At first glance, esthetic experience and editing appear to have very little in common. But even on such apparently safe ground as philological editing this impression turns out to be wrong. An editor who ignores the esthetic richness of the material he is working on may divert the attention of his edition's recipient away from essential features of the work of art in question. This collection is the fruit of a conference at which numerous editors and editing experts from various disciplines discussed the theoretical and practical consequences of such a constellation and their implications for the history of scholarship.

In German Romantic literature, Jewish mysticism was also a source of inspiration for Christian authors such as Novalis, F. Schlegel, Brentano, Arnim, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Whereas for Romantic theologians and philosophers the Kabbala represented the primal religious doctrine of humanity and a bridge between Rabbinic tradition and Christianity, the literary fraternity saw in it both an esoteric Jewish doctrine of the arcane and the magical and a trope for the mysterious power of language and writing to transcend rationalism and conscious authorial intention.

The writer Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) is one of the figures of political and literary life around the turn of the century whose importance for German-Jewish modernism has been largely neglected. Anarchist and reformer, writer and theatre critic, friend of Martin Buber and intellectual pioneer and mainstay of cultural Zionism, he left a body of work that has yet to be explored in all its variety and apparent contradictions. Hence the articles in this volume approach Landauer from a broad range of viewpoints. Some point up the early formative influences on Landauer and his particular predilections, his reading of Goethe and Spinoza, his first forays into literary activity; others trace hitherto neglected links between Landauer and psychoanalyst Karl Landauer, mathematician Felix Hausdorff and theologian Paul Tillich. Also subjected to analysis are the problems posed by the political message of Landauer as a revolutionary of the Munich RAterepublik and the utopian impact of his ideas on the Weimar years. Other contributions cast light on German-Jewish modernism in the context of the history of ideas, almost all of them converging in the extermination or banishment of its representatives by the Nazis.

The religious interest in natural philosophy, magic, pantheism, mystic language theories and symbolism, theogony and cosmogony displayed by many German Romantic authors was a response to what Hegel called the 'aridity of the Enlightenment'. This interest led to a rediscovery of cabbala. Among Jewish Romantics, and to an even greater extent among Christian Romantics, Jewish mysticism became not only a source of religious, philosophical, and artistic inspiration, but also a subject of scholarly and philosophical debate. In 1991 the hitherto largely neglected interconnections between cabbala and the history of scholarship, literature, and ideas in the Romantic period were the subject of two interdisciplinary symposia at the University of Kassel and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.