German–Jewish Studies: Next Generations 9781800736788

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. German-Jewish Studies for the Twenty-First Century
Part I From the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth Century: Families, Texts, and Religious Identities
CHAPTER 1 Le-Dor va-Dor or Discontinuities? Family Networks and the Transnational Turn in (German-)Jewish Studies
CHAPTER 2 Old Yiddish Texts in German-Jewish Culture: Diachronic Translation and the (Re)turn to the Past
CHAPTER 3 Orthodoxy as a German-Jewish Legacy
Part II Nation, Belonging, and Communities in the Early Twentieth Century
CHAPTER 4 Contested Contextualizations: Relating German-Jewish History to the History of Colonialism
CHAPTER 5 The Place of Yiddish in German-Jewish Studies
CHAPTER 6 Metaphysik der Gottferne: Negativity, Intellectual Communities, and German-Jewish Studies
Part III Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in the 1930s and Beyond
CHAPTER 7 Art without Borders: Artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus and Jewish Visual Culture
CHAPTER 8 Woman, Scientist, and Jew The Forced Migration of Berta Ottenstein
CHAPTER 9 A Global Network and Diaspora of German-Jewish Historians and Archives: Reappraising the Enduring Legacy of German Jewry
Part IV After 1945: Memory, Coming to Terms with the Past, Place, and Displacement
CHAPTER 10 Jewish Mourning in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Tending Individual Graves in Occupied Germany, 1945–49
CHAPTER 11 German-Jewish Fiction on the Holocaust: The Ethics of Narrative Causality in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Disfigured Narration
CHAPTER 12 (Un-)Jewish Musical Spaces in Munich: Past and Present
Epilogue: The Dynamic Relationship of “German” and “Jewish”
Index

Citation preview

German-Jewish Studies

German-Jewish Studies Next Generations

 Edited by

Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wallach, Kerry, editor. | Elyada, Aya, 1977- editor. Title: German-Jewish studies : next generations / edited by Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada. Description: [New York] : Berghahn Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022018483 (print) | LCCN 2022018484 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736771 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800736788 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Germany—History. | Judaism—Germany—History. | Germany— Civilization—Jewish influences. Classification: LCC DS134.23 .G46 2023 (print) | LCC DS134.23 (ebook) | DDC 943/.004924—dc23/eng/20220614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018483 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018484

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-677-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-678-8 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736771

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Foreword Frank Mecklenburg

ix

Preface Gerald Westheimer

xiv

Acknowledgments

xvi

Introduction. German-Jewish Studies for the Twenty-First Century Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada

1

Part I. From the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth Century: Families, Texts, and Religious Identities

Chapter 1. Le-Dor va-Dor or Discontinuities? Family Networks and the Transnational Turn in (German-)Jewish Studies Mirjam Thulin

17

Chapter 2. Old Yiddish Texts in German-Jewish Culture: Diachronic Translation and the (Re)turn to the Past Aya Elyada

38

Chapter 3. Orthodoxy as a German-Jewish Legacy Joshua Shanes

58

Part II. Nation, Belonging, and Communities in the Early Twentieth Century

Chapter 4. Contested Contextualizations: Relating German-Jewish History to the History of Colonialism Stefan Vogt Chapter 5. The Place of Yiddish in German-Jewish Studies Nick Block

79 101

vi | CONTENTS

Chapter 6. Metaphysik der Gottferne: Negativity, Intellectual Communities, and German-Jewish Studies Matthew Handelman

119

Part III. Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in the 1930s and Beyond

Chapter 7. Art without Borders: Artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus and Jewish Visual Culture Kerry Wallach

149

Chapter 8. Woman, Scientist, and Jew: The Forced Migration of Berta Ottenstein Stefanie Mahrer

171

Chapter 9. A Global Network and Diaspora of German-Jewish Historians and Archives: Reappraising the Enduring Legacy of German Jewry Jason Lustig

189

Part IV. After 1945: Memory, Coming to Terms with the Past, Place, and Displacement

Chapter 10 Jewish Mourning in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Tending Individual Graves in Occupied Germany, 1945–49 Stefanie Fischer

211

Chapter 11. German-Jewish Fiction on the Holocaust: The Ethics of Narrative Causality in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Disfigured Narration Corey L.Twitchell

229

Chapter 12. (Un-)Jewish Musical Spaces in Munich: Past and Present Tina Frühauf

248

Epilogue. The Dynamic Relationship of “German” and “Jewish” Michael A. Meyer

269

Index

279

Illustrations

Figures 1.1. Portrait of Samson Wertheimer, 1658–1724. Courtesy of Wien Museum, inventory number 31.035.

22

2.1. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse (Sabbath Rest), 1866. In the collection of the Jewish Museum, New York. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

40

3.1. Samson Raphael Hirsch, before 1889. Portrait by E. Singer (Xylographische Anstalt). In the collection of the National Library of Israel. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

66

5.1. In dem yidishn kultur-vogn (In the Yiddish Culture Wagon). Originally published in Der yidisher gazlen: Illustrated Journal for Wit and Humor, 26 August 1910, 8–9. Courtesy of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives.

107

5.2. Nathan Birnbaum Austrian parliamentary election candidate photograph, Buczacz, 1907. Courtesy of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives.

111

6.1. Correspondence network of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Rudolf Geck (editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung), Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Franz Rosenzweig, Benno Reifenberg (editor at FZ), and Margarete Susman (up to 1933). Figure by Matthew Handelman.

126

6.2. Correspondence network of Benjamin, Bloch, Geck, Kracauer, Lukács, Rosenzweig, Reifenberg, and Susman up to 1925 (labels included for nodes with a degree of 2 or higher). Figure by Matthew Handelman.

128

6.3. Correspondence network from figure 6.2 with labels from nodes connected directly to Lukács and Susman. Figure by Matthew Handelman.

131

6.4. Correspondence network from figure 6.2 divided into seven modularity neighborhoods around Geck, Lukács and Bloch, Kracauer, Rosenzweig, Rosenzweig family, Susman, and Reifenberg and the Frankfurter Zeitung. Figure by Matthew Handelman.

136

viii | ILLUSTRATIONS

7.1. Rahel Szalit, Die Emigrantin als Bardame (Emigrant woman as barmaid), 1929. In Die Frau von heute exhibition catalog, November 1929, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Signatur Nr. 1282/694. Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen 1867, no. 5114. Photo © Knud Peter Petersen, Berlin, used with permission.

152

7.2. Rahel Szalit, Die Fechterin, Selbstbildnis (The fencer, self-portrait), 1930. In Die Dame, no. 9 (January 1930), 38. Courtesy of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

157

7.3. Rahel Szalit-Marcus, The traveling band of beggars. Illustration of Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Fishke, the Lame, 1922. Courtesy of the Klau Library, Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

161

10.1. Caroline and Erna Schneider’s burial site at the Jewish cemetery at Eckenheimer Landstrasse Cemetery in Frankfurt am Main. Jüdische Gemeinde Frankfurt am Main K.d.ö.R., Archivunterlagen. Photograph originally taken by Carl Weiss Fotografische Werkstätte Frankfurt/Main, Courtesy of Central Archives for the History of Jews in Germany, Heidelberg, Collection B1/13 A. 240.

219

10.2. Framed photograph of David Bermann’s gravesite at the Jewish Cemetery Treuchtlingen, August 2009. © Daphna Berman, Washington, DC.

224

12.1. Choir of the synagogue at Reichenbachstraße in Munich with Cantor Saul Schenker in the center, ca. 1946/47. Reproduced by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inventory no. 81061, courtesy of George Kadish/Zvi Kadushin.

253

12.2. Kurt Messerschmidt, Munich, ca. late 1940s. Reproduced by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, inventory no. 2016.412.1, gift of the family of Henry and Inge Oertelt.

257

12.3. Kaminzimmer, Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Photo by Tina Frühauf.

260

Tables 6.1. Network metrics. © Matthew Handelman.

133

Foreword Frank Mecklenburg

This volume marks a milestone that is not to be underestimated. Over the past twenty years, the Leo Baeck Institute has gone through a number of changes to catapult the refugee society into a research library. During the preceding forty-five years, the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, published with the LBI in London, had been instrumental in creating the field of German-Jewish studies. And increasingly since the end of the Cold War, a number of emerging Jewish studies centers around the world trained scholars in this field. The number of young scholars continued to grow, but the number of positions did not increase to the same degree, i.e., the competition has been getting stronger. In 2000, LBI New York joined four other major U.S. libraries in the field of Jewish studies to form the Center for Jewish History, the largest collection outside of Israel of documents and books on Jewish history in modern times. In 2001, with the opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin, LBI was invited to partner with its archives, initially in the form of microfilm copies; in 2008, the LBI started to develop DigiBaeck, digital access to the archival collections, which was launched with a public online event in 2012. In the midst of these landmarks, the LBI in 2007 started to offer an unusual grant to junior-level German-Jewish studies scholars and researchers, as well as other creative talents, to help them over the hump of tenure or to assist them in finishing their film projects, novels, art projects, or book projects. The field of German-Jewish studies, and the history of the German-Jewish experience in general, kept expanding, and many PhDs in history, literature, cultural studies, and other fields were looking for academic jobs. To help candidates of excellence who did not come with the support necessary to cross from junior level to permanent positions, this fellowship—initially called the Leo Baeck Institute Career Development Fellowship, now known as the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship—was established to provide material support for equipment, translations, course releases, conferences, etc., and to signal institutional encouragement for all these endeavors. It is an unusual grant program, and applicants sometimes have trouble understanding how this grant money could be used to help them move up in the field. The generous donor, Gerald Westheimer, a visual neurobiologist who ran his own research institute at the University of California at Berkeley, had a genuine interest in the field of German-Jewish studies since he fled Germany in 1938 and, by way of Australia, finally came to the United States. He had been an eyewitness in Berlin in

x | FOREWORD

the 1930s, and with a great sense of curiosity along with his experience in the hard sciences, he came to inquire at the LBI what the situation was with German-Jewish studies, and the humanities and social sciences in general, and what difference he could make. I remember our first meetings in New York and his inquisitive way of asking questions that struck me as unusual. He was sharp, he was very smart, and he was amazingly curious about a field of scholarship far removed from his own work, but it must have been the trademark of the Leo Baeck Institute that convinced him of the seriousness of the work in which the LBI was engaged. Coming from the natural sciences with very different paradigms, as well as work and research habits, he did not think much of tenure in academia but rather focused on helping young creative people get established, to use his words, which is not necessarily the way tenure is regarded in the humanities. Westheimer’s idea was to support the greatest junior-level talents engaged in German-Jewish studies, not only to make their input permanent—i.e., get tenure and feel secure to investigate the field as they deemed fit—but also to attract artists and writers to help advance their work. Coming from a different academic environment, he asked about dropout rates: would people stay even if their salaries were well below what smart young people could otherwise achieve in finance, industry, and business? Why would anybody be studying and sweating for years and years at close to minimum wage remuneration with few prospects of long-term job security? It took a while to convince him that people in the humanities were interested in other aspects of life, that money was not a prime driver, and that, consequently, a not insubstantial material support grant would mean encouragement that was rare to come by, encouragement that indicated a high level of appreciation for effort and talent. It didn’t take long to launch the fellowship program once the initial points were cleared. Gerald and I first met in 2005, and over a number of lunch conversations at the local diner, phone calls and emails between New York and California, the first announcement went out in 2007, and in 2008 the first grant was awarded. AJS Perspectives ran the first quarter-page ad, which in subsequent years also appeared in the AJS conference program book as well as on H-Net and the appropriate internet fellowship websites. It was an experiment at first on a year-to-year basis. There was no real precedent. And, after a few rounds, it was determined that the idea was valid. The next step was to establish a robust program that would be limited to a duration of twenty-five years, a rather optimistic notion these days, although we are already past the midway point, and it certainly has established a solid track record. This volume demonstrates that the first decade of the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship has produced very good results. It was also important to recognize that the administrative end of the program needed support as well. From its outset, the program was equipped with 20 percent of the annual funds available for all work behind the scenes. In a way, our hope was that other grants would follow this model, since one of the persistent complaints is the lack of permissible expenses, which makes handling fellowship and grant programs hard

FOREWORD | xi

for many institutions. So far, it seems, this career development grant has not inspired other entities yet, but maybe the record by way of this volume will demonstrate the usefulness of this program. In the field of German-Jewish studies, the pool of potential candidates is somewhat limited, although it is larger when you look at conference participation. A main focus of my attention has been monitoring the program books in Jewish studies and German studies: how German is Jewish studies, and how Jewish is German studies? Over the years there have been rather dramatic changes. The annual Association for Jewish Studies conference has diversified and expanded, and lately the integration of themes and figures from the German-Jewish realm has grown, and the same, more or less, can be said for the annual German Studies Association conferences. And it is clear that, like in all other fields of academic studies, the number of jobs is far smaller than the number of people interested in studying the burning questions of such topics as literature; medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary history; religion; economics; sociology; languages; philosophy; art and music; feminism—what else? The approaches are endless. How is it possible to support the top of the competitive range when not all scholars are pampered by prestigious Ivy League institutions, teaching instead at state schools or small colleges that have no money to pay for travel, books, conferences, course release, equipment, etc.? The latter has time and again been the persistent question from our fellows. Can I buy a computer? Can I buy equipment to enlarge copies necessitated by poor eyesight? How should I report my expenses? These questions show that this unusual grant provides support in ways that other grants do not. And when you are a scholar with a young family and little money, these are the types of things that are hardest to come by. I am always happy to answer these questions in the affirmative, which exemplifies a matter of trust on my part that the funds are not being squandered, that the money is being applied to where it is really needed and where no other sources are available. Generosity of support at this career level seems to pay. Studying the applications from the first 12 or so years of the fellowship can shed light on the state of the field. Of the 150 applications submitted over the years, and also among the first 25 awardees, the ratio of women to men was pretty even, with slightly more women. The applications averaged 15 per year, ranging from 4 to 27, but fluctuations did not seem to follow any patterns, especially since advertising and announcements remained the same over the years. Some applicants have submitted repeatedly, and a few eventually received the award after several attempts. Persistence pays. A range of topics and areas of study is also reflected in this volume. Looking at all 150 applications, it seems that a disproportionate number of scholars were in the fields of music, performing arts, liturgy, Weimar modernism, the postwar era, and theoretical or philosophical approaches. Studies undertaken of the interwar period, the Weimar and Nazi eras, were concerned with changing relations between Jews and nonJews—among other topics, of course. Martin Buber has been a widely studied subject, and many applications addressed an astonishing spectrum of aspects of his work and

xii | FOREWORD

influence, though none made the final cut. Post-Holocaust topics constitute a large share of supported projects, including a wide range from postwar justice issues among survivors and within the German legal system, as well as issues of commemoration. Across the board one finds social history studies about gender, class, and ethnicity, and in recent years several projects reach back to the Middle Ages. Religious topics range from the early modern period to nineteenth-century modern Orthodoxy and other renewal processes. The two sides of German-Jewish studies—how German is it, how Jewish is it—are represented by two annual American conferences, the GSA and the AJS. Some candidates come with little knowledge of the Jewish side, which might be seen as an indication of a mistaken perception of the interwoven nature of the German-Jewish project; yet, similarly, other candidates demonstrate insufficient knowledge of the German context. To a degree, the complexities are also reflected in the differing ways that referees on the review committee have evaluated applications, especially as the committee personnel changed over the years. These committee members bring different perspectives from history, literary, cultural, and communications studies, yielding a broad range of opinions, sometimes contradictory, but usually with consensus about the quality and validity of prospects. The vast majority of awardees, as well as many of the applicants who did not enjoy this support, have succeeded in advancing their careers by getting permanent teaching positions, usually by finishing first or second books. When the Leo Baeck Institute was founded in 1955, Siegfried Moses, chairman of the board, outlined the program of the Institute for years to come in the first issue of the Year Book with these words: In recent years it was felt more and more that the era of German Jewry, so irretrievably passed, could only be retraced and preserved for ourselves, our children and the Jewish world at large, if we, the generation that had set out from Germany, would take this cultural task upon ourselves. For, in our minds, the German Jewish scene is still alive and in our midst forces are still available who can present and analyze from their own affinity and experience the manifold manifestations of German Jewry. . . . In order to carry out the tasks of the Institute, a systematic attempt must be made to attract all forces who are able to contribute. Moses presented a “rough outline” of some 50 plus major topics, which by and large foreshadowed what has been produced ever since with increasing nuance and extensions, reflected by now in over 750 articles in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. Other than what were at the time unimaginable developments of the Jewish community in postwar Germany, the outline stands with its first major heading, “The Period since the Emancipation,” divided into two main topics, “The Inner Development of German Jewry” and “The Problem of the Cultural Symbiosis,” each detailed with many subtopics; the other major headings, although much shorter, are “The Catastrophe,” “German Jewry’s Influence on World Jewry,” and “The New Centres of Jews from Germany.”

FOREWORD | xiii

In a way, the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship program has been and continues to be a major facilitator in this effort, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate. Frank Mecklenburg received his Dr.phil. in modern German history from the Technische Universität Berlin. He has been an archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute New York since 1984 and director of research and chief archivist since 1995. He played a lead role in the establishment of the LBI-Archives branch at the Jewish Museum Berlin and the digitization of the LBI-Archives, DigiBaeck. Among his publications are works on emigration history and German-Jewish life before the Holocaust.

Preface Gerald Westheimer

Why would a nonagenarian survivor, at the tail end of one of the many closed chapters of Jewish history, want to sponsor continued concern with it? Here are two reasons for promoting scholarship of the place of Jews in academia, culture, arts, professions, and commerce in German-speaking lands in the era from Moses Mendelssohn to the Third Reich and its aftermath. To be sure, the conflagration ending the era, one of the basest moments in Western history, isn’t about to be forgotten; the Holocaust promises to remain a permanent reminder of how even the most cultured of people can go off the rails. The aims here, however, are different. One of them is to celebrate the achievements when there was, albeit temporarily and uneasily, a confluence of two distinct cultural streams.Towering figures from Heinrich Heine to Franz Kafka, from Felix Mendelssohn to Kurt Weill, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, from Sigmund Freud to Max Wertheimer, even in their time and certainly from the beginning of the twentieth century cannot be thought of as Jews outside German culture any more than as Germans who were not also Jews. One cannot factor out Jews from the world ranking reached by Berlin as a metropolis, by Göttingen as a center in the mathematical and physical sciences, or by Dessau as an indelible trendsetter in the decorative arts. And the disproportionate success, whatever the field they took up, by a whole generation of Jewish émigrés who had merely a pre–World War II German-language upbringing speaks volumes about the unfulfilled promise of roles in their original homeland had they not been expelled. A second aim for continuing and deepening the studies sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute is an attempt to lay bare any fault lines that might have foreshadowed what happened from 1933 on. Even the most thorough knowledge of history does not imply the prediction of the future—the past is replayed in ever newer versions as both farce and tragedy. Nevertheless, knowing now how it all ended, could one have identified telling precursors? What were the premonitions that, if heeded, might have mitigated, perhaps even prevented, the catastrophe? As an example, the vivid discussions that I witnessed as a boy in Berlin between advocates for and against emigration to what was then Palestine—at a time when assimilation was no longer an option but the State of Israel still years ahead—pointed clearly to the ongoing dialogue between diaspora and Israel Jewry.

PREFACE | xv

To the extent that the recipients of the Leo Baeck Institute Career Development Fellowships and their contributions featured in this volume have advanced such aims, they will have accomplished what I have hoped to achieve. Gerald Westheimer Berkeley, California, January 2022

Acknowledgments

All of the contributors to this volume owe a great debt to Gerald Westheimer. We wish to thank him for his tremendous support in the form of the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, granted annually by the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin. This fellowship helped launch many of our careers and major research projects. Many of us have had the pleasure of corresponding or even meeting with Gerald; he has taken a sincere interest in our projects and their place in the field of German-Jewish studies. By way of example, during one visit to Berkeley in March 2019 to see Gerald, we discussed topics as wide-ranging as Heine, Kafka, Goethe, Wagner, Berlin neighborhoods, and the history and exhibitions of the Magnes Museum. We—along with the other recipients of this fellowship whose work is not included in this volume—could not be more grateful for Gerald Westheimer’s generous and personable support. The editors wish to thank Frank Mecklenburg and William (Billy) Weitzer at the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin. They both showed great interest in this volume, and we sincerely appreciate their help and support along the way. Frank played a major role in developing the Westheimer Fellowship program and has worked closely with the fellows over the years. Thanks are also due to everyone else who helped make this fellowship possible. In addition, the Leo Baeck Institute kindly provided financial support for this volume at various stages. As scholars and educators, we remain grateful to the various Leo Baeck Institutes around the globe for their leadership in preserving and disseminating the rich history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. Many different archivists, librarians, and others are deserving of thanks here; Michael Simonson at LBI New York has been especially helpful in the final stages of this project. Also deserving of many thanks are the contributors to this volume, who shared our enthusiasm for the project and provided us with both illuminating presentations of their research and well-thought-out reflections on the field as a whole. They have all worked through the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years, and we very much appreciate their perseverance. Special thanks are extended to Professor Michael Meyer, whose deep commitment to German-Jewish history and culture is manifested time and again in an admirable readiness to support and advance various initiatives in the field, and especially the work of the next generations. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and other colleagues who provided helpful feedback on the volume at different stages. We would specifically like to thank Darcy Buerkle, Abigail Gillman, and Lisa Silverman for their comments on the intro-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | xvii

duction. Finally, this volume would not have been possible without the assistance of several editors at Berghahn Books who have worked with great dedication and professionalism to move this book toward publication.



Introduction German-Jewish Studies for the Twenty-First Century



Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada

Nearly eighty years have passed since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, and the investigation of the German-Jewish past still continues in forms that are very different from earlier periods. Studying German-Jewish history and culture continues to be a worthwhile undertaking, though the underlying motivations have shifted over the years and new benefits have joined the old ones. What is the significance of German-Jewish studies in the twenty-first century, both in academia and in society at large? How will German-Jewish studies look in the 2030s and 2040s? In which directions is the field headed, and what approaches and issues are driving new research? The chapters in this volume reflect on the relevance and utility of German-Jewish studies for the twenty-first century while presenting current trends and directions in the field. It is becoming more difficult to interact with the émigré generation who left Germany in the 1930s or 1940s. We are also keenly aware that the retirement of many esteemed scholars of German-Jewish studies born in the immediate postwar years is looming on the horizon. Those of the following generation (born in the 1960s) have already established themselves as senior scholars in the field, and they have greatly influenced its nature and contours in recent decades. This generation has also experienced tremendous untimely losses in the past few years; in particular, we remember Jonathan Hess and Sharon Gillerman and their work on literature, race, gender history, and popular culture. This volume looks to the next generations of scholars (born mostly in the 1970s and 1980s; members of Generation X and early millennials), who—supported over the last decade and a half by Gerald Westheimer and the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin—will continue this important work of studying and teaching the German-Jewish past. All of the main chapters in this book were written by early to mid-career scholars in the United States, Europe, and Israel who represent the future of German-Jewish studies both in the diversity and interdisciplinarity of their approaches, and also because they will continue working in the field for decades to come.

2 | KERRY WALLACH AND AYA ELYADA

Each chapter in the volume explores some of the reasons why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture matters for the 2020s and beyond. The chapters approach German-Jewish studies from multiple disciplinary and other perspectives, including history, literature, Yiddish studies, cultural studies, musicology, and digital humanities. They thus aim not only to illuminate new and exciting chapters in the history of German Jewry but also to demonstrate the multidisciplinary nature of the field and its potential for enriching our understanding with regard to social, cultural, and political processes in our own times. Given the diversity of possible approaches within German-Jewish studies, these chapters both explore and challenge the parameters of this dynamic field. Some emphasize the shared experiences, common languages and spaces, or distinctive cultural attributes of German-speaking Jews. But others call into question the value of traditional binaries (e.g., Jewish and non-Jewish, German and non-German) used to delineate the field’s main focal points in light of recent turns toward more transnational, global, and hybrid approaches.1 Newer questions of positioning, agency, and activism are central to a number of chapters, several of which ask whether doing German-Jewish studies is a political act in and of itself. In light of the political trends and crises of the 2010s and early 2020s—including surges in far-right and white supremacist movements and a war on European soil—it is not difficult to understand why junior scholars and students might gravitate toward a field that interrogates some of the most problematic issues that still persist today. To be sure, German-Jewish studies as a field has gained relevance in part because it emphasizes both the political stakes and the potential dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, ethnocentrism, and racial tensions. In recent years, the field has shifted to include more multilingual and transnational perspectives. Such pressing topics as migration, refugees, exile, and precarity are at the heart of many projects in GermanJewish studies. The field further allows for a reconsideration of the history of antisemitism, as well as the intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism. It thus operates in accordance with twenty-first-century movements related to decolonization and race, including the Black Lives Matter movement and other antiracism protests in Germany. Issues related to feminism, gender, and sexuality are also investigated in many recent works in the field. Networks among and with connections to (German) Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies. Works in German-Jewish studies also serve as a model for the study of other minority groups within and beyond Jewish history, indicating that these concerns hold appeal for many outside the field. For some, German-Jewish studies offers an example of how to critically examine the internal diversity and tensions that have long existed within European societies. Significantly, some of the topics gaining traction in this field have begun to occupy a new generation of German-language writers and others involved in cultural production. Several with Russian Jewish backgrounds (Lena Gorelik, Olga Grjasnowa, Dmitrij Kapitelman, Sasha Marianna Salzmann) write on behalf of

INTRODUCTION | 3

migrants to Germany, often emphasizing the importance of multilingualism; others, such as Max Czollek and Ronen Steinke, point to recent antisemitic incidents and the rise of far-right parties as indicative of larger problems relating to the notion of Heimat, German identity, and even the German language itself.2 The ever-expanding and often-politicized field of German-Jewish studies is similarly well positioned to address these and other cultural concerns of the twenty-first century.

