When Is Philology Made Jewish? The Example of Erich Auerbach, Part 2

Part 2 of this essay focuses on a recessed but palpable thread that runs through the entirety of Erich Auerbach’s philology, though most strikingly in his two most celebrated writings, “Figura” (1938) and Mimesis (1946). All his writings speak directly to his own historical circumstances. But they do so by underscoring the ineffaceable Jewish inheritances of Western literature and culture. In the process, his writings also do something else: they model Jewish survival. By dwelling on the lingering traces of this heritage in the present, they mimic what they recall: tenacious Jewish spectrality, which gives the word mimesis a new twist. If the Jews were disappearing in Auerbach’s contemporary world, they do not disappear in his writings. Instead, they survive as irrepressible ghosts, as mysterious riddles and enigmas, and as unanswerable question marks and disturbing problems that are more implicit than explicit, audible between the lines, in brackets, and under erasure. “Figura” is the theory of this irrepressibility, which is argued out in theological terms, while Mimesis stages the spectral afterlife of the Jews by grounding their presence in the concrete historical foundation of literary and ethical realism in the Hebrew Bible: they haunt the book with a persistence that has meaning in its own right. In fleshing out the trope of the Jews as a living yet ineradicable ghost-people, Auerbach is aligning himself with a tradition that reaches back to Heinrich Heine and forward to Leon Pinsker, Gershom Scholem, and Benjamin Fondane.