German Jews: the very words evoke a highly specific and, for the most part, negative image. From their notoriously defective political judgment to their absurd sense of bourgeois rectitude to their penchant for arriving on time, German Jews exist in the mind as two-dimensional figures, their story one of all-but-predetermined doom. Foolishly, tragically, German Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries set themselves (it is said) on a trajectory that led inevitably to Kristallnacht and beyond. Their blind pursuit of German citizenship, of a place in German society, required on the one hand a denial of their Jewish distinctiveness, on the other hand a wild misreading of Germany itself. Their love affair with German high culture was fated to be unrequited: the more saliently jews emerged as intellectuals, artists, journalists, and critics, as theater- and opera- and concert-goers, the more violently were they resented by their fellow Germans. Their inability to understand or to respond effectively to this fact is but a further mark of their hopeless naiveté.
It was, perhaps, the Zionists who first drew this portrait of German Jewry as classic exemplars of Jewish political ingenuousness. But variants of the Zionist analysis have by now become a kind of conventional wisdom throughout the American Jewish community. Thus, for leaders of some secular organizations, the German experience suggests what can happen when a self-effacing group is too fearful of challenging the powers-that-be on fundamental issues of self-interest: although German Jews did fight for their civil rights, they declined to challenge degrading demands that they “earn” those rights, and this submissive attitude led, it is held, to the incapacity to combat Nazism or even to encourage migration. Religious traditionalists, for their part, lament the too-eager readiness of German Jews to subordinate their Judaism to their political and cultural aspirations: trying ever more desperately to convince their hosts that they were worthy of civic and cultural integration, they denuded their own traditions of everything particular to them, thereby failing to retain their own faithful, who increasingly abandoned the synagogue, while simultaneously failing to assuage the suspicions of the German majority.
As with all self-serving interpretations of the past, there is some measure of truth in this reading of history. Most German Jews in the 19th century did try to drop the ethnic component of traditional Jewish identity in a quest to be fully accepted by the German state; many Jewish leaders failed to combat the nationalist vision of the German majority; and many German Jews came to find their religious institutions devoid of meaning and purpose and sought refuge in an ultimately false universalism. But the standard generalization does not begin to do justice to the richness of German-Jewish civilization, let alone display any real understanding of the complexities of German politics and the difficulties Jews inevitably had in navigating them.
This alone is reason to welcome the recent completion of an extraordinary four-volume work, German-Jewish History in Modern Times1 Published more or less simultaneously in German and English, with a Hebrew version to follow, and written in clear and accessible prose, these monumental volumes represent the culmination of a long-term project of the Leo Baeck Institute, the premier body for research into the history of German Jews. They have been superbly edited by Michael A. Meyer, who in his own writings has done as much as anyone to provide a nuanced portrait of German-Jewish life; he has here assembled an impressive international team of scholars, each of whom provides a clear synthetic treatment of an assigned period or theme.
The new history covers Jewish life in the German-speaking lands from 1600 until 1945—which immediately raises a challenge: how does one define “German-Jewish” when there was no single political entity called Germany until 1871? And even after that date, should one include Austria and German-speaking areas like Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Hungary, which belonged not to the newly-unified German Reich but to the Austro-Hungarian empire? Happily, the editors have opted for inclusiveness, treating Jews from all these areas and occasionally even beyond them, with the result that we learn the backdrop to the lives of Freud, Herzl, and Kafka—none of them, properly speaking, a German—no less than Mendelssohn, Marx, and Einstein. For the pre-1871 era, the editors have striven to tell the story of Jews in smaller cities and states in addition to that of Jews in larger and more important places like Prussia and Bavaria, Frankfurt and Hamburg. Through this means we are made powerfully aware of the many different arrangements under which Jews lived in German lands, and, in turn, of the diversity of Jewish political strategies and cultural choices developed in response to those arrangements.
