Two anti-Semitic satires, from the library of Jewish singer Helge Domp

Two anti-Semitic works bound in one volume, in first and second edition respectively. They include plays, poems, short stories, and parodied Talmud quotations, written in distorted German and mock Yiddish to ridicule German Jews.

Under the pseudonym Itzig Feitel Stern a series of books parodying German Jews appeared from 1827 to 1834, and from 1851 to 1860. The earliest works were issued in Augsburg and München, and in the 1830’s new works were published in Meissen by Goedsche.

The authorship of these works has long been the subject of debate. Alfred Klepsch has convincingly made the case (at least for the earliest works from the 1820’s) for Heinrich Holzschuher (1798-1847), a German social reformer with a dark side and author of Christian church songs.

However, Klepsch leaves the possibility open that the parodies published by Goedsche in the 1830's were actually written by a different author who is yet to be identified. Some still ascribe the parodies to Johann Friedrich Sigmund Freiherr von Holzschuher, but Klepsch has shown that he could only have written some of the later satires, if at all, published in 1851-1860.

The appearance of these anti-Semitic satires in the 1830’s, mocking the way German Jews spoke, was no coincidence. As Gilman notes, “By the time “Itzig Feitel Stern” was created, the movement had begun to replace Western Yiddish with German [...], and the image of the “old Jew” became tied to his or her incompetency in German”. So, in a way, Holzschuher’s works mark the (tragic) decline of the use of Yiddish.

This copy comes from the library of Jewish singer and entrepreneur Helge Loewenberg-Domp (1915-2021), and has her bookplate on upper paste-down. Loewenberg-Domp was born into a musical, German-Jewish family. She grew up in Münster, studying music and helping her parents in their piano store.

After the Nazis' rise to power, she fled to Amsterdam. In 1936 she studied singing in London, but returned, reluctantly, to the Netherlands in 1937 to help her brother run a piano store in Enschede. She survived the Shoah and lived to be 105, admired for her business acumen, which helped her become one of the first to import Yamaha pianos to Europe. A remarkable woman, she prominently featured in the 1999 documentary "Ik bedek mijn schmertz met mijn nerts".