Half a century after the founding of the Third Reich, the role of the Jewish community in the history of Germany is receiving more scholarly attention than ever before. For only now that it has become part of a dead past can its dimensions be fully explored. As long as it was still a living reality, its members considered it awkward or even dangerous to dwell on the important part they were playing in the life of Central Europe. Those who did so most openly were generally outsiders, many of them anti-Semites maintaining that the Jews dominated German business activity and cultural life. They pointed to the leading positions which Jewish businessmen occupied in commerce and banking. They deplored the influence which Jewish editors exercised over newspapers, journals, and publishing houses. They expressed shock at the disproportionate number of Jewish intellectuals, writers, musicians, artists, and actors. And they found special satisfaction in enumerating the Jewish politicians prominent in the liberal, socialist, and Communist parties.
Their contention was that the Jews were beginning to control national life, and that all Germans should be made aware of the extent to which their culture and economy were falling under the domination of an alien minority. The Jews, on the other hand, though certainly aware of their growing importance in German society, preferred not to talk about it. They tried as a rule to minimize or camouflage their success. The last thing they wanted was to stand out. Eager to demonstrate that they were “real” Germans, in thought as well as action, they sought to blend into their background, to become as inconspicuous as possible, to prove that there was no difference between them and their non-Jewish countrymen.
The destruction of the Jewish community of Germany by National Socialism has thus paradoxically made it possible at last for the German Jews to come out of the closet. Those who survived the Holocaust emigrated, mostly to the United States, and now they and their children are free to celebrate the achievements which they had once so studiously ignored. They no longer need to insist that they are indistinguishable from the Gentiles among whom they lived; their affluence and influence in their former homeland are no longer the objects of resentment. They can examine openly those unique qualities whose existence they had previously denied. They can speak of their special contributions to the economy, thought, and culture of Central Europe. The tragedy of the Third Reich has in a sense proved a liberation for the German Jews. They have become idealized and sanctified; they appear exciting and fascinating, bigger than life.
The result has been an outpouring of popular as well as scholarly studies of Jews who have played an important part in the history of Germany. Fritz Stern in his book Gold and Iron has written about the complex relationship between Bismarck and his Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder, declaring that “Bleichröder is everything that has been left out of German history.” Edmund Silberner has published an important biography of an entirely different kind of German Jew, the ardent democrat Johann Jacoby, who began as a reformer in the period of the Restoration and ended as a socialist under the German empire. Peter Gay’s graceful Weimar Culture does not deal explicitly with Jews, but half of his protagonists are Jewish. The very subtitle of his book, “The Outsider as Insider,” suggests the extent to which Jews were prominent in the intellectual and artistic life of that brief interlude between an old authoritarian order and a new totalitarian one. George Mosse’s essays have appeared in a volume entitled Germans and Jews, dealing with such subjects as “Culture, Civilization, and German Anti-Semitism,” “The Image of the Jew in German Popular Literature,” “The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry,” and “Left-Wing Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic.” Werner Mosse has edited a weighty collection of articles, Jews in Wilhelmian Germany, by a group of prominent scholars, both German and non-German, Jewish and non-Jewish. And those are only a few examples of a steadily growing historical literature. The hunger for knowledge about the Jews of Central Europe shows no sign of subsiding.
This unexpected interest in a small vanished community reflects in part the efforts of the German Federal Republic to restore it to life. The new generation of Germans which reached maturity after 1945 sees in the Third Reich a national evil whose crimes are not only unpardonable but incomprehensible. The farther it recedes into history, the less understandable it appears to them. And yet they feel burdened by a sense of guilt, by a feeling that they must help atone for the sins of their fathers. For them the attempt to keep alive the vestiges and memories of German Jewry is an act of repentance, a rite of expiation.
Often there is something pathetic about their resolve to undo the injustices of the past. Synagogues destroyed more than forty years ago are painstakingly restored to provide a place of worship for a dozen congregants. Spacious community centers are built to serve the needs of a handful of aging and dwindling members. More fruitful are the attempts to reestablish ties with German Jews now living abroad. They are invited to return to their birthplace as honored guests of the children of those who had once treated them with contempt. They are asked to participate in penitential observances of the terrible events which led to their ordeal: the appointment of Hitler as chancellor, the burning of “un-German” books by triumphant Nazis, or the destruction of synagogues and Jewish businesses in the Kristallnacht. German money supports international conferences on Central European Jewry, finances research centers for the study of its culture, and underwrites the publication of scholarly books describing its history. For the Germans this is a form of spiritual restitution.
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But an even more important reason for the interest in the German Jewish community is the growing willingness of its survivors and their children to examine their historic roots. When they left Central Europe in the 1930’s, bewildered, outcast, victims of cruel persecution, their overriding desire was to rebuild their lives in a new environment, to break with the past once and for all. They generally continued to speak German at home because that was the language in which they felt most comfortable; they would sometimes publish a newsletter in German to help maintain their sense of ethnic solidarity. But their goal was to become Americanized as soon as possible.
They pursued this goal with the same determination with which they had once tried to become Germanized, and with even greater success. The refugees who arrived in the United States on the eve of World War II, many of them penniless and friendless, often managed within a few years to carve out for themselves careers more prosperous than those they had left behind. The same qualities and talents which had enabled them to achieve prominence in Central Europe enabled them to achieve it in the New World. Their lives found a new purpose in a new environment. They began to adjust to the values of their adopted homeland. Their confidence returned, their hope revived; they assimilated. And as the bitter past grew dim, they were able to look back at their origins in Germany. Their initial resolve to blot out the past gave way, with a sense of pain and a touch of nostalgia, to a growing acknowledgment of what had happened.
