The articles in this collection originated from an international symposium at the University of Haifa and centre around a major topic in German, European and American literature, i.e. the way in which Jewish self-definition, both positive and negative, has materialized as a product of the tensions between secular culture and society on the one hand, and Jewish tradition and religion on the other. The broad range of authors (most of them of German-speaking origin) necessarily results in an almost equally broad range of answers to this central question. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli literary scholar Chaim Shoham.

The articles in this volume originated from an international and interdisciplinary symposium organized in October 1994 by the BibliothA]que Nationale Luxembourg in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute (London), the Division of German-Jewish Literary History at the RWTH Technical University in Aachen and the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature of Haifa University. Common to all of them is the question of the various available modes of individual and collective Jewish self-awareness and self-definition existing in Central Europe in the period between 1870 and the Third Reich/Second World War.