Background
Moses (Moyses) Baruch Auerbach was born in Nordstetten (now Horb am Neckar) in the Kingdom of Württemberg. His parents were Jewish.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1343193745/?tag=2022091-20
1939
(Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichien (“Village Tales of the Blac...)
Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichien (“Village Tales of the Black Forest”) were published in many volumes between 1843 and 1871. These ushered in the genre of village tales and dealt with the peasants of the Black Forest. They were based upon observations and memories from his formative years when he had lived among the peasants.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145360135X/?tag=2022091-20
Moses (Moyses) Baruch Auerbach was born in Nordstetten (now Horb am Neckar) in the Kingdom of Württemberg. His parents were Jewish.
Berthold Auerbach began his studies at the Talmudic academy of Hechingen and continued at Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. His desire to enter upon a rabbinical career, however, waned during his years at several German universities as he came in contact with the philosophy of Spinoza and the radical theology of David Friedrich Strauss.
His participation in an illegal student movement also made it impossible for him to take the examination for the rabbinate and even subjected him to two months imprisonment.
While in prison, Berthold Auerbach began a novel on Spinoza, whose works he later translated from Latin. He attracted attention with a polemic pamphlet directed against the literary critic Wolfgang Mcnzel, who had instigated the banning by the German federal diet, in December 1835, of the past, present, and future works of Young Germany, a group of writers who made literature a vehicle for their radical ideas on politics, religion, and society. Although only two or these writers, Ludwig Borne and Heinrich Heine, were of Jewish birth, Menzel, in his attack on the group, suggested that “Young Palestine” might be a more appropriate designation than “Young Germany.”
In his twenties, he wrote biographies of famous Jews, the best of which was on Gabriel Riesser, a champion of Jewish emancipation. He also wrote the novels "Spinoza" and "Dichter und Kaufmann" (“Poet and Merchant,” 1939), whose hero was the minor Jewish-German poet Ephraim Moses Kuh.
His lasting renown in German literature rests upon his more mature "Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichien" (“Village Tales of the Black Forest”), published in many volumes between 1843 and 1871.
Auerbach joined his friend Gabriel Riesser in the struggle for Jewish rights in Germany, both before and after the revolution of 1848.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
1939(Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichien (“Village Tales of the Blac...)
Yet he opposed the views of his classmate Moses Hess, who urged him to espouse the cause of Jewish national regeneration and the settlement of Jews in their ancient homeland, Eretz Israel. He held that to affirm the existence of a Jewish nationality would undo a century’s struggle for Jewish emancipation and would play into the hands of anti-Semitic agitators.
He claimed he was a German who had more in common with his fellow Germans than with Jews outside of Germany and differed from his church-attending neighbors only by his adherence to the Mosaic faith. He even suggested that it might be better to call his religion Mosaism rather than Judaism.
Despite his patriotic protestations, Auerbach had to conclude, during his last years, that the tide of anti-Semitism was rising and that for half a century he had lived and worked in vain for German-Jewish symbiosis.
Berthold Auerbach was intended for the ministry, but after studying philosophy at Tübingen, Munich and Heidelberg, and becoming estranged from Jewish orthodoxy by the study of Spinoza, he devoted himself to literature.