From the 1950s to the Present: A Brief History of the Field German-Jewish studies emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II as a new, international, and interdisciplinary field of research. Its establishment was marked, to a large extent, by the decision of German-Jewish émigré intellectuals, including Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Ernst Simon, to found a designated institute for the study of the history and culture of German Jewry. It was named after the German-Jewish rabbi and community leader Leo Baeck (1873–1956), the last representative of the Jews in Germany under the Nazi regime and the institute’s first president.3 With offices in Jerusalem, London, and NewYork, the Leo Baeck Institute was established in May 1955 with a twofold purpose: to preserve the cultural and intellectual legacy of German Jewry and, at the same time, to promote critical and impartial scholarship about the German-Jewish past, which at that time was thought to have ended in the 1930s. The second task, to be sure, was not an easy one. As Nils Roemer reminds us, “To these émigré historians as well as to other supporters of the Leo Baeck Institute, the history of German Jewry formed an object of immense personal and intellectual interest”; for them, “the history they investigated represented not simply a distant past but a time associated in their memories with their own lives.”4 Indeed, as Liliane Weissberg emphasized, German-Jewish studies was, for the first generation, no less than “Trauerarbeit, the work of mourning for an irrecoverable good.”5 Some were not only émigrés but also survivors who had experienced Nazi atrocities firsthand. The postwar generation was eager to integrate the Jewish experience into mainstream German history precisely because they believed it essential to constructing an adequate narrative of the German past. Still, the work of early scholars in the field was not merely one of witnessing or memorializing. It also consisted of critical scholarship, one that would later be designated by David Sorkin as “the émigré synthesis.” According to Sorkin, “The émigré synthesis translated the ideological and political positions of the postemancipation era into categories of scholarly analysis: liberalism versus Zionism, reform versus orthodoxy, Deutschtum and Judentum, the ‘German-Jewish dialogue,’ and the ‘symbiosis.’ The methods were primarily Geistesgeschichte, institutional history, and the study of representative figures.”6 Other members of this generation joined German studies departments and contributed to the field in a variety of ways, including through autobiographical works.7

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A noticeable shift in German-Jewish studies came about in the 1970s and 1980s, following the broader changes that took place at the time in historiographical writing and the political landscape. The rise of social history shifted the focus from exemplary individuals to whole population groups, as well as from politics and high culture to daily life and “history from below.” Geistesgeschichte and institutional history gave way to social criticism and to categories of class and gender, which produced entirely new narratives of the German-Jewish past.8 A new baby boomer generation of “post-émigré” scholars, Jewish and non-Jewish, who were trained in the new political and academic climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, challenged accepted notions regarding the course of German-Jewish history, revealed the complexities that characterized the relations between Jews and other Germans, and offered new paradigms for understanding the German-Jewish experience in the modern era.9 At the same time, the study of German-Jewish literature flourished within the newly established field of cultural studies, which tried to remove the boundaries between literature and history.10 As Weissberg asserts, cultural studies “has a critical and largely leftist agenda. Similar to social history, it looks at figures of seemingly minor importance, everyday behavior, and ephemeral events.”11 Not unrelated to these developments, the rise of cultural history in the 1990s put new emphasis on identity formation and on the construction of distinct German-Jewish subcultures, and questions regarding memory, representation, otherness, and self-understanding took center stage.12 Pathbreaking interdisciplinary scholarship spearheaded by Sander Gilman brought into focus the intersections of Jewish and gender difference, with further attention to race, medicine, and psychiatry.13 Driven by these shifts in cultural studies and the new emphasis on women’s history, the study of women and gender entered the mainstream beginning in the late 1990s.14 The subfields of German-Jewish cultural studies and Jewish gender studies are thus relatively new and should not be taken for granted. Four decades of intensive scholarly activity culminated in the four-volume GermanJewish History in Modern Times, a comprehensive history of German-speaking Jewry from 1600 to 1945, published in 1996.15 This groundbreaking work, to be sure, successfully integrated the new directions in German-Jewish historiography. But it was by no means the last word in the field. Soon thereafter, the Yale Companion to JewishWriting and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 opened up additional possibilities for studying cultural texts.16 More recent scholarly approaches, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, discourse theories, and the various “turns” (the linguistic turn, spatial turn, visual turn, affective turn, and so on) have been and still are regularly employed in the study of German-Jewish history and culture, yielding innovative results and complicating our understanding of the German-Jewish past, its cultural products, and its continued legacy. Indeed, in addition to the persistent fascination with the life and work of such key German-Jewish luminaries as Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, much of the scholarship published in and since the 2010s has taken innovative approaches to previously underexamined cultural

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subjects ranging from popular literature, theater, dance, music, sport, film, photography, art, and architecture to other forms of visual, material, and consumer culture.17 In recent decades, the field of German-Jewish studies has seen an unprecedented flourishing, perhaps as a response to the political urgency described above. The field is also thriving in part because of the growing fascination of young Israeli scholars with German culture and because of the gradual breakdown of taboos surrounding the Holocaust and its remembrance and representation. Moreover, connections to the related fields of Holocaust studies, antisemitism studies, and memory studies—and the museums, films, and other forms of popular culture devoted to these subjects—guarantee that German-Jewish studies has a broad, general audience the world over. With an international network of centers, institutes, and university chairs stretching from the United States to Israel, Germany, the UK, and other places around the globe, the current level of academic activity in German-Jewish studies is impressive. A plethora of publications, conferences, graduate programs, and research groups enrich the field with new scholarly products on almost a daily basis, while designated funds, journals, and book series fuel this activity and provide prestigious platforms for its dissemination in English, German, and Hebrew.18 Some organizations (including the Leo Baeck Institutes) and publications maintain a more historical focus, whereas others remain oriented toward literature and culture.19 This proliferation of innovative work in German-Jewish studies has led, in turn, to a very welcome expansion of the field in terms of both geography and chronology. This expansion is consistent with the transformations that the fields of German history and German studies have undergone: at many universities, national histories have taken a back seat to more globalized, post-Eurocentric approaches. While the original “mandate” of German-Jewish studies was the investigation of “German Jewry, in particular in the form it took from the Emancipation until the collapse of the Weimar Republic,” as Robert Weltsch put it in 1955 in a meeting concerning the vision of the newly established Leo Baeck Institute,20 new generations of scholars have turned their attention to German-speaking Jews beyond the borders of modern Germany. They explore the German-Jewish diaspora throughout Central Europe, including Switzerland, Austria, and the Bohemian lands, and they follow German Jews into exile in the UK and mandatory Palestine, across the Atlantic, and to other points around the globe. Moreover, no longer does “German-Jewish history” start with emancipation, nor does it end in 1933. Jewish lives in Ashkenaz, in the medieval and early modern German lands, have gained importance as a research field within institutions and publications dedicated to German-Jewish history and culture.21 The same is true, of course, not only for Jewish lives in Nazi Germany and during the Holocaust but also for the rebuilding of the German-Jewish communities and culture after 1945.22 In 2020–21, the Leo Baeck Institutes celebrated seventeen hundred years of Jewish life in German-speaking lands23—a much broader perspective than Weltsch’s original vision. The field of German-Jewish studies is thus extremely well situated to help German studies find a place in newer history syllabi and curricula.

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Another important and relatively recent development in German-Jewish studies concerns the linguistic boundaries of the field. While the traditional priority of German-Jewish studies has been, by definition, the investigation of Jewish cultural, literary, and intellectual activity in the German language, recent decades have seen growing interest in the intersection of German-Jewish studies with other Jewish languages, most notably Hebrew and Yiddish. Renewed interest in Yiddish led to its exploration not only as part of Eastern European Jewry but also with respect to its place within German and German-Jewish culture, as well as to language-oriented aspects of the interactions between so-called Westjuden and Ostjuden.24 New generations of young scholars, especially those in or with connections to Israel, set out to explore the German-Jewish origins of important segments of modern Hebrew culture and the intricate relations between Hebrew and German in the work of bilingual authors.25 The unique contribution of German Jews to the literary, intellectual, and academic life in the Yishuv and the young State of Israel has also gained considerable attention.26 Two decades into the twenty-first century, the field of German-Jewish studies faces two major challenges: the problem of saturation or overabundance, and the question of relevance and attraction for younger audiences within and outside academia. Despite the “opening up” of the field to new territories, eras, languages, and scholarly approaches, it would seem that finding an original topic for research is nonetheless a difficult task for anyone working in German-Jewish studies, and the feeling that the field is on the verge of exhaustion is not entirely absent.27 An even greater (and not unrelated) concern, however, pertains to the question of relevance or attractiveness of the field for younger generations. Nearly eighty years after the destruction of much of German Jewry, it is less clear who might be interested in the German-Jewish legacy, and why. The deep personal engagement of German Jews who fled Germany and served as both scholars and consumers of German-Jewish studies in the first decades of the field cannot be reconstructed, and the commitment of their descendants to family origins is unsurprisingly dwindling with the third and fourth generations.28 Looking toward the coming decades, the double task of continued proliferation in an already overabundant field and the engagement of younger generations—mainly postmillennial students (Generation Z and beyond) from various and not necessarily German or Jewish backgrounds—remains a concern for today’s scholars. In the Jewish communities of present-day Germany and Europe, moreover, some of the most pressing challenges involve not only confronting racism and antisemitism but also balancing individual and religious rights. How can states that emphasize secularism and universalism also remain as inclusive as possible of religious differences and forms of religious expression? Recent controversies concerning clothing (especially head coverings), circumcision, and kosher and halal butchering demonstrate how complicated these issues continue to be for Jews, Muslims, and other minorities in Germany and other European countries. As a versatile and flexible field, German-Jewish studies naturally lends itself to addressing these questions, often in conjunction with other aspects of minority studies.29

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The values that we have inherited from German-Jewish culture and from its critics and chroniclers constitute an enduring legacy for use by current and future generations. The lessons that history conveys are perhaps most obvious when related to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, but German-Jewish studies has far more to teach us. As individuals and as parts of collectives, German-speaking Jews and their descendants have adopted different lenses for viewing and making sense out of the worlds in which they existed. Many of these have been transmitted in the form of cultural or academic works that hold the key to unlocking insight into these pasts. The ongoing work of German-Jewish studies thus entails discovering, contextualizing, and analyzing such material, and it may also require archival excavation or fresh methods of analysis. With many new research approaches and capabilities, including the digitization of many archives and the use of innovative technologies, the twenty-first century holds great potential for exciting scholarship in the field, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate.

German-Jewish Studies: A Handbook in Case Studies In presenting the current projects of early to mid-career scholars in the field, this volume showcases the continued potential of German-Jewish studies to inspire new questions and to yield original and innovative research. Beyond the adage that every generation must reinterpret the past according to its own perspective, there are several characteristics common to the chapters in this volume, which together demonstrate the vitality of the field. Rather than adhering to more “traditional” topics, such as grand narratives of contribution and symbiosis, all-encompassing dichotomies of assimilation and dissimilation, or the work and thought of well-known luminaries, most contributors chose to look at the lives and works of what might be termed “minor figures” in German-Jewish history. These include academics, rabbis, writers, artists, archivists, musicians, and other respected members of their communities who were relatively well known in their own times and achieved public or professional recognition but were forgotten over the years and largely overlooked in historical research. Folklorist Abraham Tendlau, Yiddishist Nathan Birnbaum, artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus, dermatologist Berta Ottenstein, and cantor Kurt Messerschmidt, to name just a few examples, each present different aspects of the German-Jewish experience and a different form of contribution to the consolidation, formation, and regeneration of German-Jewish culture from the nineteenth century through the aftermath of World War II. The moral obligation of telling their stories and commemorating their achievements notwithstanding, the focus on such minor figures is also important for advancing a more personal and even intimate encounter with German-Jewish history. Through these figures, moreover, the studies in the volume explore important phenomena in the German-Jewish experience, such as acculturation and nostalgia, religious sentiments, antisemitism, the encounter with the so-called Ostjuden, exile and migration, gender difference, loss and mourning, and more. The chapters illuminate these phenomena

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from new perspectives and thus enrich our understanding of the inner lives of German Jewry in the modern era. The focus on “culture as a performance,”30 on the centrality of practices, rituals, and daily life in the shaping of German-Jewish culture, we suggest, is essential for charting new paths for original research, and for presenting GermanJewish history and culture in its full richness and diversity. Despite their largely historical orientation, all chapters in the volume are also committed to present-day challenges and concerns, which they illuminate and ponder via the past experiences of Jews with ties to German-speaking lands. They thus respond to the challenges of relevance and appeal in a twofold manner. The interdisciplinary approaches of the chapters make them highly relevant for other fields, including history, literature, cultural studies,Yiddish studies, musicology, sociology, art history, and digital humanities. The projects collected in this volume present valuable case studies, which future scholarship in all of these fields might explore in greater depth or from a comparative perspective alongside other cases. Moreover, questions regarding the cultural formation of minorities and their relations with majority societies, the balancing of multiple identities, and the experiences of trauma, loss, and exile, to name just a few of the questions central to the German-Jewish experience in modern times, are highly pertinent to the core of present-day scholarship within the humanities and the social sciences in general and are bound to attract the attention of scholars beyond the fields of Jewish studies and German studies. The chapters in this book all consider why German-Jewish studies is useful, as well as how scholars operate and what they do within the field. In the first section of each chapter, contributors share ideas as to how their research is relevant for twentyfirst-century developments both within academia and in general. Here they also discuss what makes German-Jewish studies compelling for them, as well as how their research advances the field in new directions. This is followed by discussion of a case study or concrete example from their own current research. The various contributions focus on a wide array of topics within German-Jewish history and culture, ranging from the early modern period to the present day. The first part of the book explores some of the major transformations German Jewry underwent during the nineteenth century, including the consolidation of religious denominations, linguistic acculturation, and the rise of various fields in Jewish studies. The two opening chapters also look to the Jewish past in early modern Germany, as well as to the engagement with this past in modern German-Jewish culture. Mirjam Thulin presents the story of the Wertheimers, a family of Jewish court factors from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while integrating this story into a discussion on the beginnings of the field of family history among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-Jewish scholars. Thulin highlights the ways in which family history transcends political, cultural, linguistic, and other borders, arguing for the potential of this topic for innovative approaches to the Jewish experience in German-speaking lands. Aya Elyada explores the place of Old Yiddish texts in modern German-Jewish culture. Despite the rapid decline of Yiddish culture in nineteenth-

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century Germany, Elyada argues, early modern Yiddish texts continued to be retold, discussed, and explored in the works of German-Jewish scholars via the media of translation and other forms of rewriting. These granted the Old Yiddish texts not only an “afterlife” but also a rehabilitation, as these once very beloved works were being appreciated anew as literary and historical monuments to a bygone Jewish past. Joshua Shanes’s chapter discusses the rise of Jewish Orthodoxy in nineteenth-century Germany as one of the major contributions of German Jewry to shaping modern Judaism. While previous forms of Judaism grounded in Jewish autonomy and self-evident commitment to Jewish law were no longer viable, they gave way to new religious denominations, including Orthodoxy. The continuity between Orthodoxy’s earliest German formulations and its later expansion to Eastern Europe, America, and Israel, Shanes argues, has become particularly clear in the twenty-first century, as its history of conservative political alliances has reemerged in public view, although now influenced by the rise of Zionism. The chapters in the second part, which takes us into the first decades of the twentieth century, look at various intersections in German-Jewish history: antisemitism and colonialism; Westjuden and Ostjuden; individual thinkers and networks of ideas. Stefan Vogt’s chapter advocates the contextualization of German-Jewish history with respect to the histories of colonialism and racism, without losing sight of the peculiarities of German-Jewish history. Focusing on the example of Ernst Vohsen, a German Jew and a leading member of the German Colonial Society, Vogt explores Vohsen’s position on colonialist politics and ideologies, as well as his reaction to the antisemitism inside the colonialist movement. Nick Block looks at the interactions between German-Jewish and Yiddish studies from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. Looking at data from present-day job market trends, Block points out that Yiddish has institutionally become a part of German studies in North America since 2010. Block presents his own work in the field, on the figure of Viennese-born Yiddishist Nathan Birnbaum, claiming that a current wave of such scholarship signals that Yiddish studies will increasingly come to shape German-Jewish studies. Matthew Handelman’s chapter explores the productivity of negativity in German-Jewish thought during the Weimar Republic. Working in the field of digital humanities, Handelman employs negativity in digital technologies such as network analysis maps, analyzing the structure of interwar correspondence networks among such German-Jewish intellectuals as Margarete Susman, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, many of whom were affiliated with the Frankfurt School. Combined with close reading, these correspondence networks trace the circulation of key ideas and reveal the centrality of overlooked figures in the German-Jewish intellectual discourse of the time. The chapters in the third part trace some of the many paths of German-Jewish culture and knowledge beyond German-speaking lands, demonstrating that transnational and multilingual approaches are an essential part of migration, exile, and diaspora studies. Two chapters focus on women as key figures in German-Jewish history and explore how gender (and, in one case, also sexuality) impacted their lives and

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careers. Kerry Wallach’s study of East European-born artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus explores her significant contributions to Weimar visual culture, including illustrations of Yiddish and German literature that were printed in Berlin. Given Szalit’s success as a woman artist involved with the Jewish Renaissance in Germany, Wallach maintains that Szalit should be considered as a German artist as well as an East European one. Szalit’s subsequent affiliation with the School of Paris points to the need for greater attention to German-Jewish exile culture in 1930s France. Stefanie Mahrer’s focus on dermatologist Berta Ottenstein sheds light on the agency of individual actors within the transnational networks and political structures that emerged for refugee scholars. This relates to a larger digital project at the University of Bern, Switzerland, that visualizes historical data pertaining to the forced migration of academics during the Nazi period. Both Mahrer’s chapter and this project focus on the interplay between individuals, structures, institutes, relationships, and knowledge across time and space. Similarly interested in networks, Jason Lustig’s examination of German-Jewish archives and archivists reassesses the position of German Jewry as centrally located within global Jewish networks. Lustig further considers how the materials collected by these archivists have impacted our understanding of Jewish history, suggesting that émigré scholars and archivists turned diaspora and dispersion into a productive process that gave rise to the afterlife of a culture. In the fourth part, scholars with different disciplinary approaches—history, literature, and musicology—study attempts to commemorate and come to terms with the Holocaust and the Nazi past. Stefanie Fischer’s work, inspired by the field of the history of human remains, underscores the importance that attending to burial places gained in the eyes of German-Jewish refugees in the wake of the war, even in the absence of resting places for most of those who perished. Mourning rituals and requests to tend to graves in Jewish cemeteries, Fischer argues, reveal much about how émigré Jews remained connected to Germany in the postwar years. Corey Twitchell’s chapter applies narrative theory to fiction about the Holocaust, suggesting that manipulating narrative causality enabled German-Jewish writers to create more nuanced, less calcified depictions of both victims and perpetrators. Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel Der Nazi und der Friseur serves Twitchell as a case study for investigating the narrator’s “loose screw” as part of a poetics of disfigurement. Tina Frühauf explores the various spaces of Jewish musical activities in the city of Munich, including the Reichenbachstraße Synagogue, the airwaves, and the building at Arcisstraße 12, which in the 1930s went from the Pringsheim family home to Hitler’s administrative center, and today houses the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Following the spatial turn, Frühauf’s chapter ties space to notions of cultural rebirth and transformation, cross-cultural encounters and collaborations, but also division and politics. In the epilogue, historian Michael Meyer, who has helped shape German-Jewish studies for more than half a century, reflects on the many tensions between Germanness and Jewishness. Meyer suggests areas with room for further study, including Russian and Israeli immigrants in present-day Germany, biography, and different aspects

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of visual and material culture. Taken together, the chapters in this volume not only add new dimensions to the historical narrative of German-speaking Jews but also suggest outlines for present and future research in the field. It is our hope that this volume will contribute to the ongoing interest in German-Jewish studies and related topics, both in academia and among the broader public, and that it will stimulate innovative research also among the generations yet to come. Kerry Wallach is associate professor of German studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She is the author of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and numerous articles on German-Jewish literature, history, film, visual and consumer culture, and gender and sexuality. Her biography of artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus is forthcoming with Penn State University Press. She serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin and the editorial board of the book series German Jewish Cultures (Indiana University Press, supported by the Leo Baeck Institute London). Aya Elyada is senior lecturer of German and German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her fields of interest include Christian-Jewish relations, Yiddish language and literature, and the social and cultural history of language and translation. Since 2017 she has served on the Academic Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and the editorial board of its journal Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry. Her book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, was published in 2012 by Stanford University Press. Her current book project discusses the place of Old Yiddish literature in modern German-Jewish culture.

Notes 1. On these and similar recent trends in the field see, for example, Gideon Reuveni, “The Future of the German-Jewish Past Starts Here,” in The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021), xiii–xxiv; and Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska, “Postscript,” in The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, ed. Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 273–76. 2. On these and other contemporary writers, see Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller, eds., GermanJewish Literature after 1990 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018); and Katja Garloff, Making German Jewish Literature Anew: Authorship, Memory, and Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022). See also Hillary Hope Herzog, Todd Herzog, and Benjamin Lapp, eds., Rebirth of a Culture: Jewish Identity and JewishWriting in Germany and Austria Today (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 3. On Leo Baeck, see the recent book by Michael A. Meyer, Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 4. Nils Roemer, “Introduction,” in German Jewry: Between Hope and Despair, ed. Nils Roemer (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), quotes from 4, 13. 5. Liliane Weissberg, “Reflecting on the Past, Envisioning the Future: Perspectives for GermanJewish Studies,” GHI Bulletin 35 (Fall 2004): 20.

12 | KERRY WALLACH AND AYA ELYADA 6. David Sorkin, “The Émigré Synthesis: German-Jewish History in Modern Times,” Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 531–59, quote from 532. 7. Scholars of German literature from this generation—often omitted from discussions of émigré historians—include Ruth Klüger, Walter Sokel, Dorrit Cohn, and Egon Schwarz. 8. See, for example, the work of scholars including Marion Kaplan, Atina Grossmann, Deborah Hertz, Shulamit Volkov, Robert Liberles, Steven Lowenstein, and others. The new trends of “history from below” culminated, among others, in Marion Kaplan, ed., Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Among the major achievements of the new scholarship is that it spotlighted women for the first time. For an important early publication in this respect, see Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 9. On this shift see, e.g., Weissberg, “Reflecting on the Past,” 22; Sorkin, “Émigré Synthesis,” 532–33. 10. See, for example, the foundational work of Mark H. Gelber, Hans Otto Horch, Ritchie Robertson, Liliane Weissberg, Steven Aschheim, and Anson Rabinbach. 11. Weissberg, “Reflecting on the Past,” 23. 12. Among the pioneering works in this area, one should note George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes, eds., Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 13. See especially Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 14. Significant volumes relating to gender include Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Kirsten Heinsohn and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006); Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Gender and Jewish History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner, eds., Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 15. Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98). Published in German by C. H. Beck Verlag, Munich, and in Hebrew by the Zalman Shazar Center in Jerusalem. On this work, see Sorkin, “Émigré Synthesis.” 16. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1997). 17. Although this is far from an exhaustive list, notable recent works in this vein include: Todd Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Daniel Wildmann, Der veränderbare Körper: Jüdische Turner, Männlichkeit und das Wiedergewinnen von Geschichte in Deutschland um 1900 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); Jeanette Malkin and Freddie Rokem, eds., Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010); Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Darcy Buerkle, Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Jonathan Skolnik, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Katja Garloff, Mixed Feelings:Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Cambridge: Cam-

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

bridge University Press, 2017); Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, eds., Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017); Jonathan Hess, Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Caroline A. Kita, Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); Ofer Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema:The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020); Barbara Hales and Valerie Weinstein, eds., Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020); and Sonia Gollance, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). The best-known journals in the field include the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (LBI London); Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry (LBI Jerusalem); Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem); Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies (Camden House; formerly affiliated with Duke University, now affiliated with the University of Notre Dame); and PaRDeS: Journal of the German Association for Jewish Studies. The book series include Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts (Mohr Siebeck; affiliated with the LBI London); German Jewish Cultures (Indiana University Press; supported by the LBI London); Gsharim: Studies in the History of Central European Jewry (LBI Jerusalem and the Zalman Shazar Center); Studien zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur in Bayern (De Gruyter); and Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature, Culture & Thought (Camden House). The biannual German Jewish studies workshops organized by William Donahue (formerly at Duke University; now at the University of Notre Dame), for example, are more oriented toward literature and culture. Minutes of a meeting organized by LBI London, 16 October 1955, LBI Archives New York, AR 6682, box 6, folder 1. Quoted after Roemer, “Introduction,” 2. Thus, for example, the 2019 issue of the journal of the LBI Jerusalem was dedicated to everyday lives in medieval Ashkenaz, whereas the book series of both the LBI Jerusalem and the LBI London include many titles concerning German-Jewish history in premodern times. See, for example, Jay H. Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jay H. Geller and Michael Meng, eds., Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020). An important milestone in this regard is Michael Brenner, ed., A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), which first appeared in German in 2012 as the unofficial fifth volume of German-Jewish History in Modern Times. As Katja Garloff noted in a review from 2018: “If that work [the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times] originally ended in 1945, the appearance of a new volume dedicated to the postwar era signals both a hope and a conviction: that there is a significant German-Jewish history after the Holocaust” (https://readingreligion.org/books/ history-jews-germany-1945). It is also, we suggest, a clear indication of the chronical expansion of the field up to the present day. Here one should note, for example, the three-day international conference “Shared History” of the LBI New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which took place in December 2020; the lecture series of the LBI Jerusalem, “A History in Many Voices: 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany,” November 2020–June 2021; and the Shared History Project: 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in German-Speaking Lands, published online by the LBI New York in 2021. See, for example, Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000); Michael Brenner, ed., Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Göt-

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); Jerold C. Frakes and Jeremy Dauber, eds., Between Two Worlds: Yiddish-German Encounters (Leuven: Peeters, 2009); and Aya Elyada, ed., Yiddish in German and German-Jewish Culture: Special Issue of Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 10 (2016). See, for example, Amir Eshel and Rachel Seelig, eds., The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), which offers essays in the newly popular field of “German-Hebrew studies,” covering topics from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day; Lina Barouch, Between German and Hebrew: The Counterlanguages of Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); and Na’ama Rokem, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). Here it is important to mention, for example, the intensive work that has been carried out in the past decade in the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the direction of Yfaat Weiss. On this point see also Guy Miron, “Toward a Transnational Jewish Historiography: Reflections on a Possible Future Path for the German-Jewish Past,” in Reuveni and Franklin, Future of the German-Jewish Past, 230. For a different, perhaps more optimistic view on the matter, see Frank Mecklenburg, “Jewish and German: The Leo Baeck Institute Archives and Library,” in Reuveni and Franklin, Future of the German-Jewish Past, 226. See, for example, Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik, eds., Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022). See Klaus Hödl, “Looking Beyond Borders: Performative Approaches to Jewish Historiography,” Journal of Jewish Identities 1, no. 1 (2008): 51–66.

