Abstract

The historian of religion and ideas Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980) was an extraordinary exponent of the sincere aspiration of a lot of Jewish intellectuality and bourgeoisie to merge into the German national community, on an equal footing with the Christian majority. He and his family experienced the tragic failure of this epochal project. Yet, he did not want to give up and, even after World War II, he fought in defense of his identity as a politically conservative Prussian Jew. His almost unhidden homosexuality constitutes a further trait of the apparent contradictory nature of his figure. His intelligent fidelity to the practice of the late nineteenth-century Geistesgeschichte signaled him also in the academic field as an irreducible opponent of the changed spirit of the time.