Inciting Laughter

Writing in German, the humor examined here collided with the standards of respectable nineteenth-century German-speaking society, which regarded it as foreign to its own outlook. Jefferson S. Chase approaches this distinctively Jewish comic style from several disciplines at once.

The book concentrates on the years 1820 to 1850. Chase reads this humor twice over, as a stereotype that outsiders applied to Jewish writers and as a tactic those writers used themselves. Throughout, he argues that Jewish humor and German reactions to it must be understood without essentialist assumptions. He first considers the humor itself and its connection to questions of identity, then gives detailed attention to three Jewish humorists: Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine.

Chase next evaluates the place of this humor in literary history and examines the "core myth" that has shaped German literary history, tracing how that myth has changed over time. The study closes with a conclusion and translations of the three humorists' writings.