Luce dall'Oriente: l'invenzione dell'ebreo autentico in Martin Buber ed Else Lasker-Schüler

The purpose of this article is to focus on a specific aspect of the relationship between Orientalism and Judaism, i.e. the invention of the authentic Jew – conceived as an Oriental subject – in the first Hasidic anthologies by Martin Buber (Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman and Die Legende des Baalschem) and in the Hebräische Balladen by Else Lasker-Schüler. Within the aesthetics of Jewish renewal and of the Jewish Renaissance in the first decades of the 20th century, the figures of the Oriental Jew and of the Biblical Jew at large, viewed as a positive counterpart to Western German Jews, become one of the domains in which the tension between reality and fiction, between faithful representation and literary manipulation is most evident and best reflected.