Another significant decision by the editorial team was not to allow the plot to be governed by the Holocaust. Too many histories of Jews in German lands are told in the shadow, as it were, of the catastrophic end, thus creating an illusion of inevitability when, in fact, there was none. By eschewing the “prelude-to-destruction” model, Meyer and his colleagues help us understand that the Jews of Germany could no more know for a certainty what was coming than any of us knows where Jews in America will be 50 years from now.
At the same time, however, these books put paid to a tendency among lingering apologists for German Jewry—and, despite the triumph of the conventional wisdom, there are some—to pretend that everything was fine until 1933. Thus, in his recent memoir, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin,2 the well-known Yale historian Peter Gay writes unqualifiedly that “the German record was one of a century-long, almost uninterrupted improvement of relations between its Jewish and gentile populations.” That this is nonsense is made especially clear in the treatment of the relevant period in German-Jewish History in Modern Times: relations between Germans and Jews before 1933 had a very definite ebb and flow to them, but they quite often displayed far more ebbing than flowing.
In short, the singular accomplishment of Meyer’s team is to make it difficult wholeheartedly either to condemn or to apologize for German Jewry. So long as we run the tape forward, which is how people lived it, the cultural integration into German society that so many Jews passionately desired could never honestly be said to have been impossible. But neither did it ever represent more than one, very precarious, possibility among many.
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Opening with a succinct review of the Middle Ages, this new history begins in earnest with a discussion of the 16th-century return of Jews to the many German lands from which they had been expelled. Particularly important was the state of Prussia, where Jews were admitted only because of their assumed economic value. This necessarily had a distorting effect on the emergent community, making it unusually top-heavy economically and establishing a strictly utilitarian relationship between Jews and the state—something that would eventually have a deleterious impact on the willingness of the state to view them as citizens with human rights rather than as subjects with a particular role to fill.
Throughout this early period (1600-1750), Jews continued to exercise internal autonomy, running their own schools, maintaining their own social institutions, enforcing their own rules and regulations, and in general abiding by their own traditions and calendar. Their high culture was that of traditional rabbinic Judaism, with important collections of commentaries and responsa emanating regularly from the pens of their intellectual elite. Like the Jews of Europe generally, the Jews of Germany existed almost entirely within their own universe.
What challenged the viability of this arrangement was less modern ideas or even modern economics than the rise of absolutist states. The Jewish autonomous community was one of the many casualties of this new European order, which, in gathering power to the political center, broke up all the corporate bodies that had comprised late-medieval society. Inevitably this led to a considerable diminution in rabbinic authority (already waning on account of infighting among the rabbinic elite), and helped prepare the way for the emergence of the late-18th-century haskalah (enlightenment) movement, the first of many attempts in Germany to redefine the nature of Jewish culture and identity.
Leading spokesmen of haskalah argued that German Jews must learn to think of themselves as part of a larger whole, one in which they had genuine cultural and political interests. In the case of many Jews in Prussia and elsewhere, this idea was actually not quite so advanced as it might seem. Already by the middle of the 18th century, rich Jews had begun appearing in public in powdered wigs, much like Prussian gentlemen, and married Jewish women had adopted the wig (instead of a kerchief) to fulfill the religious requirement of keeping their hair covered. But that is hardly to say that the program of the haskalah went unopposed by religious traditionalists, who were quick to see where the demand that Jews learn German (again, many had already done so), develop a wider range of occupational talents, and learn to dress like others could lead.
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On the political front, the haskalah initiated the effort to change once and for all the way the state related to Jews. Led by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), haskalah activists, in tandem with German liberals, articulated a political vision whose first principles were the near-total separation of church and state and the formation of a government of laws that would extend an open hand to all residents regardless of their religious affiliation. But this vision collided head-on with a competing view that was developing at nearly the same time, and according to which the state was much more than a regulatory web; rather, it was to be seen fundamentally as a vehicle for promoting and safeguarding the distinctive traditions of German culture, a culture to which Jews were and should remain permanently alien.