This willingness to come to terms with history has been most apparent in the children of the refugees from the Third Reich. Many of them had been born in Central Europe; they still had memories of the harsh experiences which had forced their families to flee the Old World. But they had been young enough to adapt without difficulty to their changed circumstances. They had received their education in American schools and colleges; they had served in the armed forces during the period of the draft; they had achieved success in business, the professions, or academic life. An examination of the rise and fall of German Jewry was thus less painful for them than for their parents; it was not as bound up with personal memories and private emotions. Indeed, in studying the German Jewish community they were performing an act of filial piety, resurrecting a vanished ancestral world. Although their interest was stimulated by a sense of personal participation in a collective ethnic experience, they were sufficiently removed to see it clearly and analytically. Their unique situation, as both insiders and outsiders, made possible the sudden flowering of historical studies of Jewish life in Central Europe. Beginning in the 1960’s, they set out to explore a vanished culture which their fathers had been determined to forget, but which they, enjoying the security of a new identity, felt free to rediscover. Although a number of other scholars, Christians as well as Jews, joined in the search of the German Jewish Americans for their roots, leadership in the study of Central European Jewry has been largely retained by the descendants of those who had been part of it. They have provided a fuller and richer understanding of the Jewish community of Germany than had been possible while it was still a flourishing reality.
That community surely deserves the scholarly attention which has been focused on its rise and fall. For a thousand years it had remained a small, persecuted minority in Central Europe, separated by a wall of insurmountable prejudice from the Germans among whom it struggled to survive. The legal and social disabilities imposed on the Jews reflected bitter popular hostility to their religious and cultural uniqueness. Their only escape from psychological as well as physical persecution was conversion to Christianity, and there were in fact in each generation some German Jews who took this way out. But the great bulk remained loyal to faith and tradition, willing to pay the high price of their spiritual identity. In this respect the Jewish community of Central Europe was indistinguishable from that of Eastern Europe. Both bore patiently the cruel burden of their ethnic destiny.
But then fortune smiled on the German Jews. Starting late in the 18th century, they were given an opportunity to leave the ghetto without abandoning their faith. The Enlightenment with its belief in the perfectibility of man, whatever his religious convictions or cultural traditions, held out the prospect of emancipation. Soon benevolent princes and reforming ministers began to repeal discriminatory legislation directed against the Jews, who became free at last to seek acceptance in what had hitherto been an alien and hostile society. For about a hundred and fifty years the Jewish community played an increasingly important role in the economy, learning, and culture of Germany. We can now see that this period was only a brief concluding chapter in the millennial history of the Jews of Central Europe, a sudden brilliant illumination before the final darkness. For those who lived through those years, however, it was an exciting new start; the future seemed to promise the full integration of the Jews into German life.
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Still, from its earliest beginnings, emancipation exacted a price. Those responsible for it expected to be rewarded for their humaneness. They did not demand the religious conversion of the Jews, but they did require their cultural and ethnic conversion. In other words, liberation was to be achieved at the cost of assimilation. The Jews had to abandon not only their dress and idiom, the outward signs of their uniqueness, but their culture and ethos, the inner expressions of a separate identity. They had to become indistinguishable from the Germans in appearance and spirit; they had to cease being Jews in every respect except religion. They could win acceptance only by transforming themselves, by sacrificing their historic identity. They were expected to suppress those characteristics which Goethe, the greatest literary figure of the period of emancipation, had described as typically Jewish: “The twisted fervor, the sensual and loathsome enthusiasm, the wild gestures, the confused murmuring, the piercing clamor, the feeble movements and momentary exertions, and the perverseness of antiquated folly.” Only by attaining the lofty serenity of the sage of Weimar could the Jews hope to be regarded as true Germans.
The clearest description of the terms of their liberation appeared in the 1780’s in a work by the scholar and diplomat Christian Wilhelm Dohm, The Civic Improvement of the Jews. His contention was that by emancipating the Jews, the state would encourage their transformation into “good and useful members of society.” They would soon lose their “religious attachment,” finding new moral and intellectual roots in the soil of Germany. They would become artisans and farmers rather than moneylenders and shopkeepers. As for the argument that “the Jews will then cease to be true Jews,” Dohm declared, “by all means, let them!” By altering their historic character, by identifying in spirit as well as appearance with their Gentile neighbors, they would find acceptance in German society.
To the Jews of Central Europe that did not seem a bad bargain. They hastened to transform themselves with an assimilating zeal which within two or three generations made them almost indistinguishable from the Christians. Around the middle of the 18th century the way of life of the Jewish community in Germany had not been essentially different from that of the Jewish community in Poland or Russia. A hundred years later sharp distinctions in status and outlook separated the two. The Jews of Central Europe had emerged from the ghetto, they had achieved civic equality, they thought and behaved like the goyim, indeed, some of them liked to describe themselves now as “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” They resolutely tried to rid themselves of all those appearances and attributes regarded as typically Jewish. Their clothes became more fashionable; their speech more cultured; their manners more genteel. Even the form of their religious worship, the central expression of their separate identity, was modified and reformed. When had any ethnic minority undergone such a rapid acculturation?
