Preface by John A. S. Grenville and Raphael Gross
I. Discussion
The Future of German-Jewish Studies
II. Jewish Identity, Philosophy and Religious thinking
Nimrod Zinger: «Our hearts and spirits were broken»: The medical world from the perspective of German Jewish patients in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
For patients in early modern European society family members and close acquaintances played a very important role in the provision of medical care. This was true also of the Jewish community in Germany. Various sources attest to the fact that often no professional caregiver whatsoever was involved in treatment, but rather the care was entirely given by family members and acquaintances. And of those family members and acquaintances, women were the most prominent. My article gives much attention to the medical perspective of German-Jewish patients, presenting the ways in which they explained the appearance of diseases in the human body, and exploring the considerations that informed patients’ decisions on which forms of treatment or remedies to prefer.
Christian Wiese: «Let his Memory be Holy to Us!»: Jewish Interpretations of Martin Luther from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust
It is not surprising that Jewish intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries in Germany referred to Martin Luther in their historical and theological work, since the Reformer was a symbolic figure in Prussian-Protestant political culture and since Jewish emancipation and integration were dependant on participation in the dominant discourse. What is astonishing, though, is the diversity of Jewish interpretations as well as their overwhelmingly positive tone. By exploring the contrasting views expressed since the Enlightenment, including those of Saul Ascher and Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim, Hermann Cohen and Leo Baeck, the article identifies two different trends within Jewish scholarship: a) the dominating tendency to embrace contemporary, often a-historical Protestant interpretations of Martin Luther as the forefather of Enlightenment, freedom of conscience and political emancipation who had overcome the medieval forces of superstition and oppression; and b) the inclination to adopt a more critical view and identify Luther’s theological and political convictions as one of the roots of Germany’s conservative, anti-democratic and increasingly antisemitic culture. With regard to Luther’s infamous anti-Jewish writings published in the 1540s, the dominating strategy during the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich was to oppose the antisemitic instrumentalization of Luther’s thought and to emphasize the relevance of the latter’s earlier, much more positive attitude. The article interprets this idealizing view both as an – often illusionary and apologetic – protest against the catastrophic decline of liberal, humane traditions in Germany and as an act of intellectual resistance.
Martina Urban: Towards what Kind of Unity? David Koigen, Leo Baeck and the Monism-Theism-Debate
The Jewish communal fragmentation in the early twentieth century made reflections on a unifying principle mandatory. There was a growing sense that unity required an active belonging to community and shared attitudes to the ‹problem of culture›. Social cohesion was also challenged by scientific monism which reinforced culturally corrosive forces, notably determinism and relativism. A Jewish response to the problem of unity had to negotiate integration and differentiation, universalism and particularism. To render religion relevant in scientific culture required, for David Koigen, rethinking the relation between immanence and transcendence. He read Spinoza as a model for a new scientific-cum-divine ethos that raises the principle of unity to the level of a universal community. However, a cosmopolitan impulse need not contradict Jewish particularistic sensibilities when unity is understood as a realization of monotheism through culture. Leo Baeck likewise viewed unity as performative rather than as doctrinal-propositional. The article examines the translatibilty of the metaphysical principle of unity to social reality.
III. Antisemitism and Responses
Lars Fischer: The Social Democratic response to antisemitism in Imperial Germany: The case of the Handlungsgehilfen
This article builds on earlier research on Social Democratic attitudes towards antisemitism and ‹the Jewish Question› in Imperial Germany that focused primarily on the party elite. It extends the focus of that earlier research by examining the main periodical of the Social Democratic Zentralverband der Handlungsgehilfen und -gehilfinnen Deutschlands, an organization whose principal, much stronger rival, the Deutschnationale Handlungsge-hilfen-Verband (DHV), was a self-avowedly antisemitic organization. It transpires that well in keeping with prevalent Social Democratic attitudes, and its daily confrontation with the antisemites notwithstanding, the Zentralverband took issue with its antisemitic rivals for a number of reasons but rarely, if ever, targeted the antisemites’ anti-Jewish orientation.
