's ideas were indeed influenced by Herder. Mueller-Vollmer, for instance, argues on the basis of intertextuality that Humboldt's theory of signs in his “Denken und Sprechen” is a response to Herder's Abhandlung vom Ursprung der Sprache. See Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, “From Sign to Signification: The Herder-Humboldt Controversy,” Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, History, and the Enlightenment, ed. Wulf Koepke (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1990), 15; Manchester, 22-23.

50. Humboldt, 3: 295.

51. Sheehan, 365.

52. See Martin L. Manchester, The Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt's Linguistic Doctrines, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 32 (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985), 17; cf. Chomsky, 21-30, who equates Humboldt's conception of the organic form of language with “the generative system of rules and principles that determines each of its isolated elements,” (26). Hans Aarsleff rejects both Chomsky's version of the history of linguistic thought as well as the traditional interpretation in German scholarship that Herder influenced Humboldt's linguistic theories. He argues convincingly that the eighteenth-century rationalist thought of Condillac and the French Idéologues asserted far greater influence on Humboldt; see Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 14-15, 335-350; on Chomsky, see, 100-19.

53. Cf. Manchester, 26.

54. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1971, 1973), 290.

55. Friedrich Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weischeit der Indier. Studien zur Philosophie und Theologie, ed. Ernst Behler and Ursula Struc-Oppenberg, vol. 8 of Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe (Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1975), 169.

56. Foucault, 290.

57. See, e.g., Herder's more speculative Abhandlung vom Ursprung der Sprache (1772), which seeks to show how language links human beings to their Volk. Johann Gottfried Herder Werke in Zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 1: 803-5.

58. F. Schlegel, 169; cf. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 230.

59. Ruth Römer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in Deutschland (Munich Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1985), 106.

60. F. Schlegel, 173.

61. F. Schlegel, 173, 259.

62. Römer, 106-7.

63. A. W. Schlegel, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Poesie: Vorlesungen, gehalten an der Universität Bonn seit dem Wintersemester 1818/19, ed. Josef Körner (Berlin: B. Behr's Verlag, 1918), 25; quoted in Römer, 107.

64. Humboldt, 3:317.

65. Humboldt, 3:43; cf. Römer, 106.

66. Humboldt, 3:363.

67. Humboldt, 3:45-46; Aarsleff, introduction, x.

68. Humboldt, 3:45-46; cf. Humboldt, 3:50: “der menschliche Geist strebt sich in seiner natürlichen Anlage nach Vollständigkeit, und jedes, auch noch so selten vorkommende Verhältnis wird in demselben Verstande, als alle übrigen zur grammatischen Form.”

69. Humboldt, 3:60-61.

70. Humboldt, 3:63.

71. Humboldt, 3:63.

72. Humboldt, 3:243.

73. Cited in Dovid Katz, “On Yiddish, in Yiddish and for Yiddish: 500 Years of Yiddish Scholarship,” Identity and Ethos: A Festschrift for Sol Liptzin, ed. Mark Gelber (New York, Berne, Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1986), 28.

74. According to the Yiddish linguist Dovid Katz, Avé-Lallement's study contains the most “comprehensive treatment of Yiddish” up to that time, D. Katz, 28. For Avé-Lallement's views of the Jews, see Rainer Erb und Werner Bergmann, Die Nachtseite der Judenemanzipation: Der Widerstand gegen die Intergration der Juden in Deutschland 1780-1860, Anti-Semitismus und Jüdische Geschichte 1 (Berlin: Metropol, 1989), 107.

75. Humboldt, 3:64.

76. Humboldt, 3:80-1.

77. For convenience' sake, I will follow Martin Manchester's practice of referring to the earlier work as Verschiedenheit, and the later one as Einleitung.

78. Cf. Manchester, 113.

79. Humboldt, 3:155.

80. Humboldt, 3:156.

81. Humboldt, 3:161

82. Humboldt, 3:160-61.

83. Humboldt, 3:161

84. See Humboldt, 3:244, 250

85. Humboldt, 3:244

86. The problem of tracing intellectual influences on Humboldt has given rise to considerable debate. See, for example, discussion in Manchester, 17-28.

87. See Aarsleff, introduction, x and xvii-xxxii; cf. Manchester, 114, who fully rejects the assertion that Humboldt's work exhibits linguistic racism.

88. Humboldt, 3:234

89. Humboldt, 3:233-34, seeks to differentiate between Staat, Nation, and Volk with relatively concise definitions, but acknowledges that the distinctions cannot be easily maintained, since Volk and Nation tend to be used interchangeably and Staat tends to mix with the latter.

90. On the influence of geography, see Humboldt, 3:231.

91. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Werke, 6:344-45.

92. See also Manchester, 116-22.

93. Manchester, 117.

94. Humboldt, 3:555.

95. Manchester, 118.

96. Cf. Aarsleff, introduction, xvi.

97. Humboldt, 3:554, 563, 578.

98. Humboldt, 3:290.

99. Humboldt, 3:580-81.

100. Humboldt, 3:578-79.

101. Herder, Werke in Zehn Bänden, 6:257.

102. Hans Aarsleff points out that Humboldt's theories, with their hierarchical view of languages (and hence mentalities) do not adhere to linguistic relativism, but rather to “linguistic absolutism,” Aarsleff, xxxii.

103. Paul Sweet provides an excellent introduction to Humboldt's views of Jews and the Jewish question. See his discussion in Sweet, 2:203-8; here, 2:208.

104. Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, ed. Anna von Sydow (Osnabrück: Zeller, 1968; Neuausdruck der Ausgabe 1907-1908), 4:565. Further references given in text as Humboldt, Briefe.

105. Sweet, 2:208; my emphasis.

106. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (1957; New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974, rev. ed.), 65.

107. Cf. Sweet, 2:208

108. Humboldt also explained to Caroline that he advocated Jewish civil rights so that he would no longer have to enter their homes out of generosity (Humboldt, Briefe, 4: 458; cf. Sweet, 2: 207)

109. In his “Gutachten der Sektion des Cultus” of July, 1809, Humboldt wrote that Jewish conversion in the present was “nur unter besonderen Umständen zu entschuldigen” but that it will in the future be “wünschenswerth, erfreulich und wohltätig seyn.” Significantly, Humboldt rejects this act, because such Jews seek to cast off the burdens of oppression and are simultaneously assigned the name “getaufter Jude.” In other words, Humboldt expresses again his discomfort with the mixing of culture—as long as there is a significant Jewish community, and complete assimilation is impossible—the baptized Jew remains just that and hence neither wholly Jew nor Christian—Jews, with some exceptions, left unexplained, should not convert. It is worth asking what critieria—conscious or unconscious—allowed Henriette Herz to escape this dilemma in Humboldt's mind. The document is reprinted in Freund, 2:269-282, here, 276; see also Katz, 76-78.

110. Katz, 78, 106; see also Wanda Kampmann, Deutsche und Juden: Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland vom Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1963, 1989), 135.

111. Humboldt, 3:96; in the “Gutachten” cited above and composed in the same month, Humboldt writes that in the future Jews will become aware of possessing only a ceremonial law, not a religion, and that they will be driven by an inborn human need for a higher faith. Thus, future conversion of Jews—presumably when it will no longer result in the ambiguous cultural mixture—will be “wünschenswerth, erfreulich und wohltätig.” See Freund, 2:276; Katz thus refers to this aspect of the ideology of emancipation as “the image of the future”; see 57-78.

112. Gellner, 105.

113. Anderson, 1-7.

114. For the following discussion, see Anderson, chaps. 2, 3, and 8.