The use of the Yiddish language, for example, long a link between German and Polish Jewry, was now rejected as a cultural impropriety, as the reminder of an embarrassing past. Moses Mendelssohn, philosopher of the Enlightenment and champion of Jewish emancipation, spoke with disapproval about “the Jewish-German dialect and the intermixture of Hebrew and German.” He expressed fear that “this jargon has contributed substantially to the indecency of the common man.” There was still room for hope, however. “I expect a very good effect from the use of the pure German idiom, which has been spreading among my brothers for some time.” Above all, he insisted, there must be no mixing of German with Hebrew.
Some fifty years later the young Johann Jacoby, starting out on his career as a militant political reformer, submitted a petition to the leaders of the Jewish community of his native Königsberg complaining of the “noise, talking, and shrieking” in the synagogue during religious services, “practices which have become almost proverbial,” a source of malicious amusement for well-bred Christians. He proposed the prohibition of “private conversation, loud prayer, and other improprieties in the synagogue.” The prayers, moreover, should be recited, not chanted, by the cantor, while “the congregation should only be permitted to pray quietly.” Where chanting did seem appropriate, it was to be done by a male choir of four voices. Finally, a sermon in the German language was to be prescribed “as the most important part of the public divine service.” By patterning its form of religious worship on that of the Christians, the Jewish community would gain greater respect in the eyes of its neighbors.
In their eagerness to conform, many Jews even accepted the prevalent German view of Jewishness. They too came to identify it with coarseness and materialism, with the mentality of the moneylender and shopkeeper. There was something disagreeable about it, something offensive or ridiculous. They began to practice, in other words, a special form of self-hating Jewish anti-Semitism. Their longing for acceptance as Germans led them to reject their own ethnic identity.
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Consider the case of Bleichröder, who represents everything that has been left out of German history, according to Fritz Stern. Alas, he also represents a great deal that has been left out of German Jewish history. A man of enormous wealth, probably the richest in Central Europe, he remained pitifully eager to ingratiate himself with patronizing aristocrats who were his inferiors in every respect except status. By entertaining them in ostentatious luxury, he hoped to win the favor of those who behind his back made malicious remarks about the parvenu Jew. Although he must have known it, he continued to woo and flatter members of court society to the point of deferring to their anti-Semitic prejudices. At the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg described in her diary a “great and very brilliant ball” which the Bleichröders gave in their “new and magnificently furnished house.” They had invited “almost exclusively people of the higher society, excluding even their relatives.” The baroness found that “really terribly wretched.”
A few years later a police report elaborated on Bleichröder’s unremitting efforts to dissociate himself from his co-religionists: “Bleichröder, who since his elevation to nobility almost bursts with pride and who publicly no longer entertains his former friends and associates, keeps himself apart from them even in his walks: on his promenades in the Sieges-Allee he walks on the western side instead of on the eastern with the great majority of promenaders, who are almost all Jews. Asked why he walked on the other side, he is supposed to have answered that the eastern side smelled too much of garlic.” Such were the extremes to which their zeal to assimilate drove some German Jews.
Arrivistes like Bleichröder were motivated solely by social ambition, by the desire to gain acceptance in high society, whatever the cost. They were not anti-Semites by conviction; only climbers and opportunists. But there were other Jews in Central Europe, less obsequious in manner but more inflexible in doctrine, who turned self-hatred into an intellectual principle. In their resolve to become completely Germanized, they began to advocate the suppression of their own distinctive historical and cultural attributes. Take the statesman Walther Rathenau, for example. An unusual combination of industrialist and savant, highly successful in business yet devoted to culture and learning, he was more than an ambitious climber. He was an oversensitive intellectual, a philosopher manqué. Born a generation later than Bleichröder, he should have felt more secure and comfortable with his social position in Wilhelmian Germany. Yet he regarded the Jewish community of which he was part with a mixture of pity and shame.
Whoever wants to grasp its essential character, he wrote with self-lacerating bitterness, should walk Sunday around noon through the Tiergartenstrasse or look in the evening into the lobby of a Berlin theater. “Strange sight! In the midst of German life there is a distinctly alien human race, splendidly and ostentatiously dressed up, hot-blooded and excitable in manner. On the sands of the Prussian marches there is an Asiatic horde. The forced merriment of these people does not reveal how much old, unappeased hatred rests on their shoulders.” They live “in close association with one another, in strict segregation from the outside, . . . in a semi-voluntary, invisible ghetto, not a living part of the nation but a foreign organism within its body.” The Jews need only look in the mirror to see the striking difference between them and the Germans: “The imperfect build, the raised shoulders, the clumsy feet, the feeble rotundity of the shape,” unmistakable signs of “physical decay.” This was the terrible legacy of Jewish history. “Two thousand years of misery leave marks too deep to be washed away with eau de cologne.”
Could anything be done about what was now increasingly being called “the Jewish question”? To Rathenau the only solution was complete assimilation in body and spirit. There must be “an event without historical precedent,” namely, “the conscious self-education of a race for its adaptation to outside demands.” This did not mean “mimicry” in Darwin’s sense, he explained, which signifies the capacity of some insects to assume the local color of their environment. What he had in mind was “conformity in the sense that racial characteristics, whether good or bad, which have proved hateful to our countrymen are discarded and replaced by more suitable ones.” The object of such a process should be not the creation of imitation Germans but of Jews disposed and educated to be German. What was needed was “a Jewish patriciate,” based on “mental and physical culture” rather than property, which would lead the way to the gradual transformation of Semites into Teutons.
