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62 The same ideals and hopes, perhaps, accompanied the Jewish traveler to Italy and animated, as has often been noted, scores of Jewish scholars of the Renaissance, from Aby Warburg, to Erwin Panofsky, to Erich Auerbach, to Bernard Berenson, to mention only a few;63 and they would, finally, impel the Jewish searcher for Michelangelo. Desire If there ever was a phenomenon that could be called, in good conscience and not without some subtle irony, “German-Jewish,” then it may well have been the shared passion for Italian culture, whose archetypal literary font remain, of course, Goethe’s Italian Journeys of 1786 and 1788.

And it may have been the same eroticism and the same desire for the unconstrained that found a parallel in the Jewish love for Michelangelo. 96 In modern literature, Raphael and Michelangelo have constituted, of course a pair of irreconcilable antipodes. ” For Thode, the “primal power of love” (Urkraft der Liebe) was the origin of Michelangelo’s raw genius, of his “childlike naiveté,” which kept him both a lover into his old age and a follower of the unenlightened, yet powerful Catholic myth;101 but it was the origin also of his suffering and solitude, and of his deeply human feeling.

Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him,” was the often repeated formula of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, who, in 1846, likened classical Judaism to a precursor of Protestant iconoclasm. Only a committed iconoclast as Graetz could note in his travel diary of 1854 that “after a while, Venice became boring to me. ”52 The Jewish modern encounter with art, then, which accompanied Jewish emancipation since the Enlightenment, embraced the image and, at the same time, repelled it, a dialectic that mirrored not only the modern dialectic of social and cultural assimilation and simultaneous intellectual or spiritual dissimilation but also the dialectic of modernist aesthetics itself.