Danish-Jewish dilemmas of belonging

The French Revolution’s ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity sent shock waves through Europe, which for European Jews meant the opportunity to finally abandon centuries of isolation and join the surrounding society as citizens. However, those who sought assimilation found themselves in a dilemma of belonging, where they experienced dual alienation from both traditional Jewish and Christian societies. This article focuses on the Danish-Jewish literary intellectuals Meïr Aron Goldschmidt (1819–1887) and Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who faced similar dilemmas of belonging despite a 23-year age gap and being antipodes in opinion. The article discusses how they tried to navigate practically the difficult grey area between Jewish and Christian communities, and how they sought to integrate a Jewish mission into two very different historically teleological visions of cosmopolitanism through Goldschmidt’s religious syncretism and Brandes’s anti-religious modernized Hellenistic rationalism.