Erich Auerbach’s Figural Interpretation and the Uncanny Jew

The German Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach comments with uncharacteristic candor about his feelings regarding Jews in a 1941 letter to his fellow expatriate in Turkish exile Alexander Rüstow. Auerbach describes Jews as “uncanny” (unheimlich): after their ancient exile, Jews became a homeless, ghostly people and fell out of historical temporality. The language of the letter suggests that Auerbach recasts his essay “Figura” (1938) to highlight “figural interpretation” as a form of Jewish uncanniness by connecting the figural interpretation of Jewish scripture to a history of anti-Jewish tropes of cultural moribundity and homelessness. The letter places Auerbach and his most influential essay in dialogue about the uncanny with Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and, proleptically, Jacques Derrida. It especially reveals Auerbach grappling with his older contemporary Franz Rosenzweig about uncanny, particularist, and universal identity and suggests that Auerbach’s cosmopolitanism verges on a disaffiliation that challenges our notion of the committed intellectual.