Much of German-Jewish history in the modern period can be understood in terms of the effort of German Jews to find an intermediate place along the spectrum marked out by these two positions, and Meyer’s History is at its best in teasing out the ways in which the process of Jewish emancipation (as the achievement of civil equality came to be called) played itself out in those terms, both in the public arena of politics and culture and within the consciousness of Jews themselves. Aspiring to citizenship in their respective states, most Jews were also committed to affirming Jewish particularity—usually, but not always, through religious expression. But there were exceptions, and their stories are the ones more familiar to us today. For men like Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine, and women like Dorothea Mendelssohn and Rahel Varnhagen (the subject of a vivid but tendentious study by Hannah Arendt), Jewish distinctiveness represented a burden to be left behind for the wider and sunnier shores of German culture and society. But, while a handful of Jews did successfully escape their Jewishness, most who made the attempt, including through conversion and intermarriage, failed to carry it off: in the minds of their German neighbors and as often as not in their own, they remained Jews. Ironically, even the individuals I have named are remembered today mostly as characters in an interesting chapter in Jewish history and, except for Heine, have all but disappeared from the chronicles of their beloved Germany.
In any case, the adaptive creativity shown by these types in their craving for acceptance pales beside the creativity displayed by those, by far the majority, who strove to retain their identity as Jews while reaching an honorable accommodation with Germany. As an example, consider the behavior of German Jewry in 1840, the year in which the Jews of Damascus were basely and sensationally accused of killing a Christian monk to use his blood for ritual purposes. When an international campaign was mounted to gain the release of the Syrian Jews being held for this “crime,” many prominent German Jews declined to participate on the grounds that doing so would give the lie to their claim to have no ethnic ties to other Jews—a cardinal point in their efforts to win German citizenship. Abraham Geiger, the leading voice of Reform Judaism in Germany, reputedly announced in public that he was more concerned with the ability of a Jew to get a pharmacist’s license in Berlin than with the life-or-death fate of Jews in some far-off land.
But other German Jews—among them some avowed “assimilationists”—fought vigorously on behalf of the Damascus Jewish community. The young Heinrich Graetz, soon to emerge as the dean of German-Jewish historians, confided to his diary that the events in Syria had led to a resurgence among his contemporaries of “national feeling,” a new “self-confidence and pride.” Even some who had refused to join the effort to aid the Damascus community found themselves defending Judaism against Germans who gave credence to the scurrilous charges.
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By the time of the unification of Germany in 1871, Jews everywhere in the German-speaking world had achieved emancipation. A once more-or-less united community was now hopelessly fragmented religiously, and was no less divided on the question of Jewish identity. Although most insisted that they were Germans by nationality, Jews by religion, many continued to protest that the ethnic component of Jewishness could not be compromised.
In the meantime, however, the achievement of emancipation also gave fresh impetus to those Germans who were determined to limit, or terminate, the influence of Jews on their country and culture. A new and virulent form of hatred—for which the term “anti-Semitism” was coined by one of its leading spokesmen—emerged in the decades after emancipation, and would soon exercise a tremendous impact on contemporary Jewish life and thought.
Again, the story is more complex than we have been led to believe. Many Jews responded to the new anti-Semitism by trying to address what they took to be the underlying complaint: that is, they felt the burden of proof was on them to behave better, or more “German.” Some, albeit far fewer than is usually represented, came to be true self hating Jews. But many others reacted by strengthening their Jewish identity or engaging in one form or another of political action—including, among a small minority, Zionism.
While Meyer and his collaborators give considerable attention to the rise of modern anti-Semitism and Jewish reactions to it, they do not allow it to overwhelm other aspects of Jewish life in the second German Reich (1871-1918). Particularly interesting is the story of the encounter with Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden), brought on by migration and later by World War I. It is undeniable that many German Jews felt little but contempt for their poorer, Yiddish-speaking brethren from the east. But others, upon familiarizing themselves with these exotic creatures, were induced to question the authenticity of their own beliefs and attitudes. A small number of Orthodox German Jews found their way to yeshivas in the East; others, who did not go to such lengths, were nevertheless deeply influenced by the “spirituality” of East European Judaism, especially in the form of Hasidism.
