Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

See in particular Chapter 3: "Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance: Love, Fiction, and the Virtues of Marrying In."

In 1838, [...] in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Philippson presented his readers with what he called a “Jewish-religious novella” [...], a story called “Die Gegensätze” (The Opposites) in which a university-educated young Jewish man by the name of Jonathan Löwe falls in love and eventually gets engaged to Julie Kaspar, a beautiful and intelligent young Jewish woman whose father is the sworn enemy of Jonathan's father. (120)

The protagonist of Philippson's tale “Die Union” (The Union, 1864) is a young New Orleans Jew named Robert Richardson, an orphan who learned about Judaism from a German-born teacher who “had fled the oppression that our brothers had to suffer in the Old World” to pursue freedom in the New World. As a young boy, Richardson mastered the details of Jewish observance and acquired a deep sense of both the spiritual truths and universalist dimensions of Jewish tradition, learning from his teacher that “the particular mission of our tribe [Stamm] is to pursue the equality of all human beings and to help fight for the freedom of all our human brethren.” As a result, Richardson is morally opposed to slavery and harbors a deep hatred of the Jewish confederate minister Judah P. Benjamin for his “fourfold betrayal: of humanity, of liberty, of his religion and of his fatherland.” The title of the novella refers on one level to the war between the states, to Richardson's sympathies with the union cause, and indeed, much of the tale is devoted to intrigue relating to Richardson's dealings with both Judah P. Benjamin and Benjamin Butler, the union army general who oversaw the occupation of New Orleans. Published while the war was still going on, “Die Union” purports to gives its German readers an almost real-time account of events in the United States. But the primary motor behind the plot is a different sort of union, the love story between Richardson and his fiancée Antonie de Castro, the daughter of a wealthy Sephardic banker in New Orleans. (129-130)

In addition to novellas, there is discussion of novels: Salomon Formstecher's Buchenstein und Cohnberg (1863) and Rahel Meyer's Zwei Schwestern (1853) although in the latter "no one lives happily ever after" (141) and In Banden frei (1865).

German-Jewish romance fiction imagined a world where Jews typically found self-fulfillment through fantasies of romantic love that were at once fantasies of being part of a larger Jewish community. Falling in love meant falling in love with one's future mate, with one's new extended family, and with Judaism all at the same time. In this context, needless to say, dark handsome strangers, exotic figures from unknown places, erotic fantasies about foreigners - all these stock tricks of the romance novel had no role to play in German-Jewish domestic fiction. As the writers we have considered knew only all too well, romance along these lines was key to the ways Jews were so often represented - and Jewish continuity undermined - in fiction by non-Jews. Jewish writers responded to this literature by creating a counter-tradition of Jewish romance that, rather than celebrating escapist fantasies of finding true love with an exotic stranger, idealized finding love and romance with someone considerably closer to home, if not someone already living under the same roof.
In this framework, marrying one's uncle or first cousin was hardly an aberration. It embodied precisely those ideals of marrying in that German-Jewish romance fiction sought to promote. (156)

The next chapter is not focused on romance but it does discuss Marcus Lehmann's novel Gegenströmungen as a reworking of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (there's a happy ending for his version of Daniel Deronda too).