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Most German Jews, to be sure, accepted their Jewishness with more grace than Bleichröder and less agonizing than Rathenau. Their contention was that being Jewish was as compatible with the spirit of Germany as being Prussian or Bavarian or Saxon. But they all accepted the assumption that the only response to anti-Semitism was complete assimilation into German life and culture. Some tried to demonstrate their loyalty by becoming ultra-nationalists, denouncing foreign enemies and domestic dissidents with loud patriotic fervor. Others hoped to establish a more just political system in Central Europe under which different religious and ethnic communities could live side by side in harmony and peace. They became liberals, democrats, socialists, or Communists. They were never able, however, to conceive of a collective Jewish identity constituting an indigenous but distinctive element in the national life of Germany. Whatever their civic outlook or social position, they accepted the argument that Jews must learn to adapt to the point of becoming indistinguishable from Christians.
Their efforts in this direction proved highly successful. The Jewish community rapidly adopted the customs, manners, attitudes, and loyalties of the bourgeoisie of Central Europe. Indeed, it soon came to epitomize the characteristic qualities of middle-class Germans: resolute genteelness, moral earnestness, grave deportment, ceremonious courtesy, respect for formal learning, devotion to conventional culture, and a touch of pedantry and pomposity. To the Jews of Poland or Russia, their co-religionists in Germany began to seem strange and alien, rejecting the traditions of their people, adopting the ways of the goyim, Jews only in their religious observance, and even there starting to reform and modernize. To most Germans, on the other hand, the conforming zeal of their Jewish countrymen was something to be encouraged; it seemed to promise that what had been a discordant element in national life would gradually be absorbed and assimilated. The Jews were therefore rewarded for their willingness to adapt. A segregated, oppressed, and despised minority at the conclusion of the War of Liberation against Napoleon, they had by the time of World War I become a major force in business, learning, literature, the arts, and the sciences. Indeed, one of the reasons why assimilation seemed so desirable to them was that it had made possible their rapid progress in the 19th century. Now it appeared to be only a matter of time before acculturation led to their complete acceptance in German society.
Yet the goal began to recede just as they approached it. Though adopting German dress, speech, manner, and deportment, they discovered that there was still something about them which did not look or sound quite right, quite authentic. There was always some peculiarity of physiognomy, expression, bearing, temperament, or behavior which remained stubbornly un-German. Even many Germans who seemed well-disposed toward Jews, who applauded their resolve to conform and supported their demand for equality, discerned some alien trait in their character. It was so impalpable, delicate, and elusive as to be almost ineffable. But even if it could not always be described, it was there. It could be felt, almost instinctively, by someone attuned to the inner harmonies of the German spirit. However hard the Jews tried to capture that spirit, it continued to elude them. As they approached, it retreated; as they reached for it, it withdrew. They knew the torment of Tantalus. But disappointment failed to shake their confidence that before long, in a few years perhaps, assimilation would lead to their complete acceptance. In the meantime, they must continue to demonstrate by their loyalty, conformity, devotion, and patriotism that they were true Germans.
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Their success in approaching their goal, however, inspired a new form of anti-Semitism in Central Europe. The traditional prejudice against Jews had rested primarily on their rejection of the true faith. The penalties imposed on them, justified as punishment for their refusal to accept divine revelation, could be removed through conversion to Christianity. But as the role of religion in the life of the community became less important during the 19th century, as secularization began to diminish sectarian bias, a new justification for hostility toward Jews emerged, reflecting the increasingly temporal outlook of the age. Traditional anti-Semitism reappeared in modern dress. Jews were now perceived as alien not because of their religious beliefs but because of their inherent characteristics. The difference between them and the Germans became fundamental and ineradicable. It could not be overcome by external conformity or professed assimilation; it was rooted in incompatible cultural and ethnic traditions; it was almost genetic in nature. In the days of the ghetto, Jews had been regarded as a menace because they were so unlike their neighbors. Now they began to seem threatening because they were so similar, because it was becoming so difficult to tell them apart from “real” Germans. Their willingness to conform only made them more insidious, more dangerous to the society around them. Indeed, the unassimilated Jews, easily distinguishable from the Christians, appeared to some anti-Semites preferable to the emancipated Jews, who looked outwardly Germanized but remained inwardly forever alien.
The extent of this new form of anti-Semitism can be exaggerated, to be sure. In retrospect there may appear to be a logical, terrible progression from the warnings against the Jewish peril in the 1870’s to the pogroms of the Kristallnacht in the 1930’s or the gas chambers of Auschwitz in the I940’s. But in fact the rise in the German empire of a polemical literature directed against the Jews reflected not an increase but a decline of ethnic prejudice. There had been little need for an organized anti-Semitic movement in the 18th century, because the Jewish community had been too weak and despised to pose a threat to any social group or economic interest. A prevalent popular anti-Semitism had made an explicit intellectual one superfluous. It was the growing integration of the Jewish community into German life which aroused the hostility of those who felt menaced by the new importance in society of what they regarded as an unscrupulous alien minority. Their number remained small, however, and it even appeared to be diminishing. By 1914 the great majority of Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike, expected that before long, perhaps within a generation, assimilation would provide a final solution for “the Jewish question.” None of them imagined that within a generation there would indeed be a final solution, but of an entirely different sort.
