Neither Forget nor Deny I Am a Jew

Georg Brandes

1914

How preposterous and ridiculous! I have been attacked all my life as a Jew and because I am a Jew, and could not forget nor deny that I am a Jew, even if I wanted to. I am just as proud as Spinoza was to belong to the race of Maimonides, and just as indignant as he probably was to be excommunicated by some of them. I have done for my people what I have done for many other oppressed nations. In Volume XI of my complete works you will find my essay on the Jews of Roumania and in Volume XVIII you will find my appeal in favor of the Jews of Finland. I have done—as a Jew—for the Jews whatever was in my limited power of a writer.

But I must say that I have never received from our rich and powerful co-religionists the assistance I had the right to expect from them. I sent over my essay in favor of the Jews of Finland to the most important Berlin daily, owned and published by a Jew; he did not find enough room to publish it and could not spare the necessary expense to have it translated. My pamphlet in favor of the Jews of Roumania was not printed in the largest Austrian daily, because the Roumanian Government gave it a great deal of financial publicity; this paper, too, is owned by a wealthy Jew. And what revolted me most was when the Alliance Israelite of Paris found it excessive to pay a translator two hundred francs to have my writings in defense of oppressed Jews printed in a pamphlet . . . I have always found the powerful and wealthy Jews to go hand in hand with the Governments, while their poor brethren are oppressed; and therefore I cannot help being against them.

Can anybody refuse me the name of a Jew because I do not frequent the synagogue: but I do not go to any other church; I am not religious. My younger brother, who is Minister of Finance in Denmark, is a very good Hebraist and Orientalist; I am sorry to say I am not as clever as that.

I am getting old and very sensitive, and can stand lies much less than I used to; I will be glad, therefore, to see those ridiculous falsehoods about my Jewish feelings buried once for all . . .

Credits

Georg Brandes, “Brandes Resents Attacks and Explains,” by S. Lubarski Debalta, in The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, June 12, 1914, p. 174.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

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Creator Bio

Georg Brandes

1842–1927

Born in Copenhagen to a highly assimilated middle-class family, educated in literature and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Georg Brandes became the most influential and controversial critical voice in late nineteenth-century Scandinavian letters—the era when figures like Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, with whom Brandes was aligned, achieved global literary influence. In the 1870s, committed to progressive ideas, Brandes launched a critical campaign against still-dominant Romanticism in Scandinavian art and called instead for literature that would grapple with the realities of the modern world and facilitate social reform. He wrote several works that framed the new realist and progressive trends he championed as the “modern breakthrough” and connected them to the broader European scene, particularly German progressivism. In the late 1880s, his thought took a turn toward the Nietzschean, and he began to advocate what he called “aristocratic radicalism”; in writing a series of books about geniuses from Shakespeare to Voltaire, he also courted controversy and the continued anger of conservatives, not least for a late book on “the myth of Jesus.” Brandes’s relationship to his own Jewish background was famously mixed.

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