Bibliography Aschheim, Steven E., and Vivian Liska. “Postscript.” In The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, edited by Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska, 273–76. Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. Hödl, Klaus. “Looking Beyond Borders: Performative Approaches to Jewish Historiography.” Journal of Jewish Identities 1, no. 1 (2008): 51–66. Mecklenburg, Frank. “Jewish and German: The Leo Baeck Institute Archives and Library.” In The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin, 221–28. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021. Miron, Guy. “Toward a Transnational Jewish Historiography: Reflections on a Possible Future Path for the German-Jewish Past.” In The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin, 229–37. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021. Reuveni, Gideon. “The Future of the German-Jewish Past Starts Here.” In The Future of the GermanJewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin, xiii–xxiv. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021. Roemer, Nils. “Introduction.” In German Jewry: Between Hope and Despair, edited by Nils Roemer, 1–21. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Sorkin, David. “The Émigré Synthesis: German-Jewish History in Modern Times.” Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 531–59. Weissberg, Liliane. “Reflecting on the Past, Envisioning the Future: Perspectives for German-Jewish Studies.” GHI Bulletin 35 (Fall 2004): 11–32.

 Part I

From the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth Century Families, Texts, and Religious Identities

 CHAPTER 1

Le-Dor va-Dor or Discontinuities? Family Networks and the Transnational Turn in (German-)Jewish Studies

 Mirjam Thulin

Families and their histories are determined by crossing lines. They traverse time because their histories can date back centuries; they pass through geographical spaces and cross political state lines as family members or entire families move from one region or country of origin to another; they transcend languages and cultural contexts with their transregional and transnational constellations; and they even overcome traditional bourgeois life models and styles because they try to integrate new ones into their lives. The history of families is not only a reflection of fundamental human experiences but also often a seismograph of major cultural, social, anthropological, or psychological developments. For historians, family research therefore opens up new perspectives and insights into living conditions and circumstances; they become closer, better understandable, plausible, and describable.This potential alone makes family history a key theme of history in general and Jewish history in particular. In Jewish history, the family has always played an essential role, both as a life model and as an object of research, and this also applies to the German-Jewish realm.1 There are a few families who have been influential and well-known since at least the early modern era. The Wertheimers, who were Jewish court factors and royal financiers for generations, are an example of such a family. The Wertheimers flourished in Vienna in the late seventeenth century and remained significant into the twentieth century. At the heart of the history of the Wertheimer family are the connections that constituted the family and kinship as a flexible network. In fact, if we consider the current understanding of “family” and “kinship,” these networks created a greater family through interactions between family members and individuals outside the circle of blood relatives and in-laws.2 In this way they linked generations to each other, Jewish communities across political borders, and general and specifically Jewish social ranks across cultural,

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religious, economic, educational, and other differences. The networks open a door to a vivid history of mobility of persons, goods, letters, money, and ideas. In this sense the family is an example of how constitutively transregional (in the early modern era) and transnational (in the modern period) Jewish history was and still is. The transformation of the family connections and networks from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the multifaceted role of court factors, particularly their philanthropy and their diplomatic activities for their coreligionists, demonstrate the larger story of Jewish life in the early modern and modern eras. The history of the Wertheimers tells of le-dor vador (Hebrew for “from generation to generation”), i.e., the continuities and discontinuities, traditions and novelties, successes and failures—but none of it in a linear fashion. At the same time, the history of the Wertheimers reflects many stages, events, and entanglements in the historiography of (Jewish) families. Researching the Wertheimers takes one back to the beginnings of Jewish family research around 1900, when studies of this particular family became some of the groundbreaking works in the field. Already at that time, family historians questioned the attribute “German-Jewish.” They soon showed that the field repeatedly crossed, by necessity, national and political borders. Although the Wertheimers originally came from Worms, they became known and gained influence in the Habsburg Empire of the early modern period, which at its greatest territorial expanse included Spain and its American colonies. Because Jewish family life has always been subject to (forced or voluntary) mobility and strict restrictions in the context of early modern European Jewish history, researchers have understood and applied the term “German-Jewish” always in the broadest sense.3 In order to highlight and discuss the many layers and entanglements of a specific Jewish family history—namely the history of the Wertheimers—and the field of Jewish family research, my chapter is divided into four parts. First, I give an introduction to the history of the Wertheimers and the course of their remarkable story in the premodern and modern eras. One focus is the importance and significance of their extensive family network as well as the involvement of the Wertheimers in culture and the arts. Based on the observation that early scholarship on the Wertheimer family coincides with the beginning of Jewish family research in the last third of the nineteenth century, I give a brief summary in the second part of this still underexamined chapter in the history of Jewish scholarship and knowledge up until today and point again to the contributions of German-Jewish history to Jewish history at large. After this introduction to the importance of family studies in Jewish history and in German-Jewish studies in particular, I outline the dominant trends and methods in the field from the beginnings to its end in the Shoah. The final part is devoted to the question of continuity and discontinuity in (German-)Jewish family research between the “older” pre-Shoah research and that of our time. To demonstrate the fresh approaches from different disciplines in this field, I illustrate some current research questions and methods with the case of the Wertheimer family history. I argue for a transregional and transnational approach to family research, especially using the example of the importance of family networks. My primary exam-

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ple, the Wertheimer family, is also intended to illustrate the centrality of the transnational approach for German-Jewish studies in general. Using several examples from the history of the Wertheimer family, I demonstrate that central aspects of family history never took place only in “Germany” or in German-speaking regions in the narrower sense; instead, I argue that a transnational perspective must always be adopted.

Before the Rothschilds: The History of the Wertheimer Family Since the end of the seventeenth century, the Wertheimers have been one of the grand European Jewish families.Their history goes back to Samson Wertheimer.4 Born in 1658 in Worms and raised in his hometown and Frankfurt am Main, he came to Vienna in 1677 with his uncle, Samuel Oppenheimer (1630–1703), a court factor, army supplier, and donor of the illustrious, well-known field marshal of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736). Soon Oppenheimer rose to the position of an imperial court factor (Ober-Hoffactor). Oppenheimer made Wertheimer his representative and contact person in Vienna, especially when Oppenheimer was on business trips. Due to Wertheimer’s outstanding position, he quickly gained access to the Habsburg ministers and the court society, including the emperor himself. In 1703, when Oppenheimer died, Wertheimer succeeded him as imperial court factor and went on to serve under three German emperors: Leopold I (reign: 1658–1705), Joseph I (1705–11), and Charles VI (1711–40). Besides his connections to the imperial court in Vienna, Wertheimer also had business relations with other principalities. Mainz, Trier, Saxony, and Palatinate awarded him the title chief factor (Oberfactor). He wedded his seven children to other court factor families or to famous Jewish scholars and thereby secured his family and company by means of a reliable and widely ramified network of kinship, business, and power politics within the European Jewish community. When Samson Wertheimer died in 1724 in Vienna, his legacy was continued in new ways in this family network. Wertheimer’s career within the Jewish community developed mainly in the first years of the eighteenth century. Even before the emperor named him chief rabbi of Hungary in August 1717, he had been called honorary rabbi of Eisenstadt, Worms, Prague, and Krakow. He was revered as “Prince of Safed” and of the Ashkenazi Jewish population of the Holy Land, respectively. In 1711, the Hungarian Jewish community nominated him as their shtadlan (intercessor). Characteristically, Wertheimer had already made use of his positions earlier to support the interests of the Jewish community. In his rabbinical responsa and as dayyan (judge), he interpreted and decided Jewish laws for Viennese and Hungarian Jewries. Moreover, he spent many resources on charitable activities for the benefit of his coreligionists. He founded and funded numerous social institutions and foundations to support Talmud Torah studies in Vienna and all over the Holy Roman Empire. To this day, Samson Wertheimer is considered one of the most important economic actors of his time and, according to Selma Stern’s definition from 1950, the perfect image of “The Court Jew.”5

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Shortly after Samson’s death, the house of Wertheimer experienced a serious crisis when the eldest son and now head of the family, Simon Wolf Wertheimer (1681– 1765), went broke. By 1733, Wolf could no longer pay his creditors or provide for his family and the many Talmud Torah institutions that the Wertheimers supported. Wolf spent half of his life reinstalling the family business. His last will gives testimony to his difficulties and fights with his principal debtor, the deep-in-debt electorate of Bavaria.6 In the 1740s, although economically weakened,Wolf became the mediator between the Houses of Habsburg and Wittelsbach in the War of the Austrian Succession based on his personal, financial, and political involvements with the highest circles of both parties.7 In addition, he played a principal role in the campaign leading to Maria Theresa’s withdrawal of her decree to expel all Jews from Prague, Bohemia, and Moravia at the end of 1744. These interventions and the intercession for his coreligionists established Wolf’s own high reputation. His father Samson had already become famous for this kind of advocacy for Jewish interests within a greater framework of (non-Jewish) politics and economy. Samson had also stood up many times for his coreligionists years earlier, for example in 1700, when he, together with the court factor of Hanover, Leffmann Behrens (also Elieser Ezechiel Lippmann Cohen; 1634–1714), who was related to him by marriage, prevented the publication of Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s (1654–1704) anti-Jewish work Entdecktes Judenthum (Discovered Judaism).8 These two first representatives of the family, Samson and Wolf, founded and expanded the family company with the business activities customary for court factors at that time, the government bonds, as one would call them today, and the financing of the court household. Samson’s and Wolf’s economic and diplomatic activities and the representative properties of the Wertheimer family and company across the Holy Roman Empire established the fame and honor of the family. It is therefore not surprising that Samson Wertheimer was called Judenkaiser (Jewish emperor) by his coreligionists. This also resulted in the image of the Wertheimers (above all created in anti-Jewish circles) as having had a legendary influence on the imperial house and other European principalities of the time, similar to the Rothschild family some 150 years later. The following generations could only fall short of the achievements of the first heads of the family, especially after the bankruptcy of Wolf Wertheimer in the middle of the eighteenth century. Lawsuits and settlements of the heirs with creditors and debtors lasted into the nineteenth century. After Wolf’s death, the family continued their charitable engagement, employing the ever-expanding family and business network for that purpose. They collected the diaspora donation (halukkah) for the Ashkenazi Jews in the Holy Land, and as main donors they funded the study hall (Klause) in Frankfurt am Main until it was torn down in 1883. Even a brief summary of the complex web of family relations can provide a dizzying illustration of the manifold relations and activities across the centuries and across Europe. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wolf’s sons Isaak Samson Wolf (1709–62) and Joseph Wolf (1720–69) became the founders of significant Wertheimer family branches in Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, and London. Joseph Wolf’s son Salomon

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Wertheimer (1758–1834), for example, was a successful banker in Mannheim before he returned to Vienna, together with his wife Marianne Mirjam, née Oppenheim and widow of Itzig from Königsberg (1758–1836). Their son, Joseph, ennobled in 1868 as Ritter von Wertheimer (1800–1887), served as president of the Jewish community in Vienna for over two decades and spoke up for Jewish interests. He strongly advocated for Jewish emancipation and for the reform of Judaism, not least in his capacity as initiator and president of the First Israelite Synod in Leipzig (1869) besides Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–74) and Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903). The story of Joseph Ritter von Wertheimer shows that the family members—admittedly mostly the men—were capable of continuing family traditions of Jewish intercession and charity. Two things helped them in this regard: not only was the widely ramified family largely active in the trade and credit business, but the family members also remained influential in the Jewish communities to which they belonged. Most of the male Wertheimers were members of the community boards or were leading members of Jewish associations in their respective places of residence and work. Moreover, where emancipation made it possible, they rose up in the local government circles. This commitment and above all their loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy were rewarded with titles of nobility.9 The Wertheimers also continued their manifold charitable activities for the Jewish communities, for example in the local Chevra Kadisha (Holy Brotherhood) of their respective places. This long and colorful family history, beginning in the late seventeenth century and spanning more than three hundred years, shows how the Wertheimers constitute an exception to the short tenure of the European-Jewish court factors and the late arrival of the legendary Rothschilds. Their history shaped European and German-Jewish history and culture for centuries, namely when it comes to questions about (Jewish) economy, kinship, identity, politics, religion, and—crucially—art. In fact, the involvement of the family in culture and the arts gives insight into the memorial practices among wealthy Ashkenazi Jews in Europe from the early modern period to the bourgeois age, and it also continues the family history on a different level. In this context, for example, portraits may show how material objects and images reflected on the glory and splendor of outstanding families like the Wertheimers and their leaders. Copperplate engravings from the Baroque period and later oil paintings serve as an illustration of their status, their self-image, and their engagement with contemporary expressions of standing in society. Since by the nineteenth century the family and its ancestors were well-known, influential, and powerful, it is not surprising that a portrait of Samson Wertheimer was commissioned two centuries after his death.10 Showing him in a three-quarter profile, it presents him with a beard and combed hair, sitting on a chair with big wooden armrests. He is wearing the black robe of a public official, with a white lace collar, and, almost invisibly, an item of headgear. Around his neck, he wears a golden chain of grace with the locket of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. In his delicate hands, Wertheimer holds the attributes of his work: a feather in his right and a paper in his left; before him lies an official seal, more papers, and receipts. In the background,

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Figure 1.1. Portrait of Samson Wertheimer, 1658–1724. Courtesy of Wien Museum, inventory number 31.035.

there are oversized books, which may indicate the Talmud edition he funded in 1722. This painting was based on an older work from around 1700.11 In 1888, Moritz Freiherr von Königswarter (1837–93), a descendant of the Wertheimer family, donated the painting to the Wien Museum in Vienna, Austria. Prior to that, it was in the possession of the Viennese Jewish community. Today the painting exists in three versions and has been shown at various permanent and special exhibitions in all over Europe, Israel, and North America.12 The history of the portrait of the family’s ancestor shows that the nineteenth century was for the Wertheimer family a period of pride and tradition, one of stabilization and regionalization of the business and various family branches. It was also the time when the many descendants became finally and literally innumerous. In fact, the number of the offspring did not shrink, even though the later generations had fewer children. The family’s marriage policy had always been strategic, and this remained so even on a smaller scale. The choice for the sons and daughters (of whom the latter, it seems, still did not have much say) was usually made for outstanding local businessmen or Jewish scholars. Family relationships, social ties of individual family members, and

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the business network of the Wertheimers branched out into numerous networks and subnetworks. These networks show on a practical level the geographical, social, cultural, and linguistic openness of the family, but also the necessarily wide definition of the term “German-Jewish” history. Since the Wertheimer family’s history took place (and still takes place) in many parts of Germany, Europe, and beyond, the high mobility of family members and their networks requires constant consideration of the transregional and transnational potential of Jewish and German-Jewish history. In this context, the social ties of the family and individual family members help us to see beyond blood ties. Then and now, the kinship and business networks of families like the Wertheimers always included and integrated other persons into their “family.” They point to relations and social ties beyond the consanguineal and affinal family, and, therefore, to an understanding of family and kinship that can be called “fictive kinship.”13 Traditional family research has usually followed only blood-related family members and in-laws, but not family friends or neighbors. The concept of fictive kinship, however, includes relations to the family that served as both mutual support and a sense of community and also expanded a certain social framework and control. All these functions of fictive kinship relations are crucial in the history of the Wertheimer family from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

A Gift for the Father-in-Law, or How Academic Jewish Family Research Started While the actual history of the Wertheimer family and its role in German and European history in the broadest sense is significant in and of itself, the research on this particular family was also the start of academic Jewish family research. David Kaufmann (1852–99), a professor at the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest, is considered one of the founders of academic Jewish family research.14 Researching the Gomperz family, the family of Kaufmann’s wife Irma (1854–1905), was his main project for many years.15 On the way to the history of the Gomperz family, Kaufmann published several studies on other outstanding individuals and families.16 His most significant work became, however, a slim volume that he presented to his father-in-law on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday: a history of Samson Wertheimer and his family.17 In this study, Kaufmann vividly reconstructed Wertheimer’s life and legacy. This book made scholarly history, because until then there was no concise Jewish historical family study that could meet academic standards. Kaufmann’s family research was part of a larger movement and a fundamental shift of interest in Jewish studies. By the last third of the nineteenth century, the great history books of scholars like Heinrich Graetz (1817–91) sparked an interest in topics like family history and genealogy. In this context, family history became a distinct field among Jewish scholars who were mainly based in German-speaking countries and adherents of the early academic study of Judaism, or Wissenschaft des Judentums. The

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growing interest of the Wissenschaft scholars in family history reflected the developments in European historical studies at the time. In the Jewish context, the dialectics of acceptance and rejection, acculturation and transformation, which characterized nineteenth-century German-Jewish life, were often seen to entail a loss of Jewish distinctiveness. It was, therefore, these complex identity questions and the constellation of factors, among them the feeling of loss of the sense of family (Familiensinn) and the endangered self-assurance (Selbstgefühl) of acculturated German Jews that led to the growth of Jewish family studies. The year 1913 marked a milestone in the institutionalization of Jewish family history when the academic journal Archiv für jüdische Familienforschung, Kunstgeschichte und Museumswesen (Archive for Jewish family research, art history, and museology) was first published. Sadly, due to the turmoil of World War I, the Archiv ceased publication in 1916 after only three years and six issues.18 The journal was edited by Max Grunwald (1871–1953), a rabbi in Hamburg and later Vienna, who was also an author of several books on local Jewish history, family history, and folklore. Before the Archiv, Grunwald started editing the Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Jüdische Volkskunde (Notes of the Society for Jewish Folklore) in 1898, which was an early forum for discussions.19 Both journals and Grunwald himself in particular were geographically close to both the Society for Jewish Folklore in Hamburg and the Jewish Museum in Vienna, which opened its doors in 1895 and was the first Jewish Museum in the world. Many family researchers were recruited from the supporters, donors, and staffers at the museum. Eight years later, a second attempt was made to set Jewish family research on solid ground. Again, German-Jewish scholars played a leading role in the revival of the research field when, in 1924, the Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung (Society for Jewish Family Research) was founded in Berlin. In 1924/1925, the society launched the journal Jüdische Familienforschung, edited by Arthur Czellitzer (1871–1943). A Berlin ophthalmologist, Czellitzer was also related to leading scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.20 In one of his articles, Czellitzer identified the “vital connection to their family” (lebendiger Zusammenhang mit ihrer Familie) as a benchmark that motivated Jewish family researchers.21 Moreover, as a physician, he was particularly interested in the role of genetics in eye diseases, which he researched on the basis of his patients’ histories. For him—as for many other scholars of his time—genetics and eugenics played a central role for the understanding of “family.” For family research, genetics and eugenics were considered as key factors for the general social and family hygiene and the survival of the Jewish “race,” in the parlance of the time.22 Eventually, and following a contemporary trend, Czellitzer was also the first scholar promoting the more biological term “genealogy” for the field of “family research.” Sadly, this second start of academic Jewish family research lasted for little more than a decade until it was curtailed in 1938 by the persecution of Jews under the Nazis. In a tragic paradox, the near complete destruction of European Jewry brought forth a new interest in Jewish family research after 1945, which responded to different individual and communal needs: memorializing those who were lost by anchoring

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a fundamentally new Jewish present in the past. In addition, the new scholarly interest in Jewish family research resulted from a reorientation of many historians to give greater attention to social history and its actors, the family central among them. It was the Israeli historian and sociologist Jacob Katz (1904–98), more than any other scholar, who gave a new impetus to the field of Jewish family history after 1945.23 Since then, we have learned about the “myths and realities” as well as metaphors and memories of and in Jewish families, their means of “coping with life and death,” the lives and challenges of interfaith families, gender, and family roles.24 Finally, in the 1990s, there was a general revival of Jewish family research among German (and not necessarily Jewish) scholars and nonacademic researchers, from fundamentally new perspectives. Many of them were still driven by the interests that Kaufmann, Grunwald, Czellitzer, and other initiators of the field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries first embraced.

The Changing Place of Family History in (German-)Jewish Studies Over a Century Family history has served as an indicator of shifts and changes in categories, concepts, and paradigms of (German-)Jewish studies. After the Shoah, it has not been easy to connect to previously laid foundations in family research, especially because of their almost complete destruction. Moreover, as Paul Joseph Diamant (1887–1966), one of the early family historians, lamented already in 1912, family history as a field of inquiry remained (and still remains) in the shadow of the great topics in Judaic and Jewish studies, such as rabbinical literature and history, Enlightenment and Haskalah, and later also Zionism, the Shoah, and World War II. This insight, too, is exemplified by the case of the Wertheimer family, because even today we have no better or more profound study on the Wertheimers than David Kaufmann’s slim volume from 1888, suggesting that there is important work yet to be done. In the case of the Wertheimers and other families who had their heyday mainly in the premodern period, this finding reflects the current state of early modern and modern family research in Jewish studies in general and German-Jewish studies in particular. In the many biographies, including family biographies, that are published every year, chapters on the early modern era are mostly rather short—if they exist at all. There is a strong tendency in family history in general and also in Jewish family history whereby researchers choose to start their studies during or after the emancipation era and, therefore, consider only the modern period.25 Often the reason for this is a lack or shortage of sources dating to before 1800. Early modernists are typically thrown back to the wealthy and influential families like the Jewish court factor families or the descendants of great rabbis, because if anyone appears in regional and state archives, it is such elite figures. Moreover, it was these families rather than non-elite actors who were able to preserve their documents through the turmoil of the centuries.