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As the Jews became culturally absorbed into the society of Central Europe, the anti-Semites found it increasingly difficult to establish discernible differences between them and the Germans. Critics could always dwell on the pecularities of their nature or spirit, on their alleged materialism, hedonism, cosmopolitanism, radicalism, or cynicism. But the effectiveness of carping at subtle nuances of the Jewish character was limited. That was why the Jewry of Eastern Europe now became important as a means of demonstrating and defining the disparity between the Semitic and the Germanic personality. The Jews of Berlin or Frankfurt might not appear very different from non-Jews, but a look beyond the eastern borders of Germany would show how dissimilar they really were. For there, in the ghettos of Poland and Russia, could be found the archetypal Jew, complete with beard and earlocks, skullcap and caftan, wrapped in his prayer shawl, the embodiment of that ethnic uniqueness which the German Jews were so eager to deny. In the days before emancipation there had been no need to affirm the identity of East European and Central European Jewry. It had been self-evident. But as the Jews of Germany began to draw closer to their non-Jewish countrymen in appearance and behavior, the Jewish community of the Russian empire came to epitomize for German anti-Semitism the Jews’ collective distinctiveness.
Heinrich von Treitschke, the eminent nationalist historian, stressed this ethnic incompatibility in an article published in 1879 which helped mark the onset of the new secular attack against German Jewry. The countries of Western Europe did not really understand the Jewish question, he wrote, because there the number of Jews was too small to exert a significant influence over national morality. “The Israelites of the West and the South,” moreover, belonged mostly to the Spanish tribe of Jews, which had “a relatively proud history,” and which adapted quite readily to Occidental ways. Indeed, they had in the great majority become good Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Italians, “to the extent that this can reasonably be expected of a people of such pure blood and such pronounced distinctiveness.”
The situation in Central Europe was entirely different, however. “We Germans have to deal with that Polish tribe of Jews which bears the very deep scars of many centuries of Christian tyranny. Experience has shown that it is far more alien to the European and especially the Germanic character.” Yet this foreign element was beginning to play a dominant role in the life of Germany. “Year after year, emerging out of their inexhaustible Polish cradle, a horde of industrious young men selling pants pushes across our eastern borders. Their children and their children’s children will some day control the stock exchanges and newspapers of Germany. The immigration is growing visibly, and the question of how we can fuse this foreign nationality with our own is becoming increasingly serious.” Was it any wonder that even the most liberal and generous Germans were becoming concerned about the future of their country? “There is a cry which resounds today as with one voice, even in the most highly educated circles, among men who would reject with abhorrence any thought of religious intolerance or national arrogance: ‘The Jews are our misfortune!’ ” The problem, which “can never be completely solved,” was how to deal with the many Jews “who are nothing but German-speaking Orientals.”
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While to the German anti-Semites the Ostjude was the personification of an alien Jewish psyche, to the German Jews he was an ancestral ghost come to haunt their celebration of acceptance. He belonged to a past which they had tried to suppress. He represented a part of themselves which they regarded with aversion, which they had chosen to ignore. Their conformism had brought them so close to the prize. They were almost regarded as true Germans; they were almost accepted as members of good society. Only a few more obstacles, a few more successes, and they would be free of the stigma of their origin. But standing in their way were those Eastern Jews—dirty, crude, uncultured—spoiling it all, reminding the world of what they themselves had once been, of what perhaps they still were. Is it surprising that the German Jews often regarded their co-religionists in the East with the same scorn and resentment which anti-Semites displayed? They insisted, to be sure, that the behavior of Eastern Jews should not be regarded as typically Jewish. They argued that Polish Jewry could in time be taught to resemble German Jewry. Given the right circumstances, it too could acquire education and breeding. But beneath their reiteration of the perfectibility of the Ostjude ran an undercurrent of condescension and dislike.
The literary work of Karl Emil Franzos illustrates the mixture of apology and reproach characterizing the attitude of the Jews of Central Europe toward those of Eastern Europe. Born in Podolia and raised in Galicia, he rapidly moved up the ladder of cultural assimilation, his personal life thus recapitulating that of the German Jewish community as a whole. From Czortkow, the Galician shtetl, he went to Czernowitz in the Bukovina to attend the Gymnasium there, then came years of study at the universities of Vienna and Graz, then a decade as a successful journalist in the Austrian capital, and finally the crowning move to Berlin, the cultural mecca of the Germanic world, where he remained until his death in 1904.
His literary reputation, considerable though ephemeral, rested on his sketches of life in Eastern Europe, “Half Asia,” as he called it, the region “between educated Europe and the desolate steppe across which the Asian nomad wanders.” Here there was a strange intermingling of “European education and Asian barbarism, European progress and Asian indolence, European humaneness and the strife among nations and religious communities which is so wild, so cruel that to an inhabitant of the West it must seem not only strange but unheard of, indeed, incredible.” Outward forms or manners in the lands of “Half Asia” were frequently borrowed from the Occident, yet “the core and spirit are often autochthonous and barbaric.” The region appeared to Franzos in “a strange twilight, . . . neither as civilized as Germany nor as barbaric as Turkestan, but simply a mixture of both.”
The only way to enlighten and improve its inhabitants, he maintained, was by bringing them closer to European culture. This did not mean forcible assimilation, however. “I do not wish to see the East either Germanized or Gallicized. By no means!” But Franzos did hope that it could at least be made “more cultured than at present,” and there was no way of achieving that except through the increased influence of “Western education.” Since the part played by French civilization in the East had so far produced few beneficial results, “I do indeed have in mind here above all the promotion of German education.” For only German education could reduce hostility among the nationalities of Eastern Europe, bringing harmony to lands which had for a thousand years been torn by ethnic rivalries and religious hatreds. That was its civilizing mission.
While the peoples of “Half Asia” were culturally inferior to the Germans, according to Franzos, they were by no means all alike. He generally distrusted the Poles, idealized the Ukrainians, and patronized the Jews among whom he had grown up. His “love of truth” forced him to concede that there was “many a blemish in the Jewish national character,” although the fault was not theirs but their oppressors’. Any other people suffering what the Jews in the East had suffered would be no better than they, probably worse. “If the Polish Jew has not reached the level which the German or the Frenchman of the Jewish faith has attained, it is not he who should be blamed but the Christian Pole. For every country has the Jews it deserves.” In any case, the only defense against anti-Semitism was assimilation, which, if pursued assiduously enough, would produce the same beneficial results in Eastern as in Central Europe.
Franzos epitomized the attitude of the German Jews toward the Jewish community of the East. There was the consciousness of common ethnic and religious ties, but also the feeling of superiority, of condescension. The Jews of Poland and Russia should imitate the example of the Jews of Germany. They should become less clannish; they should adopt the speech, dress, and manners of the Christians; they should imitate their bearing and conduct; they should remain Jews in religious observance only. Conformity would lead to political and social acceptance, earning them the regard of the Gentile world. There would be less social ridicule, less anti-Semitic malice. The Eastern Jews might even achieve the bourgeois respectability which the German Jews had achieved or almost achieved. Was this not worth the sacrifice of an outworn ethnic identity?
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Steven E. Aschheim has recently published a provocative study, entitled Brothers and Strangers, of the perception of the East European Jew in German Jewish consciousness. Here he establishes a dichotomy between “cravat Jews” and “caftan Jews,” between the assimilated, prosperous Jewish community of Central Europe and the segregated, impoverished Jewry of the East. The former saw the latter only as an ethnic stereotype which remained unchanged for a hundred years. The Ostjude was uncultured and unsanitary, shifty and cunning, obsequious in manner, sharp in business, and superstitious in religion. The image which the German Jews had of him was in fact not very different from that which the German anti-Semites had. He was a stock figure in a vaudeville sketch, with his singsong speech, incongruous dress, excited gesticulation, and dishonest trickery.
Reality served only to confirm this preconception. Not even the experience of Word War I, when for the first time thousands of German Jews serving in the imperial army met Eastern Jews face to face, could shake their ingrained cultural bias. All they saw was ignorance, dirt, crime, and immorality. Although many of them attended the Yiddish theater, where they could readily follow what was happening on the stage, that did not shake their conviction that East European Jewry was hostile to nonreligious forms of culture. They were shocked, moreover, to find that there were Jewish pickpockets and prostitutes in Poland and Russia. In Germany lower-class crime was a Gentile monopoly. In the East there were not only Jewish bankers, industrialists, journalists, writers, poets, playwrights, and actors, but also Jewish workers and farmers, even Jewish pimps and beggars. There was a diversity of economic pursuits, a breadth of social experiences, far greater than the German Jews had encountered in their constricted middle-class milieu. But all of that remained incomprehensible to them. They were able to see only what they were prepared to see: poverty, suffering, corruption, fraud, superstition, and vice. For them cliché had become actuality.
Only here and there, especially after the opening of the 20th century, small groups of German Jews began to discern in the Jewish community of the East spiritual and cultural qualities which had become eroded in Central Europe. In generational rebellion against the genteel conformity of their parents, they sought to capture the intense feeling of ethnic identity which was still alive in Poland and Russia. Some of them were Zionists, rejecting the prevalent adaptation to German life in order to rediscover those unique collective origins which the older generation had tried to suppress. For them the Jews of the East embodied the Jewishness their own culture spurned. Others engaged in a revolt against their parents which was emotional or psychological rather than ideological in nature. Restless in the bland bourgeois environment in which they had grown up, they sought something spiritually more challenging, something which might be found among Eastern-Jews. A few even went native, leaving home to live with the Hasidim of Poland or Russia. They became the flower children of the German Jewish community.
There is a poignantly comic quality about the account of the return of one such youthful rebel to his middle-class home in Prague after a stay in a Galician shtetl. His brother recalls that the father announced, “with a note of horror in his voice,” that the wanderer had just come back. “I understood what had filled him with dread as soon as I saw my brother.” There he stood, “in a frayed, black overcoat, clipped like a caftan, reaching from his chin to the ground.” On his head was a broad, round hat of black velvet pushed back to the neck. He was stooped, his face was covered with a red beard, “and side whiskers in front of his ears hung in ringlets down to his shoulders.” His manner had become as strange as his appearance. He no longer washed his hands before each meal, “as any Godfearing and hygienically-minded person would do.” Instead, he made it a symbolic act, “pouring water alternately on to his two palms from a cup.” He refused to shake hands with women, and whenever he spoke to one, he would turn his back to her. “He said his prayers aloud, in a singsong voice, running round the room in a sort of trance.” Even the kosher food in the restaurants of Prague now seemed suspect to him. In short, the writer concludes, “my brother had not come back from Belz [in Galicia] to home and civilization; he had brought Belz with him.”
Still, German Jewish rebels of this sort, who idealized and sentimentalized the Jewry of Eastern Europe, were only engaging in what the historian James Joll has called “a watery salon mysticism.” They did not really understand it any better than those who saw in it only poverty and ignorance. Both were blinded by ethnic stereotypes and clichés. The truth is that the Germans—Jews and non-Jews alike—clung to their preconception of Jewish life in the East because it helped them maintain a more agreeable view of themselves. Their image of the Ostjude reinforced their feeling of superiority; it served to define those qualities of mind and spirit which made them better. They could not gain a deeper understanding of what he was in actuality without sacrificing cherished assumptions about their own identity. It was psychologically important to them to see only the skullcap and prayer shawl, the dirt and privation, the coarseness and superstition, the servility and dishonesty. A clearer insight might have threatened their self-esteem.
