Morgenländischer Glanz. Eine deutsche jüdische Literaturgeschichte (1750–1850) by Kathrin Wittler (review)

Abstract

articulates the pioneering work of Polo in establishing relations with the imperial court. His efforts laid the foundations for the creation of missionary networks by the Jesuits beginning in 1582 and first established by the italian priest matteo Ricci. chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on these Jesuit missionary networks and on the Jesuits’ efforts to win china for christianity by cultivating alliances with highly placed confucians and playing that religion off against Buddhism. The Jesuits’ rather convoluted attempts to show the affiliation between confucianism and catholicism culminated in the Rites controversy, (a dispute Purdy cites but never really defines), which led to rifts in the carefully cultivated ties to the imperial chinese court, for the Jesuit missionaries came under increasing pressure from the catholic hierarchy in Rome, which could not accept the idea that confucianism and christianity were theologically compatible. chapters 4 and 5 delineate the collapse of the ming Dynasty and its effects on relations with the Westerners in the chinese empire. This collapse was viewed by many in the West as tragic and led the Baroque Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel to write a drama on the chinese emperor’s failure to avert the invasion of his kingdom by the manchus. This work, Zungchin (1667) is redolent with elements of the German Trauerspiele roughly contemporary to it and is the focus of chapter 5. Purdy also shows the affiliations with this work and the sympathetic treatment of other leading non-European leaders, such as montezuma in contemporary works illustrating colonial depravity. chapter 6 shows how Wieland’s secular cosmopolitanism also helped shape the world literature paradigm as grounded in sentimentalism and sympathetic identification in contrast to the early Jesuits’ religious syncretism. chapter 7 illustrates how such sympathetic identification across space, time, and cultures is evident in the work of adam smith, who speculated on how Europeans might develop an emotional bond with the chinese in the event of a major earthquake in china. chapters 8, 9, and 10 explore how Goethe drew parallels between Buddhist/Jesuit disputations in china and the German debates between Kantians and idealists in the later years of his life. Goethe’s establishment of such parallels led to his speculative synthesis of chinese and European poetic works, culminating in his late poetry inspired by his reading of such chinese novels as The Two Fair Cousins. albeit somewhat marred by numerous typos and grammatical errors, Purdy’s book breaks new ground in showing how mercantile, political, religious, and cultural border crossings between china and Europe significantly shaped the contours of the mature Goethe’s thought and oeuvre.