Indeed, disdain and admiration for eastern Jews were not mutually exclusive sentiments but often coexisted in the psyches of German Jews. What this suggests is that their own sense of identity still remained very much in flux, and that, whatever pulls they may have felt outward, away from Judaism, considerable affirmative impulses were also at work among them. It is worthy of note in this connection that when, after 1876, German Jews became legally free to break away from the Jewish community structure, fewer than 5 percent did so, while the remainder continued dutifully to pay assessments to support the communal institutions that sustained German-Jewish life.
Which brings us to the closing volume of this work, covering the period 1918-1945 and subtitled, with characteristic evenhandedness, “Renewal and Destruction.” Fully half of the volume is devoted to the so-called Weimar period (1918-32), with extensive discussion of cultural and spiritual activities. Here again one is overwhelmed by the sheer complexity and variety of Jewish life and expression, from the self-consciously Jewish thinkers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig to Walter Rathenau, the industrialist and statesman who served briefly as Germany’s foreign minister before being assassinated by right-wing conspirators in 1922, to Theodor Lessing, a professed self-hating Jew who later repented and would be among the first to die at the hands of the Nazis in 1933. Many Jews at this time were in fact engaged in an extraordinary effort at self-realization, or, as one chapter heading puts it, in “learning to be Jews again.” In the early Nazi period, a small number of collaborators notwithstanding, the Jewish community acquitted itself for the most part with dignity and pride. The rest of the story is too well known, and too terrible, to bear repeating.
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Out of this welter, do any common themes emerge? For all the political and religious variety of German Jewry, one element of today’s stereotype seems to stand up under scrutiny: throughout the last two centuries, and with exceptions duly noted, German Jews were unrelenting in their public commitment to bourgeois civility. They were energetic devotees of the German idea of Bildung, or education and cultivation, and avid consumers and supporters of the arts. This was true, interestingly enough, all across the religious spectrum. In the major cities, even in the most self-consciously Orthodox homes, Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven, were sometimes more frequent “guests” than the revered authors of Jewish religious classics.
We must not underestimate the significance of this, especially in light of the horrific sequel. The inescapable fact is that for many, probably most, German Jews, the new worlds that were opened to them by their exposure to German culture made them feel more fully human, more fully alive, than traditional Jewish culture ever did or could. The sense of liberation and completion experienced by Jews as they thrust themselves into every realm of Western art and thought is palpable to anyone who reads the memoirs they produced in such abundance. Sometimes, as in the cases of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, this quest for fulfillment led back to Jewish tradition; sometimes not. But what German culture, and the idea if not the practice of German civility, meant to all of them should not be obscured in retrospect by the overwhelmingly stunning and vicious events that followed.
Here, indeed, may lie the true “lesson” of German-Jewish history for today. Certainly there were individuals best described in epithets like “appeaser,” “assimilationist,” or “self-hating.” But, through a tumultuous cycle of rising expectations and deflating disappointments, German Jews in the aggregate developed an extraordinary civilization, one that was prey (as we now know) to tragic error but that was also capable of mobilizing tremendous resources of intellect, creativity, and sheer persistence. Whether the actual situations of American and German Jews have ever been or ever will be comparable is highly doubtful. But from the strategies German Jews successfully pioneered for negotiating the challenges of modernity, from their still-compelling religious ideas, from their unabashed love of high culture, and, yes, from their unshakable commitment to bourgeois civility, Americans in general and American Jews in particular do in fact still have much to learn.
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1 Columbia University Press. Vol. 1, Tradition and Enlightenment, 1600-1780, 435 pp., $52.50. Vol. 2, Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780-1871, 421 pp., $52.50. Vol. 3, Integration in Dispute, 1871-1918, 466 pp., $52.50. Vol. 4, Renewal and Destruction, 1918-1945, 479 pp., $52.50.
2 Yale University Press, 240 pp., $27.50.
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