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Yet in point of fact the dichotomy of “cravat Jews” and “caftan Jews” is largely fictitious. It distorts reality. The truth is that in the second half of the 19th century Eastern Jewry entered a period of far-reaching change similar in many respects to that which German Jewry had experienced fifty years before. What emerged out of the process of cultural readjustment was fundamentally different, to be sure, but the Jewish community in Poland and Russia could no longer be accurately characterized by familiar platitudes about caftan and earlocks. Urbanization and secularization had begun to undermine the traditional religious foundations of Jewish life. Although the old faith retained much of its force, it was now being increasingly challenged by new creeds and allegiances. Some Eastern Jews, for example, began to follow the same path as the German Jews, speaking only Russian or Polish, looking and behaving like Gentiles, sometimes even converting to Christianity. If the Jewish soldiers in the German army during World War I had only looked, they could have found in any city or town in the East, among the physicians, lawyers, engineers, and businessmen, assimilated Jews like themselves, Western in dress, manner, and outlook. There were “cravat Jews” in Eastern Europe no less than in Central Europe, sharing the same eagerness to gain acceptance through conformity and acculturation.
More important, however, were the hundreds of thousands of Jews who began to leave the hamlets and villages of the East for the big cities, where industrialization and modernization promised a more rewarding existence. In the teeming slums of Warsaw, Lodz, Minsk, or Vilna, the familiar bonds of religion tended to weaken and unravel. Some of the migrants to urban centers turned to traditional pursuits; they became shopkeepers, tradesmen, peddlers, and hucksters. Others formed a Jewish intelligentsia which sought to create a sense of ethnic identity resting on secular rather than religious values. Most of them, however, became workers in the mills and factories of the rapidly industrializing Russian empire. They constituted a new Jewish proletariat, enduring the same collective privation and responding with the same organized militancy as the working classes in other parts of Europe. They became democrats, socialists, anarchists, or Zionists. There was a sense of excitement, of change, of hope and promise in the Jewish community of Eastern Europe around the turn of the century which cannot be captured by platitudes about “caftan Jews.” A way of life which had remained unchanged for centuries was suddenly becoming modernized and transformed, searching for new forms and responding to new challenges.
Out of this ferment was born a different perception of ethnic destiny. There emerged for the first time the concept of a secular Jewish culture the vehicle of which should be the Yiddish language. Within a generation Eastern Jewry produced a vigorous intellectual movement comprising Yiddish novelists and poets, journalists and literary critics, historians and sociologists, playwrights and actors, even artists and musicians, whose medium may have been universal, but whose inspiration was the life of their community. Industrialization and urbanization, moreover, engendered a new social consciousness among Jewish workers, who played an important part in the political struggles, in the demonstrations, strikes, and uprisings, of the last years of Russian czarism. The overall result was a fundamental change in the way of life of the Jews of Eastern Europe. That change can already be perceived in the works of Sholem Aleichem; it is even more apparent in the writings of Isaac Leib Peretz; and it forms the central theme of such later novels as Sholem Asch’s Three Cities or Israel Joshua Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi. For about sixty years, from the end of the 1870’s to the outbreak of World War II, Eastern Jewry went through a transformation as intense and profound as that which German Jewry had experienced at the beginning of the 19th century.
There were important differences, however. For the Jews of Central Europe conformity had become the road to emancipation. By adopting the language, manner, and outlook of the Germans, they sought to fuse and identify with them. The Eastern Jews, on the other hand, were guided by a different concept of ethnic destiny. To them assimilation seemed impracticable. For one thing, there were simply too many of them. For another, their language, appearance, bearing, and outlook distinguished them indelibly from the Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Rumanians among whom they lived. But most important, they felt too attached to a distinctive Jewish culture, whether religious or secular, to forsake it for political or social acceptance. To them the assimilated German Jews, so un-Jewish in their comportment, with their genteel airs and cultivated manners, seemed faintly comical. What they sought was something different: a recognition that they constituted a distinct ethnic nationality within the complex of peoples and cultures in Eastern Europe.
They were admittedly unlike the others in that they did not comprise a majority in any single country or region. But that did not seem an insurmountable obstacle. After all, there were Ukrainians in Poland, Poles in Lithuania, Serbs in Hungary, and Rumanians in Russia. Why should there not be Jews scattered in various parts of the East, but forming a single separate national group with its own speech, dress, and tradition? In Germany, where political unity and cultural uniformity had become sacred goals, the acceptance of distinct but equal nationalities, whether Polish, French, Danish, or Jewish, was clearly impossible. Here assimilation was the supreme civic virtue. But in Poland or Russia, where cultural diversity was a familiar reality, an autonomous Jewish community with rights and freedoms of its own seemed attainable. Its establishment became in fact a common goal of the Eastern Jewish community in the last years of its existence.