Kai Drewes: The Invention of Deviance: How Wilhelmine Jews Became Opponents of Ennoblement
Several prominent German bankers and entrepreneurs of the Imperial era, especially Jews, are said to have refused titles of nobility. In fact the Bürgertumsforschung is considerably influenced by references to such cases. As recent studies often mention alleged rejections of ennoblement, one may think that particularly Jewish members of the upper-middle class were opponents of titles of nobility. But the opposition to ennoblement is highly questionable due to the absence of serious temporary sources as well as the lasting attractivity of titles and decorations among businessmen – both Jewish and Gentile – in London, Vienna, Paris, etc. What is more, for confessing Jews Prussian titles of nobility were almost inaccessible. In fact there seems to be a topos of rejection. The article researches its complex genesis which tells us more about later perceptions of Wilhelmine Germany and Jewry than the then society itself: Although there was a significant lack of acceptance of Jews the view has developed that especially Jewish bourgeois were proud enough not to ‹accept› the highest monarchical decoration even when offered.
William Olmsted: Turning the Tables: Freud’s response to Antisemitism in The Interpretation of Dreams
The Interpretation of Dreams shows Freud’s awareness of contemporary antisemitic developments. Contrary to the Schorskean thesis of the book’s counterpolitical and a-historical theory, I argue that Freud confronts antisemitism in the analysis of his own dreams. Freud shows the effects of antisemitic politics upon the unconscious, which entertains an insidious collusion with antisemitism that the dream censorship tries to conceal. Undiscovered visual sources help explicate a dream about Dreyfus on Devil’s Island, part of a series of dreams that grapple with antisemitism. Analysis of these dreams indicates why Freud rejected a politics of revenge on patriarachal and aristocratic powers in favor of revolutionary self-understanding that aims to overcome the censorship and forestall unwitting collaboration with antisemitism.
IV. The dissemination of Information, Relief and Rescue
Verena Dohrn: Diplomacy in the Diaspora: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Berlin (1922–1933)
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), with headquarters in New York, was one of the first Jewish news agencies and became the most important one in the world. It was founded by the journalist Jacob Landau from Vienna at the end of World War I in The Hague. Since 1926 there had been five JTA offices in the old world–London, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, and Jerusalem. The JTA published its own daily bulletins in different languages and covered Jewish and non-Jewish press with news from the Jewish world. The Weimar Berlin office gatheredanddistributedinformationfromGermany,SouthCentralEurope,andtheSoviet Union. Many JTA correspondents were East European refugees. The JTA had good relations with the Jewish Department within the Foreign Office in Berlin. Jacob Landau took advantage of this relationship in order to maintain the interests of the Jewish Diaspora, especially to protect it against the growing antisemitism in Germany.
A.J. Sherman and Pamela Shatzkes: Otto M. Schiff (1875–1952), Unsung Rescuer
Often taken for granted during his lifetime, shunning praise and publicity, Otto M. Schiff (1875–1952), Chairman of the Jewish Refugees Committee between 1933 and 1949, has largely been forgotten since his death. Yet he played a crucial role during both World Wars in helping Jewish refugees seeking asylum in Britain, and occupied a unique position, based on decades of cooperation and mutual trust, representing the British Jewish community to Whitehall officials and ministers responsible for government refugee policy. Though some contemporary historians criticise Schiff for alleged failings, an examination of his work in context compels a positive assessment. Schiff ’s extraordinary personal accomplishment in facilitating the admission to Britain of some 80,000 refugees remains his monument.
