Nomadic Cosmopolitanism: Jewish Prototypes of the Cosmopolitan in the Writings of Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Lion Feuchtwanger, 1918-1933

Whereas Jews formed the paradigm of the modern cosmopolitan in the early twentieth century, they have largely vanished from today’s academic discourse of the cosmopolitan. But the story of cosmopolitanism, I contend, cannot be written without attention to the Jews. My article thus examines key writings by the German-speaking Jewish writers Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Lion Feuchtwanger, who postulated Jews and Jewish culture as the prototype of a deterritorialized cosmopolitan. In doing so, these writers departed from older notions of rooted cosmopolitanism, which they saw as unviable after the nationalistic excesses of World War I. This construct enabled them to both claim a secularized Jewish particularity and place the Jew at the core of the European idea.