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In this context, the early, mostly German-language research from the decades preceding the Shoah is a treasure for family historians today. These early historians showed that the intense engagement with families is a rich, colorful, and thought-provoking field. They focused on the written material from private collections and the recently established archives; they interviewed family members or Jewish officials about the families’ histories; and some scholars like Arthur Czellitzer gathered information through newly created questionnaires and patient records. It is, therefore, not surprising that these scholars from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on the most recent decades and centuries of their time, which scholars today call the early modern era. While the source material these scholars collected was mostly destroyed during the Shoah, their studies continue to inform today’s research, despite the profoundly different circumstances that shape such research. The fundamental transformations and ruptures in modern Jewish history, the vastly changed intellectual and political contexts, and the more mundane questions of professional training are key factors that have influenced the development of Jewish family research over the century between its institutional origins and its practice today, making for both continuities and discontinuities. Scholars of early Jewish Studies, in Germany in particular, worked under great pressure. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the widespread hatred of Jews was more and more influenced by racist theories and, since the 1880s, became known as “antisemitism.” A strong antisemitic movement soon also encompassed European academia. Supposedly scholarly works promoted antiJewish views and crude theories of race and capitalism, especially in the field of economic history and national economy. Full of prejudice, these publications often referred pejoratively to Jews in general and to certain Jewish families like the Rothschilds and the Itzigs in particular.26 In their efforts to refute false, incorrect, and incomplete research, Jewish scholars turned to specific aspects of Jewish history and family studies such as how capital was accumulated in specific families. Countering the scientific language of antisemitic scholarship, Jewish historians generated and analyzed statistical questionnaires; they examined aspects of social hygiene, the heredity of diseases and genetics, local histories and family trees, and lists of book and journal subscribers, as well as reasons for ennoblements. In the 1920s and 1930s, the German-speaking scholarly forum of the journal Jüdische Familienforschung, edited by Czellitzer, promoted these topics and tried to create counternarratives and methods. Therefore, both the focus and the studies themselves were shaped by a strong apologetic tone. They emphasized the integration and success of individual Jews and Jewish families and underlined the settledness and health of the Jewish “race” in their respective national societies. When it came to practicing Jewish family research, the backgrounds of early researchers and the subsequent professionalization of the field has had a strong impact on the topics, methods, sources, and questions that occupied researchers both more than a hundred years ago and today. Even in Germany, where Jewish family research was quite a flourishing field until the Shoah, it still led a niche existence or, to put it another way, was an affair of the heart for amateur historians. Until the 1930s, only a few trained and

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full-time historians made family studies their exclusive focus, as most historians were busy educating rabbis at the seminaries or were rabbis themselves. Therefore, Jewish family researchers were typically trained in medicine and other natural sciences, architecture, or the arts, and in their free time they made family history a favorite hobby. After 1945, Jewish studies was finally incorporated into university curricula. Subsequently, research in the academic Jewish context—mostly in history and cultural and literary studies—shifted again. Narratives in family studies, especially in qualification works, were (and still are) obliged to go beyond prosopography and storytelling. Instead, they need to make clear why family research in general and the history of Jewish families in particular are relevant today and develop innovative approaches and questions. In addition, despite the fundamentally interdisciplinary approach of family research, a clear analytical, systematic, and methodological approach is required. Parallel to these developments, there is still family research undertaken by amateur historians, who in their free time—in a completely different, much more informal way—work on and publish their research.27

Le-Dor va-Dor or Discontinuities: Old and New Perspectives in (German-)Jewish Family History Having become a subfield of Jewish studies at large, the interdisciplinary field of Jewish family history has been subject to changing research trends in history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnography in recent years. Moreover, diverse lifestyles and new family models such as building families with the help of adoption and reproductive medicine as well as LGBT families challenge the traditional understanding and perception of “the” Jewish family. These developments add new topics and types of sources to the already large portfolio of Jewish family research, which created many original works and contributed new insights for social and cultural family history. Therefore, one should ask, which are the old or rather traditional research questions on the one hand, and which are the new or fresh approaches to family history on the other? In summary, the “old” approaches and methodologies that guided scholars before the Shoah included the search for source material, the reconstruction of the lives of the families and individual members, and the creation of reliable family trees. Moreover, a justification of the significance of the family or individual members for local histories was always a focus of research. Traditional research was interested in the roles of the families in the economic realm of a certain region or state as well as in the processes of modernization such as by the Haskalah, emancipation, and religious reform. A brief look at concrete studies can illustrate the features of the more traditional topics and methods of family research. Using these as a foil brings into clearer relief new approaches in family history that determine research today. Existing works on the Wertheimer family, for example, immediately reveal that in recent years the history of material objects has become a new thematic and methodological focus in family studies

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too. Traditional research before the Shoah rarely paid much attention to the objects and images that belonged to the families, which are today either still in private ownership or in museum, archive, and congregational collections. At most, these objects served as illustrations in books and museum catalogues or were shown at exhibitions and in congregational entrance halls. The history of the objects and the historiography connected to it, however, brings family history to a new level and connects it to the growing field of provenance research.28 The abovementioned 1700 painting of Samson Wertheimer, for example, offers a remarkable and yet unknown story of an object. Due to hitherto unexplained circumstances, it came to Budapest. After the Shoah, the remaining descendants of the family were told by Hungarian officials for decades that the painting had been destroyed during the war. However, after 1989 it reappeared and was returned to the family.29 The story of this portrait alone reveals the productive and exciting combination of family history and provenance history issues. Networks and network theories are another recent focus within the humanities that raises new perspectives and questions for family studies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers driven by anti-Jewish prejudices attempted to prove the rootlessness and untrustworthiness of “the” Jews by pointing to the great mobility and transregional connections of Jewish families. For those researchers, this was proof that Jewish families and Jews as a race and a people completely lacked the relationship to “soil” (Boden) and “clod” (Scholle). In response to such depictions, early Jewish historiography identified the uncertain legal situation of Jews and the fragile living conditions as a reason for the high mobility and networking. Thanks to the great interest in networks and network theories today, these “old” questions are being considered anew. In recent decades, scholars have begun to ask how Jewish families managed to stay influential and respected over a long time period and in various places. Moreover, the connections of a family and their functions both inside and outside the Jewish community became research questions, and the politics of Jewish intercession (Shtadlanut) and the involvement of certain families in local and imperial politics gained more attention.30 Current research understands families’ mobility and networks as forms of flexibility, shelters of resilience, and openness to new developments. In the Wertheimer family, for example, Samson’s oldest son, Wolf Wertheimer, became a networker and mediator between Austria and Bavaria during the War of the Austrian Succession.31 His actions may have influenced diplomatic and personal decisions of the warring dynasties, and can thus shed light on how the official but also the “shadow” or “backroom” diplomacy and political networks worked in the early modern period. Related to the topic of mobility and networks, the history of a family’s resources, occupation, work, and business promises new insights. In contrast to the research in the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, the fresh approaches to topics like “Jews” and “economy” today go far beyond the antisemitic preoccupation with this issue on one side and the apologetic refutation of a genuinely “Jewish” capitalism on the other. Instead, scholars critically reflect on “old” research questions and approaches, their contexts, and their impacts.32 Moreover, current research is interested

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in how a family operated as a network. How was a family connected to other families and firms, and to economic and philanthropic networks? And (how) was the heritage— including not only financial but also social and cultural capital—continued after the death of the head of the family? Did inheritance disputes arise? When, for example, Wolf Wertheimer married Lea Eleonora Oppenheimer (1695–1742), he combined the Wertheimer and Oppenheimer empires, at that time the two major networks of economy and kinship in Central and Eastern Europe. The heritage was for him both a blessing and a great responsibility. Under his leadership, the house of Wertheimer went broke.The process of the restoration of the family business, however, gives a fascinating insight not only into how to rehabilitate a company in the early modern period but also into the social and official interaction with Jews at the royal administrations and different courts of several German states at that time. Finances also played an important role within the families of the Jewish court factors themselves, because usually the head of the family was responsible not only for the business but also for wedding his children and other minor family members beneficially. The mutual responsibility and personal connections between the family members were also part of the relations and gendered roles that traditional (Jewish) family research acknowledged but did not analyze in detail. These topics, too, have only been raised and analyzed as research questions since the 1960s.33 The social placement of the children, the particular yichus (pedigree or social status) a family had or could gain, and the preservation or loss of the status played an important role within the families and in alliances between families, especially in the early modern era. These considerations relate to issues of marriage and married life in all aspects. Looking at Samson Wertheimer and his family, it becomes clear that he was a self-made man who gradually established and secured his business and family in Vienna. But what was life like in the Wertheimer household? What were the roles of men and women in the families? The early modern court factors had a large household with servants, relatives, and others, which found protection under the court factor privilege. The interaction of these many individuals and social statuses has not yet been studied, at least not for these households. Last but not least, what was the role of (Jewish) religious tradition in the families? Are there any notes about behavior breaching Halakhah that played a role in the earlier or later family tradition or outside the family? These questions already occupied the older family research, but not systematically. Instead, in the older works one can usually find anecdotes in additional studies, outsourced from the main works, hidden in footnotes or unproven conjectures and insinuations about religious observance or deviance in Jewish families. For the Wertheimer family, we have sources that tell of how Wolf Wertheimer enjoyed royal amusements of the time and acted against halakhic rulings.34 For example, he went hunting during the Jewish high holidays with senior officials and dignitaries, including the celebrated warlord Prince Eugene of Savoy. Evidently, this behavior caused some irritation and incomprehension among contemporaries. When it comes to the modern period, the topic of religion involves, besides

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discussions of observance and lifestyle, the question about how families dealt with intermarriage and conversions of family members. At least for the Wertheimer family, from whose ranks many male members were active in Jewish community offices in German-speaking areas, these questions have not even begun to be answered.

Conclusion German-Jewish scholarship was formative in the founding and development of academic Jewish family research. The third generation of scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums played a pioneering role in the field. The first work on the history of the Wertheimer family, which David Kaufmann published in 1888, was the starting signal for academic Jewish family history. Consequently, the story of the Wertheimers here illustrates the special, largely German-Jewish academic history of the field. Historians like Kaufmann, Max Grunwald, and later Paul Diamant and Arthur Czellitzer—from today’s perspective they represent the “older” research—established and developed the field and defined its key questions and methods. Their main focus was on the search for sources, the reconstruction of biographies and family trees, and the study of the role of Jewish families in the economy and society. Building on the works and findings of German-speaking scholars before the Shoah, Jewish family research had to master a particularly difficult and fragile transition into the time and research after 1945. The past few decades have brought fresh analytical and systematic approaches from ethnology and anthropology and other disciplines, from various research contexts such as the United States and Israel, and from research fields such as gender studies and educational research, all of which have enriched family studies and made it a multifaceted, interdisciplinary undertaking with a broad scope and great potential beyond its own topics. German-Jewish studies as a field is not excluded from this development. Here, too, family history research and genealogy form a field of inquiry at the intersection of the key topics in modern social, cultural, everyday, and religious history. Like no other field in history, Jewish family research—either “le-dor va-dor,” implying continuity, or as discontinuities, mainly marked by the rupture of the Shoah—can tell us about the minutiae of family experiences. Although family studies have changed considerably, they have resumed visions and tendencies from one hundred years ago, such as the connection of historical research with the biological sciences.35 This subject-related connection can still be seen today, not least in German-Jewish studies. As anyone who has ever set foot on the premises of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York can testify, the “Jewish family” has taken on immense new importance over the past decades, due to both the Shoah and the impulse to preserve the memory of roots that were cut off, but also because of broader developments to locate present identities by relating them to the past, real or imagined. Visitors to the Leo Baeck Institute may also notice the divide between amateur and academic researchers of Jewish genealogies and family histories. Probably the former

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group may actually be more open to another development propelling Jewish family research: the availability of genetic testing as a way to identify biological family lineages beyond traditional historical sources such as community registers and other written documents.36 Recent developments at the intersection of the natural sciences and the humanities would allow such approaches to inform the scholarship of academic historians too, bridging the gap between humanities and natural sciences as well as between amateur and professional historians of the Jewish family. This would, in a way, mean a return to the beginnings of (academic) Jewish family research. Despite the doubts about the value of genetic testing for genealogical research on the part of academic family historians, they have benefited particularly from the digitization of (Jewish) archives in recent years and decades.37 This quick and convenient access to sources and the virtual interlinking of collections facilitates a smooth research process. Such accessibility not only saves time and research work but also opens up a new perspective on well-known personalities in German-Jewish history. Family contexts become clearer, and more recent research questions such as gender or childhood aspects can be reevaluated or addressed for the first time. Beyond the general methodological developments in the field of family studies, Jewish family research should be understood as a key topic of German-Jewish studies in two ways. Through its content, it sheds light on the state and history of the discipline of Jewish studies, especially its ramifications and creative designs at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when pioneering figures in the field were mainly German-Jewish scholars. In addition to this scientific-historical level, family research also literally shows the limits of the concept of German-Jewish studies, if the term is applied too narrowly: German-Jewish studies must include all German-speaking Jewries, including the stories and legacies of the descendants of German-speaking Jews who maybe did not (or do not) speak German or do not live in Germany or Europe anymore. Thus, German-Jewish studies must be understood as genuinely both local and regional but also as transregional and transnational. This research field transcends geographical areas and political borders, but it also transcends language borders. This realization alone can be a hallmark of a new and newly relevant approach to German-Jewish studies in general and (German-) Jewish family studies in particular. Mirjam Thulin is an associated researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz and teaches at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2019–20, she was a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University, and in 2020–21 at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in 2011 from Leipzig University. Her first book was Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst: Ein jüdisches Gelehrtennetzwerk im 19. Jahrhundert (Kaufmann’s news service: a Jewish scholarly network in the nineteenth century; Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). Among her recent publications is “Instituting Transnational Jewish Learning: The Emergence of Rabbinical Seminaries in the Nineteenth Century” in PaRDeS (2021).

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Notes 1. In Jewish history, the entries in the relevant encyclopedias show diverse definitions and foci of the subject: Louis Isaac Rabinowitz and Anson Rainey, “Family,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 6:690–95; ChaeRan Freeze, “Family,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2010), retrieved 8 December 2021 from https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Family. The most recent publications on the subject include: Steven M. Cohen and Paula E. Hyman, eds., The Jewish Family: Myths and Realities (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986); David Kraemer, ed., The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Sabine Hödl and Martha Keil, eds., Die jüdische Familie in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Philo, 1999). Furthermore, see: Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Shaul Stampfer, “Was the Traditional East European Jewish Family in the Recent Past Patriarchal?” in Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, ed. Shaul Stampfer (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), 121–41; Jonathan Boyarin, Jewish Families (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 2. Recent publications that promote a wider understanding of “family” include: David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Developments (1300–1900) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Christopher H. Johnson, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Francesca Trivellato, eds., Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean, eds., Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Lyndan Warner, ed., Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2018). 3. This claim of a wide understanding of the term “German-Jewish” has been made by many researchers, among them the authors in the volume: Elke-Vera Kotowski, ed., Das Kulturerbe deutschsprachiger Juden: Eine Spurensuche in den Ursprungs-,Transit- und Emigrationsländern (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenburg, 2015). 4. On the significance of the Wertheimers, see Mirjam Thulin, “Wertheimer,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 28 vols. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2020), 27:858–59. 5. Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1950). 6. Wolf’s testament has been edited and published as Max Grunwald, “Das Testament Wolf Wertheimers,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für JüdischeVolkskunde 17 (1914): 13–29, 55–61. 7. Barouh Mevorah, “The Imperial Court-Jew Wolf Wertheimer as Diplomatic Mediator (during the War of the Austrian Succession),” Scripta Hierosolymitana 23 (1972): 184–213. 8. The most recent publications on this subject are: Stefan Rohrbacher, “‘Gründlicher und wahrhaffter Bericht’: Des Orientalisten Johann Andreas Eisenmengers Entdecktes Judenthum (1700) als Klassiker des ‘wissenschaftlichen’ Antisemitismus,” in Reuchlin und seine Erben: Forscher, Denker, Ideologen und Spinner, ed. Peter Schäfer and Irina Wandrey (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2005), 171– 88; Mirjam Thulin, “Jewish Families as Intercessors and Patrons: The Case of the Wertheimer Family in the Eighteenth Century,” Jewish Culture and History 19 (2018): 41–43. 9. Hanns Jäger-Sunstenau, Die geadelten Judenfamilien im vormärzlichen Wien (Wien: Universitätsbibliothek, 1980) (typoscript); Kai Drewes, Jüdischer Adel: Nobilitierungen von Juden im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013). 10. Painting of Samson Wertheimer, nineteenth century, artist unknown, preserved at the Wien Museum (Inv. No. 31.035), Vienna, Austria. The Wien Museum holds another copy of the portrait that shows Wertheimer without a chain of grace (Wien Museum, Inv. No. 2327). It remains un-

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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known who commissioned the paintings. Most likely these were descendants of the family, who were probably also active members at the board of the Viennese Jewish community. In the cases of both paintings, one from ca. 1700 and the other from the nineteenth century, the artists are unknown. Today the original from ca. 1700 is owned by the Moller family in Israel, who trace their family history back to Samson Wertheimer. The best reproduction of the original 1700 painting can be found in Vivian B. Mann and Richard I. Cohen, eds., From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600–1800 (Munich: Prestel, 1996), without pagination. The painting of Samson Wertheimer, nineteenth century, artist unknown, from the holdings of the Wien Museum (Inv. No. 31.035),Vienna, Austria, is a permanent loan to and on display at the permanent exhibition at the Austrian Jewish Museum Eisenstadt/Burgenland, Austria. A copy of this painting is also shown at the permanent exhibition of the Museum Judengasse in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. For an overview of the various terminologies, see Margaret Nelson, “Fictive Kin, Families We Choose, and Voluntary Kin: What Does the Discourse Tell Us?” Journal of Family Theory & Review 5 (2013): 259–81. Paul J. Diamant and Arthur Czellitzer also presented Kaufmann as one of the pioneers of family research, cf. Paul Joseph Diamant, “Sinn und Zweck der jüdischen Familienforschung,” Archiv für jüdische Familienforschung, Kunstgeschichte und Museumswesen 1 (1912): 3; Arthur Czellitzer and Leon Julius Silberstrom, “Geneaologie,” in Jüdisches Lexikon, ed. Georg Herlitz and Bruno Kirschner, 5 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1928), vol. 2, col. 1010. It should be noted that the abbreviation of Czellitzer’s coauthor is “L.Z.” There is, however, no author by this abbreviation listed in any of the five volumes of the Jüdisches Lexikon. Therefore, I believe that there was a typo, and the abbreviation should be read as “L.S.,” which suggests Leon Julius Silberstrom as the coauthor. Silberstrom was a Berlin chemist, who wrote several entries in the Jüdisches Lexikon. On Kaufmann’s works in family history, see Mirjam Thulin, Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst: Ein jüdisches Gelehrtennetzwerk im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2012), 114–21. One example is the biography of Rabbi Yair Hayim Bacharach (1639–1702), an ancestor of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), see: David Kaufmann, R. Jair Chajjim Bacharach (1638–1702) und seine Ahnen (Trier: Mayer, 1894). David Kaufmann, Samson Wertheimer, der Oberhoffactor und Landesrabbiner (1658–1724) und seine Kinder (Vienna: F. Beck, 1888). A large part of the journal is accessible online, retrieved 8 December 2021 from https://archive .org/details/judischefamilien. From 1905, the journal was continued as Mitteilungen zur jüdischen Volkskunde: Organ der Gesellschaft für JüdischeVolkskunde in Hamburg und der Gesellschaft für Sammlung und Konservierung von Kunst- und Historischen Denkmälern des Judentums in Wien (Notes on Jewish folklore: Organ of the Society for Jewish Folklore in Hamburg and the Society for Collection and Conservation of Art and Historical Monuments of Judaism in Vienna). The journal’s location in two associations was the result of Grunwald’s move from Hamburg to Vienna. The Mitteilungen was discontinued in 1929. The new series of the journal from 1905 is fully accessible at http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ cm/periodical/titleinfo/2638044?query=Mitteilungen%20volkskunde (retrieved 8 December 2021). From 1920, Crzellitzer called his family name Czellitzer. The other part of his family stayed with the name Crzellitzer. Most recently on Czellitzer’s life and legacy, see: Mirjam Thulin, “Arthur Czellitzer (1871–1943) and the Society for Jewish Family Research,” PaRDeS 26 (2020): 29–42. Czellitzer and Silberstrom, “Geneaologie,” col. 1009. On this context, see Veronika Lipphardt, Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über “Rasse” und Vererbung 1900–1935 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008), 140–41, 207–10; Bernd Gausemeier, “‘Auf der Brücke zwischen Natur- und Geschichtswissenschaft’: Ottokar Lorenz und die Neuerfindung der Genealogie um 1900,” in Wissensobjekt Mensch: Praktiken der Human-

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23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

wissenschaften im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Florence Vienne and Christina Brandt (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos 2008), 155–56; Bernd Gausemeier, “Squaring the Pedigree: Arthur Czellitzer’s Ventures in Eugenealogy,” PaRDeS 26 (2020): 43–50. Jacob Katz, “Family, Kinship, and Marriage among Ashkenazim in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Jewish Sociology 1 (1959): 4–22; Jacob Katz, “Marriage and Sexual Behavior at the End of the Middle Ages,” Zion 10 (1945): 21–54 (Hebrew). The following list names just a few family-related topics and works from recent years: Cohen and Hyman, Jewish Family; Kraemer, Jewish Family; PeterY. Medding, ed., Coping with Life and Death: Jewish Families in the Twentieth Century (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1998); Boyarin, Jewish Families; Samira K. Mehta, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Gerdien Jonker, “Etwas hoffen muß das Herz”: Eine Familiengeschichte von Juden, Christen und Muslimen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018). One of the most recent family histories created in German-Jewish studies is Sebastian Panwitz and Peter Schüring, eds., Das Haus Kranich: Die Privatbankiers von Mendelssohn & Co. (1795–1938) (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2018). On this context and mindset, with various examples, see Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Nicolas Berg, ed., Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900: Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011). On this aspect, see Frank Mecklenburg, “Family History and the Leo Baeck Institute,” PaRDeS 26 (2020): 51–57. See, for example, the study on the Thyssen family as art collectors: Johannes Gramlich, Die Thyssens als Kunstsammler: Investition und symbolisches Kapital (1900–1970) (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015). I wish to thank Orna and Eitan Moller, Israel, descendants of Samson Wertheimer, for their account of these events and for their continued interest in my research project on the history of the Wertheimer family. For example, see Mirjam Thulin and Björn Siegel, “Transformations and Intersections of Shtadlanut and Tzedakah in the Early Modern and Modern Period,” Jewish Culture and History 19 (2018): 1–7; Thulin, “Jewish Families as Intercessors and Patrons.” Mevorah, “Imperial Court-Jew Wolf Wertheimer”; Thulin, “Jewish Families as Intercessors,” 44–46. Karp, Politics of Jewish Commerce; Berg, Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900. In fact, this kind of research began with Jacob Katz and essays like “The Semineutral Society,” in Out of the Ghetto:The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 42–56, 229–31. David Kaufmann noted such insights, but only in a supplement booklet, cf. David Kaufmann, Urkundliches aus dem Leben Samson Wertheimers (Budapest: Carl Konegen, 1891), 97–98. In academia, some researchers see the field of “genetic history” as a challenge for the historical sciences; see Elsbeth Bösl and Jörg Feuchter, “Genetic History—Eine Herausforderung für die Geschichtswissenschaften,” Neue Politische Literatur 64 (2019): 237–68. For one of the most recent accounts of this topic in Jewish studies, see Dory Fox, “Jewish Genetic Potency: The Meaning of Jewish Ancestry in the 21st-Century United States,” American Jewish History 104 (2020): 59–86. See also the issue of the journal PaRDeS 26 (2020) and its special section “From the 1920s to the 2020s: A Century of Jewish Family Research,” retrieved 8 December 2021 from https:// publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/47365. Founded in 1987, the nonprofit organization Jewish Gen shows this trend; see their website, retrieved 8 December 2021: https://www.jewishgen.org. The most important digitization projects for amateur and professional family researchers are unquestionably the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute, the Center for Jewish History in New

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York, the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and Yad Vashem and the archives of the National Library of Israel to name only the most relevant archives for transnational German-Jewish history. In addition, there are major, extensive digitization projects, such as the digitization of the Judaica collection at the University Library in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. For example, in one core project, the collection of the former (Jewish) city librarian Aron Freimann is being virtually restored, and furthermore, all German-Jewish periodicals and other writings and prints are being made accessible in a high quality and elaborate manner. See https://www.ub.uni-frankfurt .de/judaica/home.html, retrieved 8 December 2021.

Bibliography Baumgarten, Elisheva. Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Berg, Nicolas, ed. Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900: Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011. Bösl, Elsbeth, and Jörg Feuchter. “Genetic History—Eine Herausforderung für die Geschichtswissenschaften.” Neue Politische Literatur 64 (2019): 237–68. Boyarin, Jonathan. Jewish Families. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Cohen, Steven M., and Paula E. Hyman, eds. The Jewish Family: Myths and Realities. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986. Czellitzer, Arthur, and Leon Julius Silberstrom. “Geneaologie.” In Jüdisches Lexikon, edited by Georg Herlitz and Bruno Kirschner, vol. 2, col. 1009–11. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1928. Diamant, Paul Joseph. “Sinn und Zweck der jüdischen Familienforschung.” Archiv für jüdische Familienforschung, Kunstgeschichte und Museumswesen 1 (1912): 2–5. Drewes, Kai. Jüdischer Adel: Nobilitierungen von Juden im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013. Fox, Dory. “Jewish Genetic Potency: The Meaning of Jewish Ancestry in the 21st-Century United States.” American Jewish History 104 (2020): 59–86. Freeze, ChaeRan. “Family.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2010). Retrieved 8 December 2021 from https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Family. Gausemeier, Bernd. “‘Auf der Brücke zwischen Natur- und Geschichtswissenschaft’: Ottokar Lorenz und die Neuerfindung der Genealogie um 1900.” In Wissensobjekt Mensch: Praktiken der Humanwissenschaften im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Florence Vienne and Christina Brandt, 137–64. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2008. ———. “Squaring the Pedigree: Arthur Czellitzer’s Ventures in Eugenealogy.” PaRDeS 26 (2020): 43–50. Gramlich, Johannes. Die Thyssens als Kunstsammler: Investition und symbolisches Kapital (1900–1970). Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015. Grunwald, Max. “Das Testament Wolf Wertheimers.” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Jüdische Volkskunde 17 (1914): 13–29, 55–61. Hödl, Sabine, and Martha Keil, eds. Die jüdische Familie in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Berlin: Philo, 1999. Jäger-Sunstenau, Hanns. Die geadelten Judenfamilien im vormärzlichen Wien. Wien: Universitätsbibliothek, 1980 (typoscript). Johnson, Christopher H., and David Warren Sabean, eds. Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Johnson, Christopher H., David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Francesca Trivellato, eds. Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.

36 | MIRJAM THULIN Jonker, Gerdien, “Etwas hoffen muß das Herz”: Eine Familiengeschichte von Juden, Christen und Muslimen. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018. Karp, Jonathan. The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Katz, Jacob. “Marriage and Sexual Behavior at the End of the Middle Ages.” Zion 10 (1945): 21–54 [in Hebrew]. ———. “Family, Kinship, and Marriage among Ashkenazim in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of Jewish Sociology 1 (1959): 4–22. ———. “The Semineutral Society.” In Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870, 42–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Kaufmann, David. Samson Wertheimer, der Oberhoffactor und Landesrabbiner (1658–1724) und seine Kinder. Vienna: F. Beck, 1888. ———. Urkundliches aus dem Leben SamsonWertheimers. Budapest: Carl Konegen, 1891. ———. R. Jair Chajjim Bacharach (1638–1702) und seine Ahnen. Trier: Mayer, 1894. Kotowski, Elke-Vera, ed. Das Kulturerbe deutschsprachiger Juden: Eine Spurensuche in den Ursprungs-,Transit- und Emigrationsländern. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenburg, 2015. Kraemer, David, ed. The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Lipphardt, Veronika. Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über “Rasse” und Vererbung 1900–1935. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008. Mann, Vivian B., and Richard I. Cohen, eds. From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600–1800. Munich: Prestel, 1996. Mehta, Samira K. Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Mevorah, Barouh. “The Imperial Court-Jew Wolf Wertheimer as Diplomatic Mediator (during the War of the Austrian Succession).” Scripta Hierosolymitana 23 (1972): 184–213. Nelson, Margaret. “Fictive Kin, Families We Choose, and Voluntary Kin: What Does the Discourse Tell Us?” Journal of Family Theory & Review 5 (2013): 259–81. Panwitz, Sebastian, and Peter Schüring, eds. Das Haus Kranich: Die Privatbankiers von Mendelssohn & Co. (1795–1938). Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2018. Rabinowitz, Louis Isaac, and Anson Rainey. “Family.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., 6:690–95. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Rohrbacher, Stefan. “‘Gründlicher und wahrhaffter Bericht’: Des Orientalisten Johann Andreas Eisenmengers Entdecktes Judenthum (1700) als Klassiker des ‘wissenschaftlichen’ Antisemitismus.” In Reuchlin und seine Erben: Forscher, Denker, Ideologen und Spinner, edited by Peter Schäfer and Irina Wandrey, 171–88. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2005. Sabean, David Warren, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu, eds. Kinship in Europe: Approaches to LongTerm Developments (1300–1900). New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Stampfer, Shaul. “Was the Traditional East European Jewish Family in the Recent Past Patriarchal?” In Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, edited by Shaul Stampfer, 121–41. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010. Stern, Selma. The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1950. Thulin, Mirjam. Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst: Ein jüdisches Gelehrtennetzwerk im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2012. ———. “Jewish Families as Intercessors and Patrons: The Case of the Wertheimer Family in the Eighteenth Century.” Jewish Culture and History 19 (2018): 39–55. ———. “Arthur Czellitzer (1871–1943) and the Society for Jewish Family Research.” PaRDeS 26 (2020): 29–42.

