Knight at the Opera - Garrett, Leah

Examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannh¤user played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyses how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism.