IN HIS 1966 ESSAY “Juden und Deutsche” (Jews and Germans) Gershom Scholem sums up his influential critique of the idealized notion of a German Jewish dialogue: “Die Liebesaffäre der Juden mit den Deutschen blieb, aufs Große gesehen, einseitig, unerwidert” (By and large, then, the love affair of the Jews and the Germans remained one-sided and unreciprocated). Although Scholem rejects the often-professed Jewish “love” for things German both as a historical experience and as a model for the future, his own text evinces just how powerful this model is. Other scholars have found the trope of the German Jewish love affair similarly fascinating. In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Peter Gay stakes out very different claims about the situation of Jews in Wilhelminian Germany in similar terms. Gay argues that the expectation of Jews around 1900 that antisemitism would disappear was not entirely misguided and that their passionate identification with German culture was based on real or perceived affinities. Here, the trope of the love affair illustrates commonality and reciprocity. Gay calls the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who envisioned an entwinement of Deutschtum and Judentum based on their shared Greek roots, “an instructive chapter in the Jewish love affair with German culture.” Although he never mentions Scholem, Gay clearly seeks to refute his thesis about the non-integration of Jews into German culture and society. Indeed, one may speculate whether the rhetoric of love allows Gay to evade a more explicit controversy. He shifts the line of argumentation by manipulating the trope and by refashioning illusory and one-sided love as true and mutual love.