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———. “Wertheimer.” In Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), edited by the Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 27:858–59. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2020. Thulin, Mirjam, and Björn Siegel. “Transformations and Intersections of Shtadlanut and Tzedakah in the Early Modern and Modern Period.” Jewish Culture and History 19 (2018): 1–7. Warner, Lyndan, ed. Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400–1800. New York: Routledge, 2018.

 CHAPTER 2

Old Yiddish Texts in German-Jewish Culture Diachronic Translation and the (Re)turn to the Past

 Aya Elyada

Old Yiddish Literature in German-Jewish Culture Modern German-Jewish culture, as it evolved throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, presents an intriguing test case of transition and transformation. Accelerated processes of secularization, modernization, urbanization, and acculturation, which resulted from both external pressure and internal developments, profoundly altered the life and culture of the German-Jewish communities. Thus, although the pace of change differed between various sections of the Jewish population, and certain strands of continuity are noticeable throughout this period, one can discern a clear rupture between the premodern and modern stages in the history of the German Jews. This unique chapter in both European and Jewish history, which started roughly in the late eighteenth century, presents the historian and cultural critic with numerous important questions concerning the reactions and adaptations of German Jews to these rapidly changing circumstances. One central question, which I find especially appealing, concerns the ways in which German-Jewish scholars and authors grappled with their Jewish past: how did they perceive and interpret different chapters in Jewish history in general, and in the history of the Jews in the German lands in particular? How did competing ideologies—religious, national, or others—serve to create different representations of the past? And in what ways did Jewish writers attempt to harness the past to their needs in the present and hopes for the future? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the engagement of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jews with their past has attracted considerable attention in present-day re-

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search.1 Nevertheless, one significant aspect has largely gone unnoticed: the engagement of German-Jewish scholars and intellectuals with their Yiddish heritage.2 During the middle ages and the early modern period,Yiddish served the Ashkenazi communities of Western and Central Europe as the spoken language and, together with Hebrew, also as a written language.3 The rich corpus of Yiddish literature published during that time included biblical translations and paraphrases, ethical books on morality and proper conduct, prayer books, medieval epics and romance, poems, fables, and drama. This so-called “Old Yiddish Literature” (as opposed to modern, East European Yiddish literature) circulated widely in the Ashkenazi communities of medieval and early modern Europe and enjoyed great popularity among Jewish readers. Among its masterpieces one can note the homiletic “women’s Bible” Tsene-rene (Basel [Hanau], 1622),4 the Mayse-bukh or “book of stories” (Basel, 1602), the biblical epic Shmuel-bukh (Augsburg, 1544), the moralistic work Seyfer brantshpigel (Cracow, 1596), and many others, some of them becoming “bestsellers,” at least in early modern terms.They were issued in many later editions and exerted considerable influence on the cultural world of Ashkenazi Jews during this period and beyond.5 From the late eighteenth century onward, however, German Jews gradually abandoned the Yiddish of their forefathers, adopting instead the language and culture of their non-Jewish German surroundings. This linguistic shift from Yiddish to German, which resulted in the continuous decline of (Western) Yiddish and its eventual demise as the main language of German Jews, was engendered by the two interrelated processes of Jewish emancipation and acculturation. As a prerequisite for full emancipation, Jews were required to abandon their unique language and replace it with German. This demand was also promoted within the Jewish community, most notably among the maskilim (the adherents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment) and the economic elite, who supported a certain degree of Jewish integration into German culture and society. For many of the maskilim, the transition from Yiddish to German was also a means for reforming and regenerating Jewish culture from within.6 Together with the language, Yiddish literature also declined rapidly in the German territories. In fact, the eradication of this literature was one of the primary goals of the reforming agenda of Moses Mendelssohn and the other leading German-Jewish maskilim, who vehemently opposed Yiddish as an impure mixture, unsuitable for serious literary and scholarly writing. Thus, they completely discredited traditional Jewish works in this language, such as Yiddish translations of biblical texts, prayer books, Haggada, and Siddur, which were in use in every Jewish home at the time. In their stead, they produced alternative translations in “pure High German” (albeit in Hebrew characters) and according to maskilic ideals.7 In the following decades, as growing circles of Jews adopted the German language and became proficient in the Latin alphabet, Old Yiddish texts became even more redundant. German now became the Jews’ language of literary expression, and from the 1830s onward, a vast corpus of Jewish Belletristik in the German language—especially historical novels, “ghetto literature,” novellas, and drama—came to dominate the cultural world of the German-Jewish population.8

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Thus, although Yiddish speakers could still be found in the German-speaking lands throughout the nineteenth century, there was no room left for Old Yiddish literature in the new cultural climate—not even in those areas of Jewish literary production where the Jewish nature and purpose of the works were beyond doubt. It is no wonder, therefore, that the publication of this rich and once so popular corpus practically ceased in Western and Central Europe already at the beginning of the nineteenth century.9 This historical shift in the literary canon of German Jewry is well demonstrated in the renowned painting of Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882) from 1866, Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse (Sabbath Rest; see figure 2.1). The painting depicts a German-Jewish home on a peaceful Sabbath afternoon. The pivotal year “1789” is engraved on the doorpost to teach us that we are on the verge of a dramatic turning point in the history of Western and Central European Jewry, on the verge of modernity. The changing times are clearly manifested in two of the women figures in the painting. The old grandmother, sitting in the house’s doorway, represents the vanishing world of yesterday: dressed in traditional clothing and an old-fashioned bonnet, she is crouching over the Tsene-rene, the traditional Sabbath reading of Jewish women in Ashkenaz and the most popular book of Old Yiddish literature. Inside the house there is a young woman,

Figure 2.1. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse (Sabbath Rest), 1866. In the collection of the Jewish Museum, New York. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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who represents the future: fashionably dressed and with a modern hairstyle, she is reading a small, modern-looking book, a German novel.10 The linguistic and cultural shift—the replacement of Yiddish with German and the demise of Yiddish literature in the German territories—is underway. The categorical rejection of Yiddish as a spoken as well as a literary language, which characterized the eighteenth-century maskilim, continued to dominate German-Jewish discourse over the years. Community leaders, rabbis, and educators in nineteenthcentury Germany acted relentlessly to uproot the remnants of Yiddish speech, still recognizable among sections of German Jewry,11 whereas prominent representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) denounced Yiddish as a corrupt and degenerate language, inadequate for true literary production. In their eyes,Yiddish did not meet modern European standards of Bildung and Wissenschaft. Thus, it had no place in their attempt to revive Jewish culture and to present it as equal to other European cultures. Moreover, like their maskilic predecessors, early Wissenschaftler des Judentums saw Yiddish as the ultimate representative of the corruption of ghetto life. It was the embodiment of a degenerate, isolated Jewishness mired in deformed “ghetto mentality” from which the German-Jewish scholars sought to break free.12 But while the Yiddish language was almost unanimously disparaged by GermanJewish scholars and completely excluded from any “serious” cultural activity, Old Yiddish texts did not entirely disappear from the scholarly and cultural landscape of the German Jews. Rather, these texts continued to be retold, discussed, and explored in the works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-Jewish scholars and authors via the media of translations and adaptations, annotated anthologies, and literary surveys—albeit in the German language and with Latin characters.13 These German “rewritings,” as we might call them,14 granted the Old Yiddish texts not only a continuing existence into the modern period, in a kind of “afterlife” or Nachleben, but also a rehabilitation, as these once very beloved works were being appreciated anew as literary and historical monuments of a bygone Jewish past. My current book project presents the first large-scale attempt to put German rewritings of Old Yiddish texts at the center of a comprehensive and systematic study. Although a historical study in nature, the project also makes extensive use of the insights and methodologies developed in the field of translation studies over the past few decades. One of the most important developments in this field, which is central to my project, was the “cultural turn,” which brought with it a growing appreciation of translation as a valuable object of study not only for linguistics and literary studies but also for exploring larger systems and dynamics in culture and society.15 At the heart of these developments lies the recognition that the practice of translation is fundamental to cultural interaction and the movement of ideas across national and linguistic boundaries, and that it plays a crucial role in the construction and evolution of cultures and group identities. Through the importation of foreign texts, translators exert considerable influence on the development of their own culture. Yet their role as mediators is by no means confined to the mere production of a linguistic equivalent of the foreign

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text. As a cultural product, the work of translators is necessarily subject to textual and extratextual constraints inherent to their own language and culture, as well as to the interests, agendas, and beliefs of the translators themselves and of their target readership. The institutional constraints and the translator’s own input greatly influence the process of translation, usually resulting in biased modifications of the translated text. A close study of the process of translation—the criteria for the selection of a text, its manipulation and transformation by the translator, and its reception in the target culture—can thus offer important insights into the construction of cultures and the interactions between them. As becomes clear from the history of Yiddish in the German-speaking territories, depicted above, the German-Jewish rewritings of Old Yiddish texts present a unique kind of cultural translation: instead of importing texts from a foreign culture, which developed in a different geographical and linguistic zone, German-Jewish authors were engaged in a project of what we might term “diachronic translation”: the import of texts from an earlier stage in their own history and past culture, the very texts that their own forefathers (and foremothers) previously read in the original Yiddish. In the wake of German Jews’ linguistic shift from Yiddish to German, old Jewish texts were imported into the modern era and translated into German for the benefit of new generations of acculturated Jewish readers. By analyzing a large body of these “diachronic translations” and the discourses surrounding them with the tools of cultural history, my project seeks to shed light on an important and hitherto underresearched chapter not only in the long and turbulent history of Yiddish but also, first and foremost, in German-Jewish history and culture, which it illuminates from the unique perspective of translation. As I show in my book, the engagement of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-Jewish authors with early modern Yiddish texts was not driven merely by an “archeological” or “antiquarian” interest in the past. Rather, it was motivated by the ambition of these scholars to create a distinctive German-Jewish subculture, one that sought to link the Jewish past with the German present and to enable nineteenth-century acculturated German Jews to retain their strong sense of belonging to the Jewish community and its heritage.16 This was to occur, of course, without undermining the achievements of emancipation and the integration of German Jews into the German culture and society; on the contrary, it was intended to promote and strengthen these very processes.

Translating Old Yiddish Folktales in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Abraham Tendlau In the following, I shall discuss the place of Old Yiddish texts in modern GermanJewish culture by focusing on one famous and relatively early example: the work of the historian and folklorist Abraham Moses Tendlau (1802–78) from Frankfurt am Main.17 Tendlau was a pioneering figure in this field, and he is representative in many ways of

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the engagement of German-Jewish scholars with their Yiddish heritage. By analyzing Tendlau’s motivations for producing German versions of early modern Yiddish texts, as well as his selection of material and strategies of translation, I demonstrate how Tendlau promoted this literary heritage as part of the culture of remembrance and nostalgia, which was prevalent in German-Jewish circles from the mid-nineteenth century onward. At the same time, I illustrate Tendlau’s ambivalence toward the Yiddish texts he was “importing” from early modern Ashkenaz to his readership in modern Germany and the limits he attempted to draw with respect to the German-Jewish longing for the past. Despite the broad reputation of Tendlau’s work, and the fact that in the 1860s he received an honorary distinction in the field of Volkskunde, not much is known today about his life. Tendlau was born in Wiesbaden in 1802 to the family of a Kreisrabbiner, lived as an adult in Frankfurt am Main, and earned his living as a teacher and private tutor.18 He was also one of the pioneering and most influential figures in the newly established field of German-Jewish folkloristics (Volkskunde) throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.19 Emerging in nineteenth-century Germany under the influence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums on the one hand and the rise of folklore studies as an established scholarly discipline on the other, the new German-Jewish Volkskunde dedicated itself to the systematic investigation of Jewish cultural and spiritual traditions, everyday life, and popular culture and belief.20 One of the central aspects in the work of the German-Jewish folklorists was the collection and editing of Jewish legends and folktales in a critical, philological manner, including the addition of historical expositions, philological annotations, and intertextual references—usually in designated footnotes or endnotes.21 Following similar developments in non-Jewish philological and folkloristic circles in Germany of the early nineteenth century, German-Jewish scholars such as Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider advocated the notion that Jewish legends and tales were not just literature but important sources of Jewish history; as such, they had to be collected, preserved, and treated with the tools of modern historical research.22 In 1842, Tendlau published his Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit (Book of folktales and legends from Jewish antiquity, adapted from the sources and provided with notes and explanations), which quickly became one of the most popular nineteenth-century anthologies of Jewish legends. The book reappeared in two enlarged editions in 1845 and 1873,23 and like the collection of the Brothers Grimm, it became the model for all further scholarly editions of Jewish legends.24 Unlike previous compilers of Jewish tales and legends from the 1820s and 1830s, Tendlau did not limit himself to legends from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrashim.25 Instead, he also incorporated in his collection stories from medieval and early modern sources, including the famous Mayse-bukh and other Old Yiddish works—such as the Tsene-rene, Seyfer simchas hanefesh, and above all Seyfer mayse nisim (“book of miraculous acts,” Amsterdam 1696)—which he perceived as an integral part of Jewish tradition and collective Jewish memory.26

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The aim of collecting and preserving vanishing Jewish folklore, and introducing it to nineteenth-century readers, stood at the heart of Tendlau’s Buch der Sagen und Legenden. In his introduction to the work, which opens with Deuteronomy 32:7 as its motto,27 Tendlau emphasizes his desire to redeem older Jewish folktales from the imminent threat of oblivion (einer drohenden Vergessenheit zu entreißen). It is the “fresh present” (die frische Gegenwart), according to Tendlau, “which suppresses the aging past and pushes it away”; yet it also evokes things that are “beautiful and useful [manches Schöne und Nützliche] from the already forgotten, bygone world, … and gives them a new life.”28 Tendlau’s efforts to redeem the Old Yiddish folktales from the “threatening oblivion,” and to give them “a new life and existence” (ein neues Leben und Dasein), should be seen against the backdrop of the general tendency in scholarly, literary, and artistic circles within German Jewry from the 1840s onward—a tendency of which Tendlau was one of the pioneering figures—of a growing interest in, and appreciation of, the history of Jewish life and culture in the German lands.29 This tendency was manifested, on the one hand, in the renewed interest of German Jews in their medieval heritage.30 Indeed, the “discovery” of the medieval-Ashkenazi past can explain Tendlau’s choice of stories from the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh and the Seyfer mayse nisim, which emerged in the Jewish communities of medieval Germany, or whose narratives took place in this historical context.31 As historian Nils Roemer demonstrates in his book on the city of Worms, the attempts of nineteenth-century German Jews to unearth and preserve their medieval heritage gained expression, for example, in the restoration of ancient cemeteries and synagogues, the commemoration of Jewish martyrs, and the reverence of old Ashkenazi Jewish sages, such as Yehuda he-Hasid, Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki), and Meir of Rothenburg.32 Tendlau’s adaptations of the medieval legends that were included in the early modern Yiddish compilations did much to disseminate and revive the ancient narratives among his modern Jewish readers,33 and one may certainly assume that it was a major factor in the popularity of his anthology at least until the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Tendlau’s translations filled yet another important role in the German-Jewish culture of remembrance and nostalgia: the reconciliation of modern German Jews with their immediate past, the world of the ghetto that they or their parents had left behind. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, accelerated processes of modernization and the disintegration of the traditional Jewish community led to a nostalgic longing for the vanishing world of the ghetto, which came to epitomize the “authentic” Jewish experience. The desire to reappropriate the disappearing Jewish past took various artistic and literary forms, the most prevalent being the genre of “ghetto literature” (Ghettoliteratur), popularized by Leopold Kompert in the late 1840s.34 Presenting an idealized depiction of traditional Ashkenazi society on the threshold of modernity, the ghetto tales of Kompert and other authors enabled nineteenth-century acculturated Jews to “identify passively with their vanishing past, feel a sense of pride with their recent ancestors, and envision the ghetto as the authentic place of their nostalgia memories.”35

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Like Kompert, Tendlau, too, used literary entertainment as a medium of cultural memory, intending to reunite the readers with the lost world of their childhood. Yet unlike Kompert’s ghetto tales, the Old Yiddish legends in Tendlau’s anthologies were not a fictitious depiction of the traditional Ashkenazi world. Rather, they were an integral part of this world, an actual remnant from the immediate Jewish past. The nostalgic reunion with the past that Tendlau offered his readers, in other words, was not based on tales about the ghetto but on tales from the ghetto, the same tales that were read, in Yiddish, by the parents and grandparents of Tendlau’s readers and that the readers themselves had likely heard in their own childhood. Tendlau’s translations of the Old Yiddish folktales thus fulfilled two different yet intertwined purposes: an informative one, of telling the Jewish readers about the lives and deeds of their medieval ancestors (the same function fulfilled by Kompert’s books with regard to the German-Jewish “ghetto”); and a performative one, of reenacting the experience of their immediate ancestors—their parents and grandparents—who themselves had read or heard these stories, or even of evoking the readers’ own childhood recollections. And yet, despite his important contribution to the German-Jewish culture of remembrance and nostalgia, Tendlau put strict limits on the Jewish romance with the past. The past, as far as Tendlau was concerned, was only allowed to live on as a form of literature, which in fact promoted the processes of modernization and acculturation among German Jews. Already in the introduction to his Buch der Sagen und Legenden, after expressing his wish to rescue the Yiddish folktales from oblivion and grant them new life, Tendlau quickly makes clear that he is offering these tales to his readers “in a modern form” (in einer modernen Gestalt).36 This new or modern form ensured that, in spite of evoking nostalgic sentiments, an adequate distance would be maintained between the traditional folktales and the acculturated Jewish readers, between the premodern Ashkenazi past, on which soil the original stories had grown and flourished, and the modern German-Jewish present, into which they were now imported. To achieve this goal, Tendlau offered in his book new versions of the old tales, by transforming almost all of them from the original prose into verse, in the form of a German ballad. All of the tales were translated into standard German (Hochdeutsch) and written in Gothic script, as was common at the time, with hardly any identifier of their Jewish origin. Only rarely can one find a Hebraism, such as “Sabbath” or “rabbi,” and the Hebrew alphabet is completely absent from the book. Building on the example set by the Brothers Grimm and their successors, Tendlau also created an impressive philological apparatus of notes and commentaries, Anmerkungen und Erläuterungen, at the end of the book. Here he recorded the origin of every single legend as well as other known versions of the legends in older Jewish collections, explained obscure words, and provided some relevant historical information. The transformation of the Yiddish tales from “plain” prose to “exalted” poetry, as well as the insertion of comments and explications, which gave the anthology a more scholarly orientation, imbued the old folktales with a new respectability and aesthetic value, thus turning them into suitable reading material for an educated, middle-class

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German-Jewish audience. But the most crucial element in the displacement of the old folktales from their original context of the premodern Ashkenazi tradition to their new home in nineteenth-century Germany was, undoubtedly, the interlingual translation, from Old (or Western) Yiddish into modern, standard German. The necessity of such an interlingual translation can certainly be attributed to the fact that most of Tendlau’s potential German-Jewish readers were no longer proficient in Yiddish, as well as to Tendlau’s hope that his book would find readers also among non-Jewish Germans. After all, as historian Richard Cohen noted, “the ability of Jews to merge in the larger society necessitated some recognition by their contemporaries of their unique Jewish past, which remained a source of internal strength even though they themselves were breaking away from it. The Jew no longer had to hide the past in shame.”37 Indeed, in the introduction Tendlau expresses his hope that although the “natural” audience for his book is Jewish, it will also be of interest to non-Jews, for he made a significant effort to choose only tales and legends that were, in his mind, of a special quality or that held great appeal.38 Yet the need to translate Jewish folktales from Yiddish into German did not stem merely from the wish to make them accessible for a broad Jewish and non-Jewish readership. Two additional important factors, it would seem, stood behind Tendlau’s decision to render the tales in standard German: the first was a literary-aesthetic factor, and the other a sociolinguistic one. It was, undoubtedly, the highly problematic image of Yiddish, discussed above, as a language lacking an aesthetic and moral value, and hence inadequate for “serious” literary and scholarly writing, that motivated Tendlau to completely exclude it from his work. In order to gain the appreciation of nineteenthcentury German Jews as “true literature,” the Yiddish folktales had to be “repackaged” in the respectable and highly valued garment of the German language, without traces of the “unpleasant jargon.” The importance of this factor becomes apparent when one compares the language of the Buch der Sagen und Legenden with another work of Tendlau’s, the famous Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (proverbs and sayings of GermanJewish antiquity), published in Frankfurt am Main in 1860.39 As Tendlau himself asserts, the aim of this collection of proverbs was mainly folkloristic and less “literary” in the classic sense of the word: it was meant, first and foremost, to document the premodern oral culture of the German Jews in the most authentic and reliable manner possible.40 It was probably no coincidence, therefore, that only in a treatise of this kind, free of any literary or aesthetic aspirations, did Tendlau allow himself to bring out the original “Jewish-German jargon” from behind the scenes and present it publicly and openly (albeit in German transcription) to his reading audience. As Tendlau explains in the introduction to the work, in this case he had decided to render the proverbs themselves “entirely in their original form and common pronunciation,” preserving even the “corrupted German expression” (des verdorbenen deutschen Ausdrucks).41 Apparently, this decision was not easy for Tendlau, yet in this case, as he emphasizes, the aim of keeping the faithful rendering of the “voice of the people” was above all

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other considerations. At least the content of the Jewish proverbs, he added, is not inferior to that of any other folk.42 In addition to the literary-aesthetic factor, it seems that a sociolinguistic factor also played an important role in Tendlau’s decision to render the Old Yiddish folktales in standard Hochdeutsch. This relates to the fact that Yiddish served for generations as a marker of difference between the German Jews and their non-Jewish surroundings, a language that both emerged from, and helped reinforce, Jewish seclusion from German society and culture. As literary scholar Jeffrey Grossman rightly asserted, “Liberation from Yiddish becomes [for educated German Jews] a synecdoche that stands for the entire process of casting off the constraints of the supposedly ghettoized world of traditional Jewish culture.”43 By reading Yiddish folktales in German translation, nineteenth-century German Jews could reconnect to the cultural heritage of their ancestors while at the same time reasserting their own liberation from that very ghetto and their successful integration into the “respectable” culture of the German bourgeoisie. To be sure, the separation between the medium and the content in Old Yiddish literature, as was done by Tendlau and other German-Jewish authors throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributed considerably to the turning of this literary corpus into a legitimate and even worthy object of translation and research. This undertaking thus ensured the continuing existence of this important body of literature, so central to the cultural history of the Jews in the German lands, well into the modern era.

Tendlau’s Legacy and Later German-Jewish Versions of the Mayse-bukh Like other German-Jewish writers of “middlebrow literature,”44 Tendlau was not granted prominent status within German literature, nor did his work result in any significant impact on the future development of Jewish literature. However, within the confines of the genre, it seems that Tendlau’s anthologies did gain considerable resonance among contemporaries.This can be judged both from the appearance of subsequent, considerably enlarged editions and from the favorable reviews in respectable Jewish as well as non-Jewish journals of the time.45 Moreover, some of his translations of Yiddish folktales were published in both the Liberal journal Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums and the Orthodox Der Israelit.46 This attests not only to the proliferation of the old legends in their new German form but also to their growing acceptance among readers from both Jewish denominations.47 In addition to the broad resonance that Tendlau’s works found among contemporaries, his anthologies and his compilation of proverbs made an important contribution to the development of both Jewish Volkskunde and the scholarly interest in Yiddish culture in the following generations. Leading Jewish folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Max Grunwald and Moses Gaster, dedicated consider-

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able attention to the Old Yiddish folktales and often made use of Tendlau’s adaptations in their own works.48 Other German-Jewish authors followed in Tendlau’s footsteps and chose to publish their own German translations of the Yiddish folktales for popular consumption rather than exploring the tales within the framework of scholarly or even academic folkloristic research. In 1929, the renowned feminist and social reformer Bertha Pappenheim published her Allerlei Geschichten (All kinds of stories), a German rendering of the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh.49 As Pappenheim asserted in a brief introduction to the book, the old folktales could serve as a window into the lives of Jews in the Middle Ages, to their resistance in the face of hostility and oppression, and to the “power of believing in God-given teachings.” The tales, moreover, should provide parents and educators with “a bridge to a renewed appreciation of the meaning of inherited Jewish culture and religion” (überlieferten jüdischen Kultur- und Glaubensgutes).50 With regard to her translation, Pappenheim declared it to be devoid of any scholarly pretension—like the original book itself.51 Five years later, already under the shadow of National Socialism, the prominent poet and literary scholar Ludwig Strauß published yet another German translation of twenty-one selected tales from the Mayse-bukh, which he considered “the narratively most beautiful and content-wise most characteristic” (die erzählerisch schönsten und gehaltlich charakteristischsten Stücke).52 Unlike Pappenheim, who translated the stories very closely to the original Yiddish, Strauß’s translation was more in the spirit of Tendlau’s. Although Strauß, like Pappenheim, proclaimed his commitment to the original, he chose to translate the text into standard German and added a scholarly apparatus of historical and philological explications.53 Yet he, too, emphasized moving the reader toward a more intimate engagement with “our traditional story-telling” (Erzählungsgut unserer Überlieferung) as his ultimate goal.54 The German-Jewish endeavor of translating Old Yiddish folktales into modern German, initiated by Tendlau in the 1840s, thus came to an end with Pappenheim and Strauß in the mid-1930s. Strauß fled Germany to Mandatory Palestine in 1935, shortly after the publication of his translation, while Pappenheim passed away in 1936, just a few years before her life work as a social reformer was destroyed and many of her intellectual and literary writings lost. Indeed, if the corpus of Yiddish-German “diachronic translations” had lost both its authors and audience by the late 1930s, it had also lost most of its raison d’être. As a corpus meant to help German Jews balance between their Jewish and German identities, between their Jewish past and German present, the German renderings of Old Yiddish texts—which embodied in their very existence the possibility and realization of the “German-Jewish symbiosis”—have themselves bcome obsolete.

