Religion is a central concern of German literature in all centuries and the canon looks different when this perspective is acknowledged. For example Goethes fascination with evil is difficult to disentangle from the Holocaust Moses Mendelssohn is as profound as the playwright who portrayed him and Princess Sabbath deserves to be numbered among Heines more enchanting lyrics. This essay collection posits and tests the hypothesis that German literature at its best is often an expression or investigation of Judaism or Christianity at their best but that the best German literature is not always the bestknown and vice versa. Asking whether the New Testament is antiJewish and answering in the negative essayists range through the German centuries from The Heliand to Kafka and Thomas Mann.