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World War II put a tragic end to both solutions to “the Jewish question.” The Holocaust showed how inadequate either cultural assimilation or ethnic separateness was as a weapon against anti-Semitism. The extermination of the Jewry of Central Europe as well as Eastern Europe is proof of that. And yet in historical memory the two have been treated quite differently. The German Jews have come to enjoy a posthumous cultural renaissance; there is a continuing popular interest in their struggles and accomplishments. The distinctiveness which they had sought to deny has proved a source of strength, a focus of attention. Their destruction as an organized community has eliminated the need to maintain that they were indistinguishable from the Germans. Indeed, the interest in their history derives largely from the perception that they were in reality different, that they contributed something distinctive to the culture of which they were part. The Jews of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, have been largely forgotten or, worse still, reduced to platitudes and stereotypes. They appear now as quaintly pious residents of the shtetl, accustomed to poverty, resigned to oppression, obedient to tradition, loyal to their community, and faithful to their God. Even when one of the classics of Yiddish literature is brought to the stage or screen, the rich diversity of the life of Eastern Jews is lost in picturesqueness and exoticism, in a swirl of beards, earlocks, caftans, and tsitsith. Reality is drowned in filial piety or sugary sentimentality.
How are we to explain these differing perceptions of two Jewish communities which have suffered the same tragic fate? It is clear, to begin with, that the assimilation pursued by the Jews of Central Europe has produced at least one of the results they sought. By identifying with an alien but vigorous culture, they insured that their contribution to it would survive their destruction. To the extent that German thought, learning, literature, music, and art continue to be studied and appreciated, the memory of German Jewry remains alive. And since the German language is familiar beyond as well as within Central Europe, the accomplishments of the German Jews have been immortalized in the cultural life of a people which had scorned them during their lifetime. The Germans themselves, moreover, seeking to atone for the sins of yesterday, are now celebrating the Jewish community which their fathers destroyed. For them it is an act of contrition, a rite of national redemption.
But in Eastern Europe the situation is different. There the determination of the Jews to maintain a culture of their own, to preserve a separate ethnic identity, meant that their spiritual obliteration was the inescapable consequence of their physical destruction. There had been some assimilated Jews, to be sure, who made an important contribution to the cultural life of Poland and Russia, but the Poles and Russians prefer not to dwell on their Jewishness. As for the many more who clung to their historic distinctiveness, they are now forgotten along with the unique spiritual values they had sought to maintain. The countries of Eastern Europe show little interest in the Jewish culture which had once flourished in their midst. When they recall the terrible fate of the Jews, they perceive it as one more item in the long catalogue of barbarities committed by National Socialism. For them the Jewish tragedy is part of the Polish, Russian, or Ukrainian tragedy. Even when commemorating some especially moving episode in the destruction of Eastern Jewry—the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, for example—they tend to politicize and ideologize, ignoring its specific ethnic character. The Jewish community of the East has not only been annihilated but forgotten in the lands where it had existed for more than five hundred years.
In Israel, whose creation their agony helped make possible, sympathy or understanding for the Jews of Eastern Europe is not much greater. The new virile Jewish state sees in them the tragic legacy of the Diaspora, a community crippled by persecution and humiliation. They seem to embody all those qualities—obsequiousness, passivity, dissimulation, and overintellectuality—which twenty centuries of oppression had bred in a people torn from its historic roots. Yiddish, the language of that physical and spiritual exile, is tolerated but not encouraged. A nation restored to its ancient greatness requires a different idiom, the heroic biblical idiom of David and Solomon. Some of the surviving Eastern Jews in Israel continue to use the familiar speech of their childhood, but their sons and daughters have become adapted to a new way of life whose vehicle is Hebrew. In the Jewish state Yiddish remains the language of an exile culture no less than during the period when it flowered among hostile Christians in Eastern Europe. It is perceived as expressing the spirit of resignation of a people waiting to be reborn, yearning for deliverance from Egypt. It appears out of place in the ancestral home of Israel.
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The world of Eastern Jewry has been largely forgotten even in the United States, where most of its descendants have settled. They may still retain fond memories of their immigrant parents or grandparents, who crossed the Atlantic in steerage, passed through Ellis Island, and settled on the East Side to carve out a better life for themselves and their children. But their recollection rarely extends beyond the Jewish experience in the New World. They remember the warmth of the parental home, its hopes and ambitions, privations and achievements, all suffused with nostalgia. They remember the grave paternal piety, the generous maternal bosom, the close community of relatives and friends, the struggling, adapting, learning, and succeeding. This is the great ethnic saga which has been so affectionately told in Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers. But what about the life of those immigrant forebears before they came to the New World? Here the memory of American Jewry stops short. Familiarity with the language and culture of the Jewish community of Eastern Europe is essential for an understanding of its way of life. Most Jews in the United States, however, know little Yiddish beyond a few slang phrases. For them it is only a jargon, pungent and amusing perhaps, though hardly worth serious study. A knowledge of Polish or Russian can also be useful for an understanding of the Jewry of Eastern Europe. But who studies Polish in this country except a handful of young Polish Americans searching for ethnic roots? While interest in the Russian language is greater, those who master it are generally attracted to more glamorous subjects than Russia’s dwindling Jewish minority. A long, important chapter in the history of the Jews is thus becoming neglected and forgotten.
This is the real tragedy of East European Jewry. Its annihilation as an organized community is an unalterable reality which must be accepted. Even the fading of its memory, the obliteration of its values and aspirations, appears to be an irreversible historical process. Its spirit was too distinctive, too reflective of a uniquely Jewish experience, to survive its physical destruction, as the spirit of German Jewry has survived. But at least we should not distort it by caricature or stereotype. We should not ignore its diversity and multiformity, its vigor and boldness, its inward steadfastness in the face of bitter adversity. The culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe has vanished along with the world they had created. But they remain part of Jewish history, indeed, of human history. We should remember them with respect based on a true understanding of what they were. That is a moral obligation which the living surely owe to the dead.
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