Conclusion When scholars of German-Jewish studies discuss the place of Yiddish in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-Jewish culture, they almost always re-

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fer to the import of modern, East European Yiddish literature, such as the works of Y. L. Peretz or Sholem Aleichem, translated into German and disseminated among German-speaking readers.55 This is probably not surprising, considering both the proliferation of such rewritings (namely translations, adaptations, literary reviews, anthologies, and the like), especially from the turn of the twentieth century, and the popularity they enjoyed among German-Jewish readers. However, as demonstrated in this chapter, this geographical, Ost-West dimension of the encounter of modern German Jews with Yiddish culture is only part of the story. During the same years, and indeed throughout the nineteenth century, another corpus of German rewritings of Old or Early Modern Yiddish texts added a temporal dimension to this encounter. In this case of “diachronic translation,” Jewish authors were in fact translating their own culture, for Jewish consumption, from its traditional Yiddish language to their newly acquired German tongue. By this they helped build bridges between past and present, between the modern world of nineteenth-century German Jews and the bygone Jewish world of their premodern ancestors. Unlike the German rewritings of modern, East European Yiddish literature, the corpus of German rewritings of Old Yiddish texts has been largely neglected in modern research. In my book, I aim to reintegrate Old Yiddish literature into the cultural and intellectual history of German Jewry in the modern era. As I attempted to show with the one example of Abraham Tendlau and the Yiddish folktales, such a scholarly endeavor has two important advantages for modern research, beyond a long-warranted correction of a historical injustice. In the field of Yiddish studies, the separation of the Yiddish literature from its original language, and the exploration of its “afterlife” in German rewritings, will enable us to disengage from the negative and even disparaging discourse on the Yiddish language, which dominated German-Jewish discourse from the Haskalah onward, and shift our attention to other voices too: voices that spoke highly of Old Yiddish literature, that considered it relevant and meaningful also for their own times, and that wished to rescue it from oblivion. In the field of modern German-Jewish history, an examination of the engagement of German Jews with the Old Yiddish texts—including its underlying motivations, the strategies of translation, and the discourses surrounding it—may open up a valuable window for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jews grappled with the transformations and challenges of modernity. It could thus shed new light on familiar processes and phenomena, such as secularization, acculturation, Bildung, and nostalgia. Like so many aspects of German-Jewish history, the story of Old Yiddish literature and its place in modern German-Jewish culture is relevant not only for various fields of study but also for present-day discussions outside academia. In a world of constant migrations and relocations, questions of cultural transformation, integration, and preservation are always present. These include the role of translation in the construction and transformation of group identities; the relations between cultural minorities and hegemonic cultures and societies; the ways in which immigrants’ communities ne-

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gotiate between their past and present cultures; and the role of literary heritage in the formation of new and hybrid subcultures. The exploration of these and similar questions in the context of German-Jewish history, therefore, not only contributes to our understanding of the past; at one and the same time, it also adds a much-necessary dimension to our understanding of key phenomena in present-day culture and society. Aya Elyada is senior lecturer of German and German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her fields of interest include Christian-Jewish relations, Yiddish language and literature, and the social and cultural history of language and translation. Since 2017 she has served on the Academic Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and the editorial board of its journal Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry. Her book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, was published in 2012 by Stanford University Press. Her current book project discusses the place of Old Yiddish literature in modern German-Jewish culture.

Notes This chapter is part of my current book project, which explores the place of Old Yiddish literature in German-Jewish culture between the years 1818 and 1938. The very first foundations of the project were laid almost ten years ago, with the generous support of the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship of the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin. The second part of this chapter is derived in part from an article I published in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies in 2017, @Taylor & Francis, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/ 14725886.2017.1350335. 1. Among the many studies dedicated to the diverse aspects of this topic, one could mention Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994); Nils H. Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in NineteenthCentury Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) [originally in German, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006]; Jonathan M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Jonathan Skolnik, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 2. A notable exception is Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse onYiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), chap. 2, focusing on the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century (especially on the figure of Leopold Zunz); and see also Diana Matut, “Steinschneider and Yiddish,” in Studies on Steinschneider, ed. R. Leicht and G. Freudenthal (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 383–409. 3. The Yiddish discussed in this chapter is referred to today as “Western Yiddish,” as opposed to the “Eastern Yiddish” of the East European Jews. Composed almost entirely from a Germanic and a Hebraic component, Western Yiddish was, linguistically speaking, closer to German than modern Yiddish, which contains an additional Slavic component. On the history of the Yiddish language, see especially Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble, ed. Paul Glasser, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) [originally in Yiddish, New York:YIVO, 1973]; Neil G. Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

University Press, 2005). For the sake of convenience, I use the term “Yiddish” throughout the chapter to designate this “Western,” “Old” or “Early Modern” Yiddish of the German Jews. Three earlier editions, which have not survived, are mentioned on the title page. On early modernYiddish literature, see, in particular, Chone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature: Chapters in Its History (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1978) [in Hebrew]; and, more recently, Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2005) [originally in French, Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1993]. On the German-Jewish language shift, see, e.g., Nils Römer, Tradition und Akkulturation: Zum Sprachwandel der Juden in Deutschland zur Zeit der Haskalah (New York: Waxmann, 1995); Simone Lässig, “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung: Zur Bedeutung der Sprache im innerjüdischen Modernisierungsprozeß des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 270 (2000): 617–67. The most renowned example in this respect is, of course, Mendelssohn’s translation of the Pentateuch from 1783, considered to this day the starting point of modern German-Jewish literature. For further examples of maskilic endeavors to replace Yiddish literature, also with regard to other Old Yiddish genres, see especially Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature, 147–66; Chava Turniansky, “Old Wine in a New Vessel: Maskilic Versions of the Tsene-rene,” in Let the Old Make Way for the New: Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry, ed. David Assaf and Ada Rapoport-Albert (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2009), 2:313–44 [in Hebrew]; Römer, Tradition und Akkulturation, chaps. 6–8. On the persistence of writing High German in Hebrew characters throughout the nineteenth century, see also Steven Lowenstein, “The Yiddish Written Word in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 24 (1979): 179–92, here 188–89. In recent decades, a vast corpus of research emerged on modern German-Jewish literature. For a useful overview and bibliography see Hans Otto Horch, ed., Handbuch der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). New publications in the corpus ceased to appear already by 1800, whereas reprints of earlier Old Yiddish works, covering some of the religious and entertainment repertoire of traditional Yiddish literature, continued to see light in Germany for a few more years (the last edition of the Tsene-rene, which is also the last known Old Yiddish book to appear in Germany, was published in Sulzbach in 1836). See Lowenstein, “Yiddish Written Word,” 180–82. New editions of the Tsenerene and other Old Yiddish favorites continued to be published in Eastern Europe well into the twentieth century, whereas in Germany the only literature that continued to appear in Yiddish was parodies and humoristic plays, which were written in regional dialects and are considered marginal in the corpus of German-Jewish literature. See ibid., esp. 183–85; Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature, 167–73. On this painting and its interpretation, see, e.g., Leopold Stein, Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben: Photographien nach Originalgemälden von Moritz Oppenheim; mit biographischer Einführung und Erklärungen von Leopold Stein (Frankfurt am Main: H. Keller, 1868), 9–10. See also Jonathan Hess’s introduction to his book Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity from 2010, where he uses the painting as a vantage point for his discussion on modern German-Jewish literature. An illuminating example is the memorandum of the supreme Jewish authority in the Grand Duchy of Baden from 1834 to all members of the Jewish communities, calling them to stop using the “Jewish-German Jargon” with the children, both at school and at home. For the original German memorandum, see Jacob Toury, Der Eintritt der Juden ins deutsche Bürgertum: Eine Dokumentation (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute, 1972), 312–13; and see also Peter Freimark, “Language Behavior and Assimilation:The Situation of the Jews in Northern Germany in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 24 (1979): 157–77. On the attitudes of Wissenschaft des Judentums toward Yiddish, see the references in note 2 above. Recently, see Aya Elyada, “Contested Heritage: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Yiddish Biblical

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13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Zion: A Quarterly for the Research of Jewish History 86, no. 4 (2021): 563–91 [in Hebrew]. Among the many examples, one could note the works of Moritz Steinschneider, Max Grünbaum, Joseph Perles, Bernhard Heller, Bertha Pappenheim, Solomon Birnbaum, and Ludwig Strauß. Translations, reviews, and discussions on Old Yiddish texts also appeared in the leading German-Jewish journals of the time, such as the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Jüdische Volkskunde, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, and others. “Rewriting,” as proposed by literary critic André Lefevere, is a general term that can indicate translations, adaptations, paraphrases, anthologies, and similar texts that “are designed to adapt works of literature to a given audience and/or to influence the way in which readers read a work of literature”: André Lefevere, “‘Beyond Interpretation’ or the Business of (Re)Writing,” Comparative Literature Studies 24, no. 1 (1987): 30. See also André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992). In addition to the many studies of André Lefevere, see especialy the works of Susan Bassnett, Antoine Berman, Gayatri Spivak, Gideon Toury, and Lawrence Venuti. On the creation of a distinct German-Jewish subculture, see the by-now classic studies by David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland, 1780–1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994); Shulamit Volkov, Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne: Zehn Essays (Munich: Beck, 2001). Some of these essays appeared in English in Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), part 3. On the engagement of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jews with various aspects of the Jewish past and cultural heritage, and the important role it played in the formation of modern German-Jewish identity, see the references in note 1. This part is an abridged and revised version of Aya Elyada, “Bridges to a Bygone Jewish Past? Abraham Tendlau and the Rewriting of Yiddish Folktales in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no. 3 (2017): 419–36. Some of the contents appeared in Hebrew in Aya Elyada, “Between Rejection and Nostalgia: Yiddish as a Post-vernacular in Modern German-Jewish Culture,” Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 20 (2018): 6–26 [in Hebrew]. The information appears in the editor’s introduction to the second and shorter version of Abraham M. Tendlau, Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischerVorzeit, Gekürzte Neuausgabe (Berlin: Schocken, 1934), 8. For a comprehensive analysis of Tendlau’s work in the field of German-Jewish Volkskunde, see Elyada, “Bridges to a Bygone Jewish Past.” For a comparison between Tendlau’s work and the writings of German-Jewish folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Aya Elyada, “Deutsch-jüdisches Gelehrtentum und altjiddische Literatur: Zur Rehabilitierung einer vergessenen Tradition,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 11 (2017): 167–92. On the German-Jewish Volkskunde, see, e.g., in Birgit Johler and Barbara Staudinger, eds., Ist das jüdisch? Jüdische Volkskunde im historischen Kontext (Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde, 2010). See also Dani Schrire, “Anthropologie, Europäische Ethnologie, FolkloreStudien: Max Grunwald und die vielen historischen Bedeutungen der Volkskunde,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 109, no. 1 (2013): 29–54. Gabriele von Glasenapp, “From Text to Edition: Processes of Scholarly Thinking in GermanJewish Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 368–88, here esp. 370–71. Ibid., esp. 378–79.

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23. Abraham M. Tendlau, Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit: Nach den Quellen bearbeitet nebst Anmerkungen und Erläuterungen (Stuttgart: Cast, 1842) (2nd elaborated ed.: Stuttgart: Cast, 1845; 3rd elaborated ed.: Frankfurt am Main: Kauffmann, 1873). All further references are to the 3rd ed., Frankfurt am Main, 1873. 24. Glasenapp, “From Text to Edition,” 382. 25. On this point, see also in a review of Tendlau’s book, which appeared shortly after its publication: Raphael Kirchheim, [Review on Tendlau], Der Orient: Berichte, Studien und Kritiken für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur (Literaturblatt des Orients) 3, no. 42 (11 October 1842), 657–62, esp. 660–61. 26. This tendency was markedly bolstered in the subsequent editions of the book, where Tendlau added many stories from the Seyfer mayse nisim. Thus, of the sixty stories of the second edition, about one-third drew on Old Yiddish tales, either as their main source or as an additional one. This proportion persisted also in the third, enlarged edition. 27. “Gedenke der uralten Zeiten, Betrachte die Jahre voriger Geschlechter; Frage Deinen Vater, er wird Dir’s verkünden; Deine Alten, sie werden Dir’s erzählen.” (Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.) 28. Tendlau, Buch der Sagen und Legenden, intro., [v]–vi. 29. On this development in German-Jewish historiography, art, and literature, see also Nils H. Roemer, German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 76–80; Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 4; Hess, Middlebrow Literature, esp. intro. and chap. 2. 30. On this aspect, see, e.g., Roemer, German City, Jewish Memory, chap. 4: “Restoring the Lost Memory.” 31. The Mayse-bukh is a compilation of about 250 stories, edited and translated into Yiddish, from older, mainly Jewish sources. In addition to a large group of stories taken from the Talmudic and midrashic literature, the Mayse-bukh includes a second layer of stories stemming from the medieval German-Jewish settlements in the Rhineland and the Danube area, mainly from the circles of Hasidei Ashkenaz (the medieval Ashkenazi Pietists), and a third layer of international legends and folktales.Yuzpa Shammes’s Seyfer mayse nisim is an anthology of twenty-five fantastical stories, which combine historical narrative with fantastic, otherworldly elements. The stories recount the history of the Jewish community of Worms during the Middle Ages and the early modern period: its origins, its great medieval sages, and its relations with the Christian surrounding. On these two renowned seventeenth-century compilations of Old Yiddish folktales, see, e.g., Baumgarten, Introduction, chap. 10, with further references. 32. Roemer, German City, Jewish Memory, chap. 4. 33. On this point see also ibid., 79–81, 85–86. 34. For an illuminating discussion on the various aspects of the German-Jewish culture of nostalgia in general, and the genre of Ghettoliteratur in particular, see Cohen, Jewish Icons, chap. 4: “Nostalgia and ‘the Return to the Ghetto’”; Hess, Middlebrow Literature, chap. 2: “Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past” (with further references to literature on this genre). 35. Hess, Middlebrow Literature, 76. 36. Tendlau, Buch der Sagen und Legenden, intro., [v]–vi. 37. Cohen, Jewish Icons, 180; on this element in Kompert’s ghetto tales, see Hess, Middlebrow Literature, 83–84. 38. Tendlau, Buch der Sagen und Legenden, intro, vi–vii. 39. Abraham M. Tendlau, Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit: Als Beitrag zur Volks-, Sprach- und Sprichwörter-Kunde; Aufgezeichnet aus dem Munde des Volkes und nach Wort und Sinn erläutert (Frankfurt am Main: H. Keller, 1860). This is a compilation of more than one thousand Jewish-German proverbs and sayings, accompanied by explanations and etymological analyses.

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40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

Tendlau also provided stories—some of them from the Old Yiddish literature—that illuminated certain proverbs or pointed out their origin. Ibid., intro., esp. iii–iv. Ibid., intro., esp. vi. See, e.g., proverb no. 986, “E Wormser Neß!” no. 987: “E jüdischer Gamsu-letoowe!” and others. Tendlau discusses this point at some length in the introduction to the work: ibid., intro, vi, viii–ix. For Grossman and other scholars, this process was integral to the evolution (or rather invention) of the modern German Jew. See especially Grossman, Discourse on Yiddish, chap. 2: “Yiddish and the Invention of the German Jew” (quote from 107). And see also Grossman’s assertion in ibid., 109: “Yiddish thus evokes more than the image of ghetto life—it becomes the world of the ghetto internalized, from which freedom can be won only by linguistic and cultural disinheritance, that is, by expelling Yiddish from the projected canon of Jewish literature.” I borrowed the term from Hess’s book, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (2010), mentioned earlier in the text. See, e.g., the reviews in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (1842), Der Orient (1842), Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (1843), and Blätter für Literatur und bildende Kunst (1843). See, e.g., Abraham M. Tendlau, “Belletristik: Raschi und Gottfried von Bouillon; Eine jüdische Sage von A. Tendlau,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 7, no. 22 (1843): 328–30, and Abraham M. Tendlau, “Feuilleton: Mahram Merothenburg; Von A. Tendlau,” Der Israelit 6 (1865): 51–52, 66–67, 79–81. On this point, see also Roemer, German City, Jewish Memory, 86. On the engagement of Grunwald and Gaster with Old Yiddish folktales, see Aya Elyada, “Early Modern Yiddish and the Jewish Volkskunde, 1880–1938,” Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 2 (2017): 182–208. Bertha Pappenheim, ed. and trans., Allerlei Geschichten: Maasse-Buch. Buch der Sagen und Legenden aus Talmud und Midrasch nebst Volkserzählungen in jüdisch-deutscher Sprache. . . . Hrsg. vom Jüdischen Frauenbund (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, 1929). Ibid., intro., vii–viii. On Pappenheim’s translation of the Mayse-bukh and other Old Yiddish works, see Elizabeth Loentz, Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007), chap. 1. English translations from ibid., 45. Pappenheim, Allerlei Geschichten, intro., vii.Yet it should be noted that Pappenheim did acknowledge the potential contribution of the Mayse-bukh—and her German translation thereof—to modern scholarship; in particular, to Jewish cultural history, folkloristics, linguistics, and sociology: ibid., vii–viii. Ludwig Strauß, ed. and trans., Geschichtenbuch: Aus dem jüdisch-deutschen Maaßebuch; ausgewählt und übertragen von Ludwig Strauß (Berlin: Schocken, [1934]), quote from Nachwort, 74. Strauß maintains that he was mostly interested in the ones that were “markedly folktales” (ausgesprochene Volkserzählung), like those of the cycle of Hasidei Ashkenaz. See his “Anmerkungen”: Strauß, Geschichtenbuch, 76–80. Ibid., Nachwort, 75. See, e.g., Delphine Bechtel, “Cultural Transfers between ‘Ostjuden’ and ‘Westjuden’: German-Jewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture, 1897–1930,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 42 (1997): 67–83; Jeffrey A. Grossman, “From East to West: Translating Y. L. Peretz in Early TwentiethCentury Germany,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality,Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed.Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2000), 278–309; Jeffrey A. Grossman, “From Shtetl to Ghetto: Recognizing Yiddish in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 10, no. 2 (2016): 215–44;

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Sabine Koller, “On (Un)translatability: Sholem Aleichem’s Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories) in German Translation,” in Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics, and Art, ed. Gennady Estraikh et al. (London: Routledge, 2012), 134–49.

Bibliography Baumgarten, Jean. Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature. Edited and translated by Jerold C. Frakes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 [originally in French, Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1993]. Bechtel, Delphine. “Cultural Transfers between ‘Ostjuden’ and ‘Westjuden’: German-Jewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture, 1897–1930.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 42 (1997): 67–83. Brenner, Michael. Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History. Translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010 [originally in German, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006]. Cohen, Richard I. Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Elyada, Aya. “Bridges to a Bygone Jewish Past? Abraham Tendlau and the Rewriting of Yiddish Folktales in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no. 3 (2017): 419–36. ———. “Deutsch-jüdisches Gelehrtentum und altjiddische Literatur: Zur Rehabilitierung einer vergessenen Tradition.” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 11 (2017): 167–92. ———. “Early Modern Yiddish and the Jewish Volkskunde, 1880–1938.” Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 2 (2017): 182–208. ———. “Between Rejection and Nostalgia:Yiddish as a Post-vernacular in Modern German-Jewish Culture.” Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 20 (2018): 6–26 [in Hebrew]. ———. “Contested Heritage: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Yiddish Biblical Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Zion: A Quarterly for the Research of Jewish History 86, no. 4 (2021): 563–91 [in Hebrew]. Freimark, Peter. “Language Behavior and Assimilation: The Situation of the Jews in Northern Germany in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 24 (1979): 157–77. Glasenapp, Gabriele von. “From Text to Edition: Processes of Scholarly Thinking in GermanJewish Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, edited by Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, 368–88. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Grossman, Jeffrey A. The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. ———. “From East to West: Translating Y. L. Peretz in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.” In Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality,Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, edited by Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni, 278–309. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “From Shtetl to Ghetto: Recognizing Yiddish in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 10 (2016): 215–44. Hess, Jonathan M. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Horch, Hans Otto, ed. Handbuch der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016. Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Johler, Birgit, and Barbara Staudinger, eds. Ist das jüdisch? Jüdische Volkskunde im historischen Kontext. Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde, 2010. Kirchheim, Raphael. [Review on Tendlau]. Der Orient: Berichte, Studien und Kritiken für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur (Literaturblatt des Orients) 3, no. 42 (11 October 1842): 657–62.

56 | AYA ELYADA Koller, Sabine. “On (Un)translatability: Sholem Aleichem’s Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories) in German Translation.” In Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics, and Art, edited by Genaddy Estraikh et al., 134–49. London: Routledge, 2012. Lässig, Simone. “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung: Zur Bedeutung der Sprache im innerjüdischen Modernisierungsprozeß des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts.” Historische Zeitschrift 270 (2000): 617–67. Lefevere, André. “‘Beyond Interpretation’ or the Business of (Re)Writing.” Comparative Literature Studies 24, no. 1 (1987): 17–39. ———. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge, 1992. Loentz, Elizabeth. Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007. Lowenstein, Steven. “The Yiddish Written Word in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 24 (1979): 179–92. Matut, Diana. “Steinschneider and Yiddish.” In Studies on Steinschneider, edited by R. Leicht and G. Freudenthal, 383–409. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pappenheim, Bertha, ed. and trans. Allerlei Geschichten: Maasse Buch. Buch der Sagen und Legenden aus Talmud und Midrasch nebst Volkserzählungen in jüdisch-deutscher Sprache. . . . Mit einem Geleitw. von I. Elbogen. Hrsg. vom Jüdischen Frauenbund. Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, 1929. Römer [Roemer], Nils. Tradition und Akkulturation: Zum Sprachwandel der Juden in Deutschland zur Zeit der Haskalah. New York: Waxmann, 1995. ———. Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. ———. German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010. Schorsch, Ismar. From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Schrire, Dani. “Anthropologie, Europäische Ethnologie, Folklore-Studien: Max Grunwald und die vielen historischen Bedeutungen der Volkskunde.” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 109, no. 1 (2013): 29–54. Shmeruk, Chone. Yiddish Literature: Chapters in Its History. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1978 [in Hebrew]. Skolnik, Jonathan. Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824– 1955. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Stein, Leopold. Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben: Photographien nach Originalgemälden von Moritz Oppenheim; mit biographischer Einführung und Erklärungen von Leopold Stein. Frankfurt am Main: H. Keller, 1868. Strauß, Ludwig, ed. and trans. Geschichtenbuch: Aus dem jüdisch-deutschen Maaßebuch; ausgewählt und übertragen von Ludwig Strauß. Berlin: Schocken, [1934]. Tendlau, Abraham M. Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit: Nach den Quellen bearbeitet nebst Anmerkungen und Erläuterungen. Stuttgart: Cast, 1842 (2nd elaborated ed.: Stuttgart: Cast, 1845; 3rd elaborated ed.: Frankfurt am Main: Kauffmann, 1873). ———. “Belletristik: Raschi und Gottfried von Bouillon; Eine jüdische Sage von A. Tendlau.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 7, no. 22 (1843): 328–30. ———. Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit: Als Beitrag zur Volks-, Sprach- und Sprichwörter-Kunde; Aufgezeichnet aus dem Munde des Volkes und nach Wort und Sinn erläutert. Frankfurt am Main: H. Keller, 1860. ———. “Feuilleton: Mahram Merothenburg; Von A. Tendlau.” Der Israelit 6 (1865): 51–52, 66–67, 79–81. ———. Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit. Gekürzte Neuausgabe. Berlin: Schocken, 1934.

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Toury, Jacob. Der Eintritt der Juden ins deutsche Bürgertum: Eine Dokumentation. Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute, 1972. Turniansky, Chava. “Old Wine in a New Vessel: Maskilic Versions of the Tsene-rene.” In Let the Old Make Way for the New: Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry, edited by David Assaf and Ada Rapoport-Albert, 2:313–44. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2009 [in Hebrew]. Volkov, Shulamit. Die Juden in Deutschland, 1780–1918. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994. ———. Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne. Zehn Essays. Munich: Beck, 2001. ———. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Weinreich, Max. History of the Yiddish Language. Translated by Shlomo Noble. Edited by Paul Glasser. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008 [originally in Yiddish, New York: YIVO, 1973].

