India as a Jewish Third Space. German-Jewish Thought, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Transnationality of Intellectual History

This essay explores the link between the Aryan myth and its exclusion of Jews as it became postulated during the Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and in India. Yet, in a pivotal contrast, beginning around 1890, the notion that Jesus had absorbed Buddhist ideas became a popular topic of inquiry in Germany, which also rejected the Jewish roots of Jesus. Thus, Musch eloquently argues that both German perceptions of Aryanism and German constructions of Indian religious thought became articulated in a racially charged non-Jewish space. In a further nuance, Musch juxtaposes Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) speech, “The Message of the Forest,” which Tagore delivered on several occasions during his European travels, with the formulations of German-Jewish thinkers. That Jewish counter, Musch argues, helped forge the creation of a Jewish third space and demonstrates the process of Jewish cultural transformation in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.