V. the Jewish Presence in Post-War Germany
Philipp J. Nielsen: «I’ve never regretted being a German Jew»: Siegmund Weltlinger and the Re-establishment of the Jewish Community in Berlin
Siegmund Weltlinger played a prominent role in the re-establishment of Berlin’s Jewish community, from his appointment to head of the Division for Jewish Affairs at the Council for Church Affairs of the Berlin City Council on 24 September 1945 until his resignation from the city’s administration in 1957. At the same time, Weltlinger was a visible link to the city’s pre-war community, which he had joined in the 1920s. Throughout his time in office Weltlinger attempted to transfer his sense of continuous identity as a Jewish German to the Jewish community in Berlin. This was more than just a matter of personal importance to him, as the establishment of a continuous identity had real bearing on the community’s position in restitution negotiations. The article thus contributes to our growing understanding of the post-Holocaust Jewish presence in Germany.
Michael Birnbaum: Jewish Music, German Musicians: Cultural Appropriation and the Representation of a Minority in the German Klezmer Scene
Klezmer music is so popular in Germany that it has taken up a major place in the country’s conception of Jews and Judaism. But the music comes from Yiddish-speaking Central and Eastern Europe, not from the Jews who once lived in Germany itself. Most twentieth-century German Jews had little to do with Yiddish or klezmer; in fact, they looked and acted German in the decades leading up to the Holocaust. Looking at the rhetoric and development of the post-war German klezmer scene, this article makes the argument that modern-day Germany’s focus on the picturesque shtetl Jews amounts to an obliteration of the history of the assimilated Jews who once lived among Germans. In the country’s arid klezmer culture, Jews become a racialised people of the past, rather than an ordinary people of the present. By retroactively orientalising and caricaturing the murdered population, German klezmer diminishes the shock of the Holocaust and distances the country from its victims, and precludes a meaningful dialogue with the growing population of Jews who continue to inhabit the country.
VI. Reflections
Arnold Paucker: Robert Weltsch. The Enigmatic Zionist: his personality and his position in Jewish politics
In this memoir based on his close collaboration with Robert Weltsch over many years, the author attempts a sketch of the personality of one of the great Jewish editors. In it he speaks of Weltsch’s hankering for the Habsburg Empire of his youth, and of Weltsch’s recollections of his defiance in the face of Nazi policy during the April 1933 boycott, for which he is best remembered. Later on Weltsch was to express his disappointment with the failing of the ideology which had moulded his early years, his belief in a Humanist Zionism tested by current reality. He was a prince among editors, not only in Germany as editor of the Jüdische Rundschau but also in England, creating one of the most distinguished of modern Jewish annuals, the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. He was very aware of importance of the image of Israel abroad and was severe critic of those Jewish spokesmen who felt ill-served their cause. His idiosyncratic views on women’s emancipation, on old age, music, food and drink, went together with his humane, yet cynical, outlook on life and his uprightness and independence of thought.
Jürgen Matthäus: «You have the right to be hopeful if you do your duty» – Ten Letters by Leo Baeck to Friedrich Brodnitz, 1937–1941
In their attempt to reconstruct the life of Jews under Nazi rule, scholars can rely on relatively few sources generated at the time by German Jewish leaders. In the case of Leo Baeck, the imbalance between Nazi-era sources and post-war memoirs is particularly pronounced, opening a wide field for myth-making and speculation. The ten letters presented here (in German and in translation) provide insights into Baeck’s mindset and into the reality faced by German Jewish leaders forced to reflect and decide free of the blinding clarity of hindsight.
Yfaat Weiss: «Nothing in my life has been lost.» Lea Goldberg revisits her German Experience
Lea Goldberg arrived in Palestine in 1935. Goldberg was a poet, a writer of prose and plays and a scholar of literature. In the beginning of the 1930s she was a student in Germany but from the time of her arrival in Palestine until her death in 1970 she never returned there. In 1962, she almost by accident renewed her relationship with a close friend of her Germany study days Ilsabe Hünke von Podewils. This essay is based on their vast correspondence, furthermore on Goldberg’s prose writing of the 1930s which was partly published and partly remained unpublished during her life time. Its purpose is to examine Goldberg’s sentiment – a Jewish girl from Lithuania – towards Europe in general and Germany in particular. In addition, it will examine her relationship to German culture and society and by that illuminate this issue in her body of work.
VII. List of Contributors
VIII. Index