 CHAPTER 3

Orthodoxy as a German-Jewish Legacy

 Joshua Shanes

German Jewry and the Birth of Modern Judaism Modern Jewish history turns on the challenge of continuity, both in terms of unprecedented threats to physical survival as well as the need to reimagine and reconstruct Jewish identity and religion in light of the transformative dual challenges of emancipation and the Enlightenment. Germany—the birthplace of modern Jewish denominations as well as the Nazi regime that sought their destruction—sits at the heart of both of these stories. Early scholars of the German-Jewish experience—as well as Zionist and Orthodox polemicists—tended to dismiss German-Jewish history as the sad story of assimilation and decline. This narrative later gave way to a wave of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that demonstrated precisely the opposite, that the German-Jewish experience in fact produced unprecedented new models of Jewish vitality and creativity that in many ways anticipated and modeled the future of Jewish life beyond its borders. For example, David Sorkin (my doctoral advisor) launched his career by dismantling this unhappy platitude and demonstrating that nineteenth-century German Jewry experienced not assimilation but “transformation,” developing a new German-Jewish “subculture” without even realizing they were doing it.1 While Sorkin and others of his generation focused mostly on social history— sketching the socioeconomic transformation of German Jewry and the cultural building blocks of their new community such as the new Jewish press, grand synagogues, and secondary associations—perhaps no area highlights that community’s pathbreaking importance as much as the religious innovations they developed to serve these new types of Jews. Edifying, vernacular sermons, new rules of decorum, secularly educated rabbis and rabbinical seminaries to train them, new religious schools for

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children, liturgical change, and the Jews’ very division into religious denominations itself first emerged among German-speaking Jews before spreading beyond their borders. Previous forms of “Judaism” grounded in Jewish autonomy, rabbinic power, and self-evident commitment to Jewish law were no longer viable, and, in their place, modern denominations—including Orthodoxy—emerged to answer the basic questions of Jewish meaning, providing a religious expression compatible with an emancipated, middle-class German-Jewish life. Each grounded itself in a different set of texts and traditions to defend its authenticity. For example, Reform Jews downplayed the Talmud as outdated while drawing heavily on prophetic statements like Micah 6:8, emphasizing the centrality of humility and charity, while Orthodox Jews focused on rabbinic texts and the minutiae of ritual requirements that they demanded. “Modern” Orthodox rabbis drew on heroes who combined cultural integration with rabbinic erudition, like Maimonides, while the segregationist “ultra-Orthodox” leaders cited traditions that celebrated cultural and social separation. Each tended to pull their own “prooftexts” out of context, while deemphasizing their competitors’ material, in order to make their case for superior religious authenticity. Nevertheless, as we will see, Western denominations often agreed on more than they would readily admit. Scholars have not been shy about the critical role of German Jewry in developing these new models. Robert Liberles, for example, opened his history of German-Jewish Orthodoxy by writing bluntly: “Until its demise, German Jewry spoke for Judaism in modern times. From Moses Mendelssohn to Leo Baeck, German soil produced the spokesmen that would explain, defend, rationalize, and even alter the content and form of the Jewish expression for the Western world.”2 Adam Ferziger wrote similarly that German Orthodoxy, and particularly its hierarchical model of Judaism (discussed below), serves as a model for how Orthodoxy developed throughout most of Europe and beyond.3 On the other end of the religious spectrum, Michael Meyer’s magisterial history of Reform Judaism likewise focused on Germany as the birthplace of modern Judaism, writing that “although the American Reform movement soon greatly surpassed its European antecedent, it was its heir in ideology and forms.”4 And the former chancellor of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Ismar Schorsch, explained the “European origins of Conservative Judaism” in his biography of Zacharias Frankel (1801–75), the German-Jewish founder of “Positive-Historical” Judaism.5 In fact, as Leora Batnitzky documents, the very constitution of Judaism as a “religion”— an individual commitment separate from the political or national spheres—was a product of German Protestantism, particularly the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher.6 To be sure, there has certainly been critical pushback against this model as well. Already in 1983, in a conference organized by the great Jewish historian Jacob Katz, scholars (some of them his own students) emphasized the variety of paths to modern Jewish life, even in the West. Todd Endelman, for example, argued for the “Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England.”7 More recently, David Sorkin’s magisterial history of Jewish emancipation highlighted the complex and varied processes toward emancipation that evolved in different times and places.8 Still, most of those scholars admit the

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critical role that German Jews played as a model and influence on other Jewish communities, whether positive or negative. All of those Western communities grappled with similar questions as German Jews and—often with German-Jewish influence—tended to land in similar places. For example, German-style “neo-Orthodoxy” (see below) was forged and led in Britain by its first “chief rabbi,” Nathan Adler (1803–90), who arrived from Germany in 1844. It ultimately shared much in common with its German counterpart, although, lacking serious religious competition or a similar struggle over emancipation, British Orthodoxy expressed itself in ways that reflected local influences.9 In contrast, Jews of the Ottoman Empire—and Middle Eastern Jews beyond it— followed a different trajectory to modernity. Younger scholars of Sephardic and Arab Jews insist that if we move away from a worldview centered on German Jews—a natural bias considering this was the birthplace of Jewish studies—we can identify other possibilities of modernization.10 Instead of denominations, for example, we see uniquely Sephardic models of religious evolution and acculturation that predate the Western Enlightenment, including an iteration of acculturated observance and faith different than either German neo-Orthodoxy or Hungarian-style ultra-Orthodoxy, and certainly quite different than German or American versions of Reform. Guy Miron and others still argue that the categories created by German-Jewish studies, such as “assimilation,” “acculturation,” and hyphenated identities, offer critical tools to understanding the Arab-Jewish (specifically Iraqi) experience.11 Nevertheless, the point is well taken that while German-Jewish models may apply to the modern Jewish experience in the West, including in contemporary America and much of Israel, there are wide swaths of the Jewish world who entered modernity through a different portal. This approach to Jewish history that my teachers derived from the German-Jewish experience—emphasizing and documenting creativity and redefinition over assimilation and demise—has guided my own scholarship as well. My first book, for example, analyzed the birth of Jewish nationalism, which I argued served primarily as a form of Jewishness for modernizing Jews searching for Jewish authenticity without traditional religious observance rather than as a political strategy to respond to antisemitism. It traced how the first Zionists responded to modernization by reimagining the very nature of Jewish identity to fit into a rapidly nationalizing and secularizing environment.12 Modern denominations successful in Germany worked less well further East, even in the area of the German Kulturbereich where I worked (Galicia). Here, Jewish nationalism, political Orthodoxy, and Jewish socialism arose with competing answers to the same essential questions about Jewish meaning that Western denominations sought to answer for their communities: What are Jews—a religion, a nation, or an ethnicity? What constitutes the boundaries of Jewish authenticity? What are the Jews’ most important texts, traditions, and rituals, and which can be discarded? What is the sacred past on which they should build their community, and what is the destined future? What is the meaning of the land of Israel and exile, and what is the Jewish relationship to non-Jews among whom they live? Even language itself divided these factions.13

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Jewish nationalists, for example, insisted that Jews constituted a secular, political nation deserving the same political rights as Ukrainians, Poles, or any other national group. Zionists glorified the Maccabee and Bar Kochba rebellions above all other historical eras, and Hanukkah and its celebration of militarism above all other religious rituals. For many, the land of Israel served only as a symbol of Jewish nationhood, although a minority intended to achieve national rights there in the pre-messianic present. Traditional religious observance such as Shabbat or kosher food was irrelevant for most of them; instead, loyalty to the party and the struggle for national rights constituted Jewish authenticity, while opposition to them constituted “assimilationism.” In contrast, Orthodox political parties—devoted to traditional religious observance and clerical power but now expressing themselves through modern political forms— accepted the idea of Jewish peoplehood but rejected most forcefully any notion of Jews establishing a political state in the pre-messianic present. Zionists preferred biblical texts and liturgy that emphasized the centrality of the land of Israel, albeit repurposed beyond their original messianic intent, while the Orthodox emphasized rabbinic texts focused on ritual commandments and traditional homiletic reinterpretation of the Bible. This led to ironies like Zionists in Galicia railing in print and at rallies—in Polish—that Jews constituted a modern nation based on Hebrew, which they could not understand, while Orthodox leaders who could not speak Polish supported Polish Conservatives, with whom they felt religious affinity based on their shared commitment to traditional ritual observance and clerical power. Meanwhile, self-described liberal “assimilationists” who viewed Jews as constituting only a religion published a Hebrew-language journal supporting Polish national identity combined with Jewish pride. “Who is more assimilated,” Vienna’s chief rabbi Moritz Güdemann (1835– 1918) reportedly asked, capturing the essence of this modern predicament, “the nationally minded Jew who ignores the Sabbath, or the observant Jew who feels himself to be a German?”14 In short, the German-Jewish model of denominations selectively drawing on texts, traditions, and history to present their own vision of Jewish authenticity was operative here as well, even if the Zionists and others gave different answers. Like those models, Zionism presented itself—indeed, it still presents itself—as self-evidently authentic and eternal despite clear evidence of its own modernity. Zionism, in other words, is best understood as a competing form of Jewishness rather than as simply a political movement to (re)create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This is why Galician Zionists—like American Zionists today—focused not on mass immigration to Palestine but rather on building a robust program of domestic political engagement that (in their case) succeeded in 1907 to seat the first Jewish nationalist party in a European parliament, the subject of my research funded generously by the Westheimer award.15 Much of my first book and subsequent publications focused on the relationship of the nascent Zionist movement to Orthodox and specifically Hasidic society, which was far more complex and varied than commonly understood. For example, the early Yiddish press in Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) highlighted the sharp distinction

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between traditional Jews—ritually observant but unfamiliar with modern notions of nationality or religious denominations, let alone state politics—and “Orthodox” Jews, modern Jews voluntarily choosing a form of Jewishness in conscious contradistinction from other competing forms, with which they were quite familiar.16 From this foundation, I moved to write a complete history of Orthodoxy, from its German foundations through today, blending my interest in the historic and contemporary, the local and transnational, while allowing me to return to my roots in German-Jewish studies. This is my current project.

Orthodox Politics and the Politics of Orthodoxy Orthodoxy, whether as a modern expression of Judaism or as a form of modern Jewish politics, is a relatively young field of research. Until relatively recently, scholars tended to treat Orthodoxy as a barely adulterated continuation of premodern Judaism, the last gasp of a world destined to be replaced by its modern religious and political competitors. Pioneering work by Moshe Samet, Jacob Katz, Michael Silber, and others documenting the modernity and innovations of Orthodoxy as a religious denomination began only a generation ago, while Ezra Mendelsohn, Gershon Bacon, Rachel Manekin, and others brought attention to Orthodoxy as a modern political option even more recently than that.17 As a result of their work, as well as the manifest (and unexpected) success of Orthodox communities in the United States and Israel both demographically and politically, the subject is today both a hot topic of academic research and is widely discussed in popular media. The success of the Netflix film Unorthodox—along with other “off the derech” literature (i.e., memoirs of formerly Orthodox Jews)—is but one sign of broad interest in these communities by outsiders.18 Yet ignorance of their history, origins, and contemporary configurations remains widespread, even among some scholars. Orthodox—literally “right believing”—and Orthodoxy typically refer to an accepted tradition, doctrine, or practice. Within a Jewish context, it is broadly understood to refer to those Jews who most strictly observe the strictures of rabbinic law, particularly in regard to gender roles and sexuality, food consumption, and Sabbath restrictions, as codified in the sixteenth-century legal code, the Shulchan Aruch, and its subsequent commentaries. The word itself reinforces the self-conception of its adherents of their own religious fidelity, but at the same time, and this view is shared by many outside their camp, it reinforces their perception that they are authentically perpetuating premodern Jewish forms. Thus, for some outsiders, Orthodoxy signifies ossified rituals divorced from moral progress, while insiders consider it the highest form of divine service—but both tend to view it as an authentic reproduction of premodern forms, despite superficial changes. In reality, Orthodoxy is no less a product of modernity than its religious and political competitors. Like them, Orthodoxy followed the end of Jewish autonomy and

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represents a range of self-conscious attempts to negotiate a Jewish identity that feels authentic and unchanged in the radically new context of the voluntary community in a post-traditional world. Born in Germany and a product of its unique conditions at the start of the nineteenth century—an acculturating, upwardly mobile Jewish population moving slowly from an autonomous to a voluntary community expected to prove its worthiness for emancipation—Orthodoxy has manifested itself in a variety of competing forms over the past two centuries since that time. These range from the “neo-Orthodox” West European religious denomination committed to social and cultural integration to the ultra-Orthodox “Haredim” committed to segregation, from the strictly religious to the explicitly political, from the starkly antinationalist to the messianic Zionist. All of them share the basic condition first born in Germany: a voluntary community innovating new theology and social structures to accommodate it while attempting to hide these innovations through a variety of strategies and all the while keenly aware of competing Jewish and non-Jewish options —including apostasy—and the Jews’ freedom to choose from among them. Despite the contentiousness of its initial adoption over two centuries ago, the term “Orthodox” has since been proudly embraced and defended by its leaders. Throughout its history, and especially today, battles over its meaning and its boundaries have constituted one of Orthodoxy’s defining features as well as a source of deep contention. Indeed, as Adam Ferziger notes in his classic history of German Orthodoxy, its very identity was often built more around boundaries than theology. “The cultivation of group identity,” he concludes, paraphrasing Emil Durkheim, “may result more from defining who is not within the fold than from agreeing on a set canon of common values.”19 In other words, the Orthodox struggle to agree on a shared set of values—but they know heresy when they see it—and by excluding Jews beyond the pale, they claim authenticity under the banner of “Orthodoxy.” Germany is the birthplace of the very term “Orthodoxy,” which entered the Jewish lexicon from Protestant usage in Germany in the late eighteenth century. It evolved from its initial meaning at that time of an ideological movement opposed to the Enlightenment into a denominational label for the Jewish group(s) opposed to religious reform in practice, based on competing views of the divinity of Jewish texts.20 By the time Jacob Ettlinger (1798–1871) launched the first Orthodox newspaper in 1845, the Treue Zionswächter, with the masthead goal to promote “the interests of Orthodox Judaism,” Orthodox Jews had developed a sense of community identity behind the label.21 Nevertheless, the term’s use was controversial and its meaning and boundaries highly contested, both from within and outside the community. A key moment in its emergence as a denomination came in response to the Hamburg Reform Temple in 1817, which rallied rabbinical forces against Reform and led to the beginning of the congealment of an “Orthodox” movement, in the newer sense of the term. Scholars widely regard this as the start of both Reform and Orthodox denominations.22 In particular, the initial insistence by Reform Jews that they remained loyal to Halakhah (Jewish law) led to the rise of the Orthodox innovation to elevate

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custom to the level of law in order to fight reforms that were technically permissible but religiously suspect to traditionalist rabbis who feared that they would lead down a slippery slope to more serious transgressions.23 By midcentury, Orthodoxy had learned to assert itself and to create new models of religious life to allow it to thrive in the unprecedented environment of an emancipated, and increasingly acculturated, German-Jewish community. Although they all shared a core commitment to ritual observance and belief in the divine origins of both the written and oral (i.e., rabbinic) Torah, Orthodoxy evolved in a number of directions in Central Europe. “Neo-Orthodox” groups dominated, embracing secular education, acculturation, and even social integration. Led most famously by Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) and Esriel Hildesheimer (1820–99), the theology of neo-Orthodoxy—which Hirsch called “Torah im Derekh Eretz” (meaning tradition and modernity organically bound together)—was actually developed first by Hirsch’s teacher Isaac Bernays (1792–1849), appointed rabbi in Hamburg in 1821.24 Unlike the response to liturgical change a generation earlier, neo-Orthodox leaders defended acculturation, ritual leniencies and change (including liturgical change), and the reinterpretation or adaptation of tradition to fit in their local (German) environment. For example, Hildesheimer ruled that the Shabbat morning Torah reading could be held in the afternoon to accommodate students returning from school, a leniency that would be almost unimaginable today. They defended most changes by declaring them religiously neutral, undercutting the sense of hallowed sanctity of custom that we saw in the initial Orthodox response to early Reform.25 Neo-Orthodoxy shares many qualities with contemporary “Modern Orthodoxy,” particularly its embrace of acculturation and secular education, but they are different phenomena, most obviously in neo-Orthodoxy’s nearly universal rejection of Zionism, a foundation of Modern Orthodoxy today.26 In contrast, ultra-Orthodox groups led by men such as Moses Sofer (1762–1839) in Pressburg (today Bratislava) rejected all of these things, famously declaring in a halakhic pun, “Everything new is forbidden by the Torah.” Originally referring to the prohibition of consuming wheat from a new harvest before bringing a portion to the Jerusalem Temple, Sofer pulled the Talmudic line out of context to argue that modernity itself, particularly acculturation, was prohibited by the Torah.27 Ultra-Orthodoxy achieved its greatest success in Hungary, where men like Akiva Joseph Schlesinger (1838–1922) collected prooftexts to defend resistance to even the mildest forms of acculturation or minutest change to ritual practice.28 All of these groups, including the ultra-Orthodox that claimed to reject change, developed innovative institutions—schools, synagogues, voluntary associations, even newspapers—to define and maintain a specifically Orthodox Jewish subculture.29 Orthodox Jews faced a new problem that their traditional ancestors did not. Jewish communities historically had mechanisms for addressing religious deviants, but they never envisioned a situation in which the deviants constituted the vast majority of the community. German Jewry was the first to address this problem theologically but also

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socially, because German Jews remained, even after emancipation, legally bound to a single Jewish community to which they paid taxes that supported a wide variety of community institutions. In addition to the theological issue of the halakhic status of Reform Jews, Reform conquest of the communities beginning in midcentury raised the problem of the halakhic status of community institutions such as synagogues, ritual baths, burial societies, communal kitchens, and more. In general, Orthodox Jews responded by developing an innovative theology of religious hierarchy that enabled them to maintain a sense of Jewish community while insisting that they alone represented authentic Judaism. Ettlinger applied the halakhic category of “Tinok she-nishba,” an infant taken captive by non-Jews and thus unaware of their transgressions, to excuse the so-called deviance of later generations of Reform Jews and avoid most consequences of their nonobservance. In the eyes of Orthodox Jewish leaders, Reform Jews remained Jews but of a lower rank. This approach was largely replicated in other denominationally divided communities, including today’s largest in the United States and Israel, despite the very different circumstances of those two places.30 That said, different approaches evolved within this theological model. Hirsch responded to the rise of Reform Judaism by severing his relationship with the non-Orthodox altogether, fighting much of his adult life for the right to form a separate Orthodox community, which the Prussian legislature passed in 1876, and then fighting (mostly unsuccessfully, even in his own community of Frankfurt am Main) to convince other Orthodox Jews to join him in separating.31 Hirsch considered Reform Jews beyond the pale, not even counted in prayer quorums, and refused to work with them even on matters of shared interest like fighting antisemitism. For example, Hirsch and the newspaper connected to him (Der Israelit) ignored or even attacked Jewish defense organizations like the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Union of German-Jewish Communities), the only nationwide Jewish organization in existence to fight the outbreak of political antisemitism in the 1870s. In contrast, Esriel Hildesheimer in Berlin—following the lead of Rabbi Seligman Bamberger (1807–88) and others—used the threat of an Orthodox exodus (which he had strongly backed) to extract concessions from the Reform leadership sufficient to satisfy their religious needs, such as Orthodox control over burial, communal kitchens, and support for Orthodox religious spaces, but thereafter advocated for a united community.32 He did so both on theological grounds, the traditional deference to a united Jewish community, and out of practical necessity, particularly after the rise of political antisemitism in Germany beginning in the 1870s. Unlike Hirsch, for example, Hildesheimer supported both the Gemeindebund and its more important successor, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith). Similarly, though opposed to Zionism, Hildesheimer was so committed to supporting Jewish life in Palestine that he even backed the orphanage there pushed by the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), whom Hildesheimer otherwise rejected as a heretic. (Graetz taught at Zacharias Frankel’s “Positive-Historical”

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Figure 3.1. Samson Raphael Hirsch, before 1889. Portrait by E. Singer (Xylographische Anstalt). In the collection of the National Library of Israel. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

rabbinic seminary in Breslau, whose graduates’ religious credentials Hildesheimer rejected prima facia.)33 Germany, in short, was the birthplace of modern denominational Judaism, and although the hubris of supremacism is often attributed only to the Orthodox, in fact each denomination—Reform, Positive-Historical (today “Conservative”), Neo-Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox, and eventually Zionist—claimed to inherit the mantle and authority of authentic Judaism, as each still does today.34 To be sure, Orthodox denominations have a reasonable argument. They do capture an aspect of premodern Judaism in their continued demand for ritual observance and in their belief of the divine authorship of both the Bible and rabbinic traditions. Nevertheless, they have also changed in dramatic ways, first and foremost by virtue of the voluntary nature of their new communities and of their self-conscious, free religious choices.

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Moreover, most Orthodox Jews in Germany shared much in common with their non-Orthodox erstwhile brethren, including an embrace of Enlightenment and secular learning, a veneration of Moses Mendelssohn, a rejection of Jewish mysticism, a redesigned synagogue with decorum and an edifying (vernacular) sermon, rabbi pastors trained at modern rabbinic seminaries (Hildesheimer established the first Orthodox seminary), a passionate nationalist patriotism and (later) absolute opposition to Zionism, and a commitment to achieving middle-class education and respectability (“Bildung”).35 In fact, the very insistence that Judaism constituted a religion and not a nation was among its most central innovations.36 In most ways, neo-Orthodox Jews actually had far more in common with their Reform co-nationals—with whom they disagreed so dramatically on the authority of Jewish law and the divine nature of the Torah—than with traditional Jews in Eastern Europe or the Levant. This distinction returns us to our starting point on the role of German-Jewish studies in understanding Orthodoxy and modern Jewish history more generally. Nineteenth-century Germany saw the foundation of “Orthodoxy” as a denominational (“religious”) identity based on fidelity to Halakhah, its divinely authored texts, and to its contemporary rabbinic authorities, developing a highly adaptive and innovative theology grounded in a theory of hierarchy within Judaism. The path to modernity developed differently in Eastern Europe, however, where Hasidism remained strong, where Jews continued to occupy a unique (and far poorer) socioeconomic role in a region barely past feudalism, and which remained a multiethnic society in which millions of Jews maintained their own language and a far more robust ethnic identity. The German model of an integrated, Orthodox religious denomination barely takes hold. Instead, Orthodoxy emerges here as a political movement. They compete mainly against forms of socialism and especially Zionism unknown further West, and in this different context they develop Orthodox forms quite different than Germany or elsewhere in Western Europe, despite continuing German-Jewish influence, as we will see. Orthodox leaders in Galicia formed the first Orthodox political party in 1878, Machsike Hadas (Upholders of the Faith),37 followed a generation later by the more famous Agudath Israel, a union of Polish Hasidic and German Neo-Orthodox leaders established in 1912.38 Although today more closely associated with the East European Orthodox, especially Hasidim, much of the initial leadership and direction of the organization came from Germany, especially from the separatists in Frankfurt.39 German Orthodox leaders also inspired and funded the revolutionary Bais Yaakov school system for girls, started by Sarah Schenirer in Krakow in 1917, which today boasts over a thousand branches and is a pillar of ultra-Orthodox society.40 The “Aguda” (as it became known) was committed to opposing Zionism and worked to rally Jews to their competing political organization against the Zionists and socialist heretics, as they saw them.41 Paradoxically, that competition—and the sociopolitical environment that produced it—led them to adopt many ideas of Jewish nationalism, even as they remain steadfast opponents of the secular Zionist movement and its religious Zionist iterations. For example, the Aguda’s Knessia Gedola (Great Assembly)

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was explicitly designed to mirror the Zionist Congress. Similarly, the Aguda developed a youth movement (to compete with Zionists and Jewish socialists), a newspaper, and a workers’ movement, and even advocated for Jewish settlement in Palestine, setting up an immigration office and a settlement fund to compete with the Zionists’ Jewish National Fund.42 The Polish members of the Aguda, and even more so their Hungarian ultra-Orthodox rivals, strongly opposed German neo-Orthodoxy’s embrace of secular studies and acculturation. Nevertheless, all of these groups, including the German neo-Orthodox, shared a basic conservative political outlook and preference to ally with right-wing, even antisemitic political movements rather their social democratic competitors. For example, although Hirsch and Hildesheiemer both advocated progressive ideals and democracy (a goal only pushed by the socialists at the time), by the 1880s—precisely when political antisemitism became a serious factor—the German Orthodox were a fundamentally conservative political force.They eventually threw their weight behind the Catholic Zentrum party even as it openly embraced antisemitism and pushed antisemitic candidates. “In the long run,” writes Mordechai Breuer, “the common interests of Orthodoxy and the Zentrum in political questions regarding schools and religion overcame all qualms, and after [1906 they] … remained loyal to the party and did not change this attitude even when Zentrum allied itself with the strongly anti-Semitic Conservatives in 1912.” Meanwhile, the Orthodox press there branded the social democrats “traitors to the country” and wrote that the Jewish socialists were no Jews. And yet the Orthodox—like the Christians—would demand liberal rights when it suited them. As Breuer writes, If it was politically expedient they would stress their basically conservative attitude and would, above all, joyfully join the chorus of “cultural conservatism.” On the other hand, they turned the theses of liberalism to their account if it was a matter of insisting on their rights as a religious minority. Internally intolerant, they demanded external tolerance in the sense of demanding liberal conduct by the state. In this their policy resembled the Catholic Zentrum. Thus a tactical political community of interests arose that steered many Orthodox spokesmen and voters towards the Zentrum party. The inner religious contradiction inherent in the Orthodox Jewish-Catholic accord, which was felt to be so even in unsophisticated pious circles, yielded to the image of a spiritual fellowship between believing Jews and Christians.43 The same approach manifested throughout prewar Orthodoxy. Machsike Hadas, as noted above, allied itself with Polish conservatives, the elite power in Galicia, and against liberals, social democrats, and the Ukrainian nationalists.44 Russian Orthodox leaders attempted to reach a rapprochement with the tsar at the height of his antisemitic repression, expressing shared animosity toward leftist Jews in the hopes of winning political concessions.45 The Polish Aguda backed the conservative, business-friendly Piłsudski regime after his overthrow of Poland’s democratically elected government in 1926.46 And

