In an unpublished 1966 lecture on the centennial of Aby Warburg’s birth, Max Adolph, Aby’s only son and at one time his designated successor as director of the Warburg Library, remarked that his father had embodied like no other the virtue Chancellor Bismarck sorely missed in his fellow citizens, namely, Zivilcourage: “Had there been more Germans like this German Jew, we might have been spared the horrors of Nazism and our second war.” The chief merit of Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism, first published in Germany in 1998, is to have drawn renewed attention to this side of Warburg’s personality, his engagement and political fearlessness, more than just providing a meticulous record of his interest in the history of anti-Semitism and his unyielding stance against its resurgence. While several important studies and archival materials have come to light since the release of its German edition (some are taken into account, others, inexplicably, are not, despite an undated “Preface to the English-Language Edition”), Charlotte Schoell-Glass’s book remains indispensable and substantially contributes to the ongoing revision of our image of the great art and cultural historian, which was shaped for a generation of scholars by Sir Ernst Gombrich’s influential and still authoritative “intellectual biography.” But Schoell-Glass shows how, on this account as well as in several other respects, Gombrich’s picture is too sketchy and one-sided and needs to be supplemented, when not straightforwardly amended.

Warburg never sought refuge from a menacing present in the study of the past—be it the Italian or Northern Renaissance, classical antiquity, or Rembrandt’s age, which were his main areas of scholarly interest—even as the outbreak of the First World War provided ample evidence that the threats he and others had foreseen were no mere figments of the imagination. Schoell-Glass is right in identifying Warburg’s main and lasting concern as “the danger that reason might be manipulated” (122; emphasis in original), and legitimately claims that “only when we see Warburg’s achievements within the factual circumstances of their becoming, are they seen also to have been part of that great ideological battle fought over the term Kultur in the years before the First World War” (3). Mercifully, his death in 1929 spared him the sight of worse horrors to come. Schoell-Glass reminds us that Warburg liked to compare himself and the institute he had founded to a seismograph (5): and even if it is undoubtedly true, as Jean-François Lyotard has observed, that seismographs themselves could not withstand unscathed the immeasurable quake of the Holocaust, the record of the tremors that heralded it may help us, if not to prevent future catastrophes, at least to keep striving for a more reliable prediction of their occurrence.

Warburg was passionately interested in the daily politics of his time, as he actively engaged in every aspect of contemporary culture and social life. The fourth and top floor of his library in Hamburg was not by chance devoted to the dromena, the “things done,” a Greek category that he inherited from Jane Harrison—rather than simply to action, the English translation that replaced it when the library itself was transferred to London—and was meant to include all that related to the drama of life. The culmination of the library, in a literal sense, was thus to be the vita activa, thereby reinforcing the metaphorical hierarchy implicit in its organization. Warburg was a voracious reader of newspapers, as much as he was thoroughly familiar with the broadsheets of Luther’s age, and subjected each document to the same thorough scrutiny and the same keen interpretation. “Nocuments are Documents” is the witty translation that a Renaissance English polymath, Samuel Purchas, proposed to reproduce the Greek tragic line pathos mathos (literally, suffering is learning, deriving nocument from Latin nocere, “to harm”), and one may argue that Warburg’s investigations were guided by a similar, and equally tragic, insight: nothing is more important as a historical document than pathos and its expression, those Pathosformeln (the translator oscillates between “emotive” and “expressive formulas”) that his last project, the atlas Mnemosyne, was meant to exhaustively collect and display.

We encounter an enlightening discussion of how Warburg meant to organize the images of his atlas, still a matter of debate for the scholars engaged in the reconstruction of this torso (Warburg died before completing the project), in the final chapter of the book, devoted to an astute discussion of Paolo Uccello’s predella in Urbino and other depictions of the desecration of the Host that were to be included in its last plate. But Warburg was also interested in the verbal expression of pathos, and Scholl-Glass gives us a choice example of Warburg’s polemical talent in his answer to the letter of a German anti-Semite, “a true document of barbarism” (183), whose language he subjects to a thorough analysis and ultimately ridicules as displaying “the clipped tones of the noble paleface” (182). The seduction of the “Philistine blood myth” (93) is nonetheless unmistakable even in the pamphlet Aby and his brother Max composed during the war (the whole text is published in the appendix to the volume, pp. 167–176) in order to push the case for an equal treatment of Jewish soldiers within the German army, which occasioned the response of the anti-Semite I just mentioned (also published in its entirety, pp. 178–182); and even in his often quoted self-definition as Ebreo di sangue, Amburghese di cuore, d’anima Fiorentino (“Jewish by blood, Hamburger at heart, of Florentine soul” (13)), we find an echo, however ironic, of the very language from which he hoped Germany could free itself.

Besides restoring civic consciousness and political engagement to their due place in Warburg’s life and work, Schoell-Glass is successful in redressing the more disturbing misperception that he, like so many German and Austrian Jews of his generation, either willingly or unwillingly repressed his Jewishness for the sake of expediency or assimilation. In the case of Warburg, Schoell-Glass is able to demonstrate that, in spite of having declared himself a “dissident” from the Jewish community (24), having rejected the ritual obligations and, especially, married his Protestant wife against the objections of his orthodox parents, he was fully cognizant of and directly involved in the fight against the budding and ever more uninhibited phenomenon of anti-Semitism in German society. At the same time, however, Schoell-Glass overstates her case when she derives the impetus for all of Warburg’s projects from the hidden question that he supposedly sought to answer, namely, “what is the cause of Jew-hating?” (3)—rather than from the question he openly asked, that about “the afterlife (Nachleben) of antiquity” (6). The danger implicit in Schoell-Glass’s stance, which relies heavily on the assumption of such an unavowed obsession, is perhaps best detectable in the weakest section of the book, that on mauscheln, the derogatory term used to refer to the Jewish variety of German, here strangely translated as murmuring (35), and in the frankly puzzling hypothesis that Warburg’s “virtuoso use of metaphor” and his interest for words no less than for images may be due to a desire, conscious or unconscious, to counteract “the myth of a hidden language of the Jews” with a “civilized” way with words (37)—as if Warburg needed to prove that he wrote, indeed, in German, albeit his challenging, idiosyncratic, unique brand of German, which Schoell-Glass halfheartedly acknowledges as “a fundamental prerequisite for his methodological innovations,” while labeling it dismissively as “the wrestling with the German language that yielded his texts” (37). If Warburg wrestled with the genius of the German language, he came victorious out of this struggle, like Jacob with the angel. The task of any interpreter can only be to struggle, in turn, with Warburg’s inimitable German, even at the price of coming out limping from such a formidable encounter.

While the translation of this book will be welcomed without reservations by cultural historians, the interest of art historians may be more qualified: the book only touches upon the question of Warburg’s methodology, and, besides embracing Martin Warnke’s pithy definition of his approach as a “diagnostic understanding of the artwork” (186), Schoell-Glass can offer in her new preface no better appraisal of her own than “a considered progress to newly formulated problems” (viii). If this is one of the two qualities that, according to Schoell-Glass, make Warburg’s scholarship still attractive today, along with “his deep involvement with the power of images as images” (viii), we would be hard pressed to explain the enduring fascination that his work exerts upon us, and the challenge that it still presents to the discipline: Georges Didi-Huberman’s evocation of Warburg as the dybbuk that haunts art history is certainly more adequate (L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris: Minuit, 2002, 28). Luckily, Schoell-Glass’s book does not dispel the mystery surrounding this “unknown guest” (a Goethean turn of phrase made his own by Warburg (1)): that he keeps haunting us, however, is only reason to celebrate.