Moses Schwarzfeld: Between Jewish Studies and Literary Comparatism
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Abstract: The purpose of this article is to introduce the work of the Jewish scholar Moses Schwarzfeld in the field of Romanian and Jewish Folklore. He explored how folklore influenced Jewish identity in the nineteenth century, especially in a context where Jewish participation in this field was viewed as an unauthorized trespass into a cultural space to be solely Romanian. According to Schwarzfeld, folklore played a central role in shaping Jewish identity. Based on the principles of “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Schwarzfeld established a new type of interdisciplinary research examining antisemitic stereotypes and commonly held cultural beliefs in Romanian folk literature. By doing so, he converged with the universalist vision of the Transylvanian comparatist Hugo Meltzl, whose intention was to promote marginal literatures. But different from Meltzl, besides the scientific content Schwarzfeld’s work had a clear political component: especially his early research was used as a tool in the Jewish emancipation struggle. These two components—activism and research—were a defining feature of his work.
Keywords: Jewish intelligentsia, Romanian Folk-Literature, Anti-semitism, Wissenschaft des Judentums, Literary Comparatism, Jewish emancipation.
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-18, through the project A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature (1877–1944), PNRR-III-C9–2023-I8-CF 22/27.07.2023, contract no. 760276/26.03.2024.
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