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in Germany, the Aguda and the Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Judaism wrote Hitler himself in October 1933 to declare their loyalty to his regime and their shared hatred of Marxist materialism and communist atheism, including a denunciation of leftist Jews!47 This political orientation has become highly relevant today as scholars work to understand the seemingly sudden support of Orthodox Jews for the radical right, both in Israel and particularly in the United States. American Orthodoxy today, like much of Christianity, has increasingly coalesced around an ethnonationalist identity that views the political right and its ultranationalist worldview, both in America and in Israel, as a religious foundation united against the threat of the cultural left, and has increasingly absorbed these nationalist values into the center of its religiopolitical identity as it celebrates the ethnic aspects of Jewish tradition over the prophetic and rabbinic traditions of humanism and social equality. This political tribalism blends in new ways with the growth both in Israel and the United States of ethnonationalist strands of Zionism, which is particularly pronounced among Orthodox Jews. The overwhelming anti-Zionist consensus of Orthodox Jews a century ago has almost totally evaporated in favor of a technical anti-Zionism among some ultra-Orthodox but a de facto “Israelism” (support for “Greater Israel” combined with antipathy toward Palestinians) among almost all of them; and therein lies the rub. The postwar division until recently had fallen largely between Haredi and centrist Orthodox Jews, who accepted the reality of the secular Israeli state and worked with it but insisted that it carried no theological significance, and religious Zionists, who insisted that the state was the manifestation of messianic redemption, or at least a holy endeavor whose religious character must be ensured. The distinction between these groups increasingly grows dimmer, even if it formally remains, in part because both share similar political sympathies, even if only some incorporate innovative Zionist ritual and liturgy into their religious faith and practices. This contemporary reality in both the United States and Israel highlights both the strengths and limits of the earlier German-Jewish models for understanding today’s Orthodox. On the one hand, Orthodox Jews today maintain that sense of hierarchy and “religion” in which non-Orthodox Jews are recognized as such but viewed as inferior or, in some cases, even traitorous. Moreover, German and East European Orthodoxy’s tendency to ally with conservative, even antisemitic, political forces as part of its religiopolitical identity clearly connects them to the contemporary reality. On the other hand, their fundamental opposition to Jewish nationalism has almost completely evaporated, both in Israel and America, even as American Orthodox continue to imagine themselves as constituting a religious community in this multicultural setting. In short, the study of Orthodox Jews bridges the gap between earlier generations of scholars that saw the German-Jewish experience as the central story of modern Jewish history and younger scholars today pushing to expand our research and models beyond Germany and test the extent to which these categories may or may not apply to other communities.48

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Today, in a sense, all Jews—certainly at least in Europe, America, and (in many ways) Israel—are German. All Jews who chose to live as Jews do so in voluntary communities with a range of religious options, most of which first emerged in Germany. As David Ellenson concludes, “All Jews who struggle with the Tradition in the modern West employ, as the German Orthodox did, a new language to awaken and defend ancient faith and tradition.”49 Traditional Jewish life is gone. Modernity engendered, as Peter Berger famously wrote, a “heretical imperative.” “For premodern man,” he writes, “heresy is a possibility—usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative.” Not only choice, he writes, but also defensiveness against heresy and creative solutions to hiding one’s own modern reconstruction. They suffer a sense of fragility unknown to traditional Jews.50 The transformation of Judaism into a religion, evidenced as much by Orthodoxy as any other Jewish denomination, and its sense of hierarchy—of superiority—within the Jewish people are global realities today.The only question is what direction the Orthodox will choose to go in the future. Joshua Shanes is associate professor of Jewish studies and director of the Arnold Center for Israel Studies at the College of Charleston. The author of numerous publications on modern Jewish politics and religion, including Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge, 2012), he is currently writing a history of Orthodoxy from its German origins until the twenty-first century as well as a reader of Orthodox documents.

Notes 1. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2. Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 3. Liberles’s gendered formulation should be expanded to include pathbreaking women such as Regina Jonas (1902–44), the first woman rabbi in Jewish history. See Stefanie Sinclair, “Regina Jonas: Forgetting and Remembering the First Female Rabbi,” Religion 43, no. 4 (2013): 541–63. 3. Adam Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 16, 186–92. The exception, he writes, is Hungary, birthplace of the ultra-Orthodox denomination of Moses Sofer and others, which never took root in Germany. 4. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xii. 5. Ismar Schorsch, “Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism,” Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Life & Thought 30, no. 3 (1981): 344–54. 6. Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 25ff. 7. Todd Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England,” in Toward Modernity:The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987), 225–46; cited in Guy Miron, “Toward a Transnational Jewish Historiography: Reflections on a Possible Future Path for the German-Jewish Past,” in The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

Question of Antisemitism, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021), 229. David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Eugene Black, “The Anglicization of Orthodoxy: The Adlers, Father and Son,” in Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe 1750–1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 295–325. Robert Liberles emphasizes the greater confidence of British and French Orthodox in light of the absence there of religious schism or a political battle over emancipation. Liberles, Religious Conflict, 229–30. See, for example, Matthias Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Julia Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Yaron Ayalon, “Rethinking Rabbinical Leadership in Ottoman Jewish Communities,” Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 323–53. Miron, “Toward a Transnational Jewish Historiography,” 234–35. Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5. Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism, 11, 51. The first of two major articles coming out of that project—“The ‘Bloody Election’ in Drohobycz: Violence, Urban Politics, and National Memory in an Imperial Borderland”—appeared in Austrian History Yearbook 53 (2022), 121–49. Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism, 109–48. Moshe Samet, “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism 8, no. 3 (1988): 249–69; Jacob Katz, “Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 2 (1986): 2–17; Michael Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminar, 1992), 23–84; Mendelsohn, Jewish Politics; Gershon Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916–1939 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996); Rachel Manekin, “Orthodoxy and Politics: The Galician Example,” in Orthodox Judaism: New Perspectives, ed.Yosef Salmon, Aviezer Ravitzky, and Adam S. Ferziger (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006), 447–70 [in Hebrew]. See, for example, Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015), and Leah Vincent, Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation after My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood (New York: Doubleday Press, 2014). See also the recent anthology of short memoirs edited by Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020). Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy, 191. Jeffrey Blutinger, “‘So-Called Orthodoxy’: The History of an Unwanted Label,” Modern Judaism 27, no. 3 (October 2007): 310–28. Judith Bleich, “The Emergence of an Orthodox Press in 19th Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 42, nos. 3–4 (1980): 326; Mordechai Breuer, Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 166–73. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 53–61; Jacob Katz, “The Controversy over the Temple in Hamburg and the Rabbinical Assembly in Braunschweig: Milestones in the Development of Orthodoxy,” reprinted in Jacob Katz, Divine Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), 216–54. On the Orthodox prohibition of prayer in the vernacular, see Ira Bedzow, “Minhag Israel Torah He (The Custom of Israel Is Torah): The Role of Custom in the Formation of Orthodoxy,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 57 (2012): 121–44.

72 | JOSHUA SHANES 24. Liberles, Religious Conflict, 18. On “Torah Im Derech Erets” in Hirsch’s theology, see Matthias Morgenstern, From Frankfurt to Jerusalem: Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 168–87. 25. David Ellenson, “German Jewish Orthodoxy: Tradition in the Context of Culture,” in Wertheimer, Uses of Tradition, 5–22. Adam Ferziger discovered a religious conflict not only within Orthodoxy, and within Neo-Orthodoxy, but even within the group of neo-Orthodox who rejected communal separation. See his analysis of the debate over how to treat the ashes of cremated Jews, which he sees as a reflection of local influence between Hamburg and Altona. Adam Ferziger, “The Hamburg Cremation Controversy and the Diversity of German-Jewish Orthodoxy,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 56 (2011), 175–205. 26. Alan Brill, “What Is ‘Modern’ in Modern Orthodoxy?” in Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road not Taken, ed. Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Steven Bayme (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 172–92. On Hirsch’s polemics with non-Orthodox Jews and his rejection of Zionism, see Ephraim Chamiel, The Middle Way: The Emergence of Modern Religious Trends in Nineteenth-Century Judaism (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2014). 27. Jacob Katz, “Towards a Biography of the Hatam Sofer,” in Malino and Sorkin, Profiles in Diversity, 223–66. 28. While the ultra-Orthodox leaders did draw on halakhic prooftexts, in light of their revolutionary effort to extend their own power and add layers of legal restrictions, homiletic sources proved far more useful. For example, they cited the story of ancient Israelites earning redemption from Egyptian slavery—despite having become idol worshipers—by virtue of their having maintained their unique language, fashion, and names. This popular story never had legal significance before this time. Silber, “Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy,” 47–62. 29. Bleich, “Emergence of an Orthodox Press,” 323–44. 30. Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy, 99–105, 186–91. Ferziger is careful to point out, however, that East European Orthodoxy in contrast tended to eschew this model and insist that they represented not only their own constituents but all Jews. 31. For a scathing indictment of Hirsch’s separatism, by a congregant who otherwise revered him, see Samy Japhet, “The Secession from the Frankfurt Jewish Community under Samson Raphael Hirsch,” Historia Judaica 10, no. 2 (1948): 99–122. Markus Horowits (1844–1910) was appointed rabbi by Hirsch’s opponents in Frankfurt, where he led the local united Jewish community (Einheitsgemeinde) for decades. See Isaac Heinemann, “Supplementary Remarks on the Secession from the Frankfurt Jewish Community under Samson Raphael Hirsch,” Historia Judaica 10, no. 2 (1948), 123–34. 32. Jacob Katz, A House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century European Jewry (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 257–72. 33. David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 73–114, esp. 101–8. On the division between Hirsch and Hildesheimer, as well as the third approach of Markus Horowitz who fully embraced the unified community, see Adam Ferziger, “Constituency Definition: The Orthodox Dilemma,” in Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2004), 2:535–67. 34. Breuer, Modernity within Tradition, 35. Ismar Schorsch writes similarly: “Whereas radical Reform cavalierly used history to legitimate its course of action and Hirsch continued to obligate through the dogma of a single act of exhaustive revelation, Frankel transmuted history into a conserving force, a generator of commitment.” In other words, Positive-Historical (later “Conservative”) Judaism alone struck the authentic balance between evolution and commitment. Schorsch, “Zacharias Frankel,” 354. 35. Yaakov Zur, “German Jewish Orthodoxy’s Attitude toward Zionism,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press,

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36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

1998), 107. On Hirsch’s deeply felt German patriotism and identity, see Matthias Morgenstern, “Rabbi S. R. Hirsch and his Perception of Germany and German Jewry,” in The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, ed. Steven Aschheim and Vivian Liska (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 215–30. Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion, 40–43; Breuer, Modernity within Tradition, 24, 77–80, 287–96. See Manekin, “Orthodoxy and Politics.” See Bacon, Politics of Tradition, and Alan L. Mittelman, The Politics of Torah:The Jewish Political Tradition and the Founding of Agudat Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 94–140. See the short memoir by Jacob Rosenheim (1870–1965), editor of the flagship German Orthodox paper Der Israelit and a founder (and later president) of Agudat Israel, defending Hirsch’s communal exit in light of later events. Jacob Rosenheim, “The Historical Significance of the Struggle for Secession from the Frankfurt Jewish Community,” Historia Judaica 10, no. 2 (1948), 135–47. Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019), esp. 109–11, 129–32. German Orthodox writers also provided the first textbooks and literature for Bais Yaakov students. “The interdependence of German Orthodoxy, spiritually trained by the ideal of community independence, and the east-European giants of Torah, still deeply rooted in unadulterated Jewish history, created Agudath Israel which, no longer on the basis of the individual community, but on a nation-wide scale, struggles with a historical Zionist nationalism for the soul and the spiritual future of the Jewish people.” Rosenheim, “Historical Significance,” 145. Gershon Bacon, “Imitation, Rejection, Cooperation: Agudat Yisrael and the Zionist Movement in Interwar Poland,” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 85–94. The title of the book highlights the extent to which Orthodoxy had barely begun to be seen as a pillar of modern Jewish politics at the start of this century, Bacon’s contribution notwithstanding. Breuer, Modernity within Tradition, 337. Rachel Manekin, “The New Covenant: Orthodox Jewish Political Alliances with Polish Catholics in Galicia (1879–1883),” Zion 64, no. 2 (1999): 157–86 [in Hebrew]. Vladimir Levin, “Orthodox Jewry and the Russian Government: An Attempt at Rapprochement, 1907–1914,” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 2 (2009), 187–204. Bacon, Politics of Tradition, 265–72. Marc Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg 1884–1966 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), 225–33. See, for example, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), in which German-Jewish history dominates most chapters. Later editions added new sections, finally adding material on Mizrahi Jews (and more sources written by women) in 2010, but its German-Jewish focus remains clear. David Ellenson, “German-Jewish Orthodoxy,” 22. Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative (New York: Anchor Press, 1979), 28–30.

Bibliography Ayalon,Yaron. “Rethinking Rabbinical Leadership in Ottoman Jewish Communities.” Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 323–53. Bacon, Gershon. The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916–1939. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996. ———. “Imitation, Rejection, Cooperation: Agudat Yisrael and the Zionist Movement in Interwar Poland.” In The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, edited by Zvi Gitelman, 85–94. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.

74 | JOSHUA SHANES Batnitzky, Leora. How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Bedzow, Ira. “Minhag Israel Torah He (The Custom of Israel is Torah): The Role of Custom in the Formation of Orthodoxy.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 57 (2012): 121–44. Berger, Peter. The Heretical Imperative. New York: Anchor Press, 1979. Black, Eugene C. “The Anglicization of Orthodoxy: The Adlers, Father and Son.” In Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe 1750–1870, edited by Frances Malino and David Sorkin, 295–325. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Bleich, Judith. “The Emergence of an Orthodox Press in 19th Century Germany.” Jewish Social Studies 42, nos. 3–4 (1980): 323–44. Blutinger, Jeffrey. “‘So-Called Orthodoxy’: The History of an Unwanted Label.” Modern Judaism (October 2007): 310–28. Breuer, Mordechai. Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Brill, Alan, “What Is ‘Modern’ in Modern Orthodoxy?” In Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken, edited by Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Steven Bayme, 172–92. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019. Chamiel, Ephraim. The Middle Way: The Emergence of Modern Religious Trends in Nineteenth-Century Judaism. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2014. Cohen, Julia. Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Ellenson, David. Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. ———. “German Jewish Orthodoxy: Tradition in the Context of Culture.” In The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, edited by Jack Wertheimer, 5–22. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992. Endelman, Todd. “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England.” In Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, edited by Jacob Katz, 225–46. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987. Ferziger, Adam. “Constituency Definition: The Orthodox Dilemma.” In Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, edited by Jack Wertheimer, 2:535–67. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2004. ———. Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. ———. “The Hamburg Cremation Controversy and the Diversity of German-Jewish Orthodoxy.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 56 (2011): 175–205. Heinemann, Isaac. “Supplementary Remarks on the Secession from the Frankfurt Jewish Community under Samson Raphael Hirsch.” Historia Judaica 10, no 2 (1948): 123–34. Japhet, Samy. “The Secession from the Frankfurt Jewish Community under Samson Raphael Hirsch.” Historia Judaica 10, no. 2 (1948): 99–122. Katz, Jacob. “Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 2 (1986): 2–17. ———. A House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998. ———. “The Controversy over the Temple in Hamburg and the Rabbinical Assembly in Braunschweig: Milestones in the Development of Orthodoxy.” Reprinted in Jacob Katz. Divine Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility, 216–54. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998. ———. “Towards a Biography of the Hatam Sofer.” In Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe 1750–1870, edited by Frances Malino and David Sorkin, 223–66. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

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Lehmann, Matthias. Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Levin, Vladimir. “Orthodox Jewry and the Russian Government: An Attempt at Rapprochement, 1907–1914.” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 2 (2009): 187–204. Liberles, Robert. Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt Am Main, 1838–1877. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1985. Manekin, Rachel. “Orthodoxy and Politics: The Galician Example.” In Orthodox Judaism: New Perspectives, edited by Yosef Salmon, Aviezer Ravitzky and Adam S. Ferziger, 447–70. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006 [in Hebrew]. ———. “The New Covenant: Orthodox Jewish Political Alliances with Polish Catholics in Galicia (1879–1883).” Zion 64, no. 2 (1999): 157–86 [in Hebrew]. Mendelsohn, Ezra. On Modern Jewish Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Meyer, Michael. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Mittleman, Alan L. The Politics of Torah:The Jewish Political Tradition and the Founding of Agudat Israel. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. Miron, Guy. “Toward a Transnational Jewish Historiography: Reflections on a Possible Future Path for the German-Jewish Past.” In The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin, 229–37. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021. Morgenstern, Matthias. From Frankfurt to Jerusalem: Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Boston: Brill, 1995. ———. “Rabbi S. R. Hirsch and his Perception of Germany and German Jewry.” In The GermanJewish Experience Revisited, edited by Steven Aschheim and Vivian Liska, 215–30. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Rosenheim, Jacob. “The Historical Significance of the Struggle for Secession from the Frankfurt Jewish Community.” Historia Judaica 10, no. 2 (1948): 135–47. Samet, Moshe. “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy.” Modern Judaism 8, no. 3 (1988): 249–69. Schorsch, Ismar. “Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism.” Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Life & Thought 30, no. 3 (1981): 344–54. Seidman, Naomi. Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019. Shapiro, Marc. Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg 1884–1966. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999. Silber, Michael. “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition.” In The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, edited by Jack Wertheimer, 23–84. New York: Jewish Theological Seminar, 1992. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “The Émigré Synthesis: German-Jewish History in Modern Times.” Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 531–59. ———. Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Zur, Yaakov. “German Jewish Orthodoxy’s Attitude toward Zionism.” In Zionism and Religion, edited by Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, 107–15. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998.

 Part II

Nation, Belonging, and Communities in the Early Twentieth Century

 CHAPTER 4

Contested Contextualizations Relating German-Jewish History to the History of Colonialism

 Stefan Vogt

The contextualization of Jewish history, especially when this context is the history of colonialism and racism, is still a rather difficult and contested endeavor. This is particularly the case in Germany, where heated debates about the relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia, about continuities or discontinuities between German colonialism and National Socialism, and above all about the singularity of antisemitism and the Holocaust have made it difficult to even raise these questions.1 This chapter argues that it is indeed important to relate Jewish history, and German-Jewish history in particular, to the history of colonialism and racism. Such contextualization makes it possible to identify aspects of Jewish history that would otherwise remain obscure; opens up the field to important methodological developments; and allows us to appreciate the full significance of Jewish history, which goes well beyond the field itself. Contextualizing German-Jewish history with respect to the histories of colonialism and racism can also produce important new insight into these contexts themselves, that is, the study of the history of colonialism and racism. At the same time, such contextualization is indeed a tricky thing, as it can lead to false conclusions, oversimplifications, and the disappearance of particularities. However, as I will argue in this chapter, it is certainly possible to do it in a critical and careful way that avoids these pitfalls and their normative implications. This is especially the case if a historical-empirical approach is used. Instead of discussing the topic on a purely theoretical level, or searching for direct continuities and conclusive causalities, it makes much more sense to look at empirical cases where Jewish history and colonial history actually intersected. A particularly good topic for this approach is the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), the most important colonialist pressure group in the German Empire (and beyond) and one of the major nationalist associations of the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 In this Society, antisemites and colonialists did indeed meet. Although the Society during the Kaiserreich never adopted an antisemitic program or officially voiced antisemitic positions, many antisemites joined its ranks, and there was meaningful overlap between activists of the Society and those of explicitly antisemitic organizations. At the same time, the Society had a significant number of Jewish members, several of whom ranked among its leaders. This meant that antisemitism from within the German Colonial Society could also be directed at Jews inside the Society itself. As a colonialist organization, the Society’s ideological orientation included various forms of racism. Thus, it was a meeting place not only for Jews, colonialists, and antisemites but also for antisemitism and racism. This chapter looks at the case of Ernst Vohsen (1853–1919), one of the most prominent members of the Society with a Jewish background, and his confrontation with Max Robert Gerstenhauer (1873–1940), a staunch antisemite and the chairman of the Society’s chapter of Meiningen in Thuringia. It will demonstrate that Gerstenhauer’s attacks against Vohsen were clearly antisemitic but also fused by a harshly racist rejection of Vohsen’s relatively moderate position on the politics regarding the colonized. Both motives, in fact, became closely intertwined. It will also demonstrate that Vohsen’s reaction to these attacks was to mobilize his credentials as a German patriot rather than to confront Gerstenhauer’s antisemitism. Vohsen felt that he would be more successful in defending himself as a German rather than as a Jew, and he was right about this. With this example I will show that colonialism could provide an important but also a highly ambivalent and precarious path to national integration for German Jews. Moreover, I will argue that even if antisemitism and racism worked with different arsenals of arguments, these arguments could be easily connected, especially in the context of colonialism. Vohsen’s position in the colonial movement can thus serve as an example to illustrate the potential of an approach that contextualizes German-Jewish history, and the history of antisemitism, with respect to the histories of colonialism and racism.

Why Contextualization Matters There is good reason to consider Jewish history, and German-Jewish history in particular, as something unique and singular. The one most salient reason, of course, is the Shoah, a truly singular attempt to build an entire nation, and to secure its position of undisputed global hegemony, through the complete extermination of a racially defined group. Also in a more general sense, and beyond its manifestation in the Shoah, antisemitism has unique features. Only antisemitic ideology has the powerful potential to “explain” practically everything, from capitalism to communism to the coronavirus crisis; is capable of transforming a single delusional idea into a comprehensive Weltanschauung; and is almost unlimitedly flexible in its actual manifestations.3 It works with a very specific set of tropes and semantics, which includes, for example, the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy, the allegation that Jews are internal and often disguised

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enemies of the nation, and the inversion of the actual structures of hegemony into the notion that Jews would dominate, or even colonize, non-Jews. Antisemitism thus has a distinct and very central role in the political and ideological structure of modern societies.4 This peculiarity of antisemitism alone makes Jewish history a special case. However, neither antisemitism nor Jewish history emerged and exist in a historical vacuum. Jewish history may very well be unique, but it is not solitary. In the case of German-Jewish history, this is meanwhile increasingly being recognized. Recent studies have followed an integrative approach, considering Jews as active protagonists of modern bourgeois society in Germany, in its emergence, development, and conflicts.5 Therefore, German-Jewish history is no longer seen as a separate entity but as part and parcel of German history. Both Jewish and non-Jewish cultures are now considered dynamic fields, the borders of which are constantly being negotiated and contested.6 Concepts such as “influence” or “contribution” have been replaced by the notions of interaction and intersection. Steven Aschheim has coined the term “co-constitution” to denote this approach.7 In my own work, I have used the concept of “positioning,” taken from the work of the postcolonial scholar Stuart Hall, to expand and sharpen this approach.8 This concept emphasizes that the co-constitution was not necessarily being done harmoniously or on an equal basis, and that it also involved struggles for recognition and against discrimination and persecution. The fields in which the positioning took place were uneven fields, structured by hierarchies and power relations. However, they were common fields that were commonly constructed. This is also the case with respect to the field of colonialism. Recent scholarship has shown that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism had an enormous influence on German politics and culture, even if the German colonial empire only lasted for about thirty years, from the mid-1880s to 1918.9 As a major element of German history, it was of course also a major context for German-Jewish history. German Jews were active in various colonial contexts, such as the colonial movement, colonial economics, and colonial politics, but also anticolonial discourses and practices.10 Given the social and cultural setup of the Jewish population in Germany, it would be extremely surprising if they were not. By the end of the nineteenth century, most German Jews belonged to the bourgeois middle classes, which were the main social bases of the colonial movement. More importantly, however, colonialism affected the ways Jews saw themselves, saw their position within society, and were seen by non-Jewish members of society. As recent studies have shown, colonial ideas, imaginaries and politics were present in all segments and layers of German society, from small and big business to everyday life, and from academic scholarship to popular culture. They were particularly prominent in debates about national identity and belonging.11 In addition, the position of Jews in German society was in several respects that of a colonized minority. For instance, the scholarship on and representation of Jewish history was for a long time considered the domain of Christian theology, very similar to the way Europeans claimed authority over non-European histories and cultures.12 Colonialist tropes figured prominently in non-Jewish discourses about Jews, whereas

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in colonialist discourses antisemitic tropes were used to make racist discrimination seem plausible and legitimate.13 This overlapping of colonialist and antisemitic discourses suggests that contextualizing German-Jewish history with the history of colonialism must go beyond recognizing that Jews co-constituted colonial, and anticolonial, ideologies and practices. In fact, there are genealogical and structural relationships between Jewish history and the history of colonialism that need to be explored in order to fully understand these histories. If colonialism is seen not only as the political rule over foreign territory but also as the establishment of the hegemony of Europe, or “the West,” over the rest of the world through political, economic, and cultural means, in a process that reconfigured Western societies as well, the position of the Jews both in the West and in the rest of the world was necessarily codetermined by it. For example, as we will see later in this chapter, colonialism was an important field in which the question of whether Jews belonged to the German nation was discussed, negotiated, and fought over. Conversely, if the constitutive role of antisemitism for the development of Western modernity is taken seriously, it follows that also colonialism was structurally affected by it. Moreover, the mutual applicability of certain elements of racist and antisemitic ideology to Jews and colonial Others shows that these ideologies have been developed not only alongside but also in connection with each other. This is particularly obvious for the period since the end of the nineteenth century, when, in interrelated processes, antisemitism and racism became increasingly radicalized. In this period, these ideologies were also frequently propagated by the same individuals or in the same organizational frameworks.14 Thus, to really assess how closely antisemitism and racism, and more generally Jewish history and the history of colonialism, were intertwined, and to understand the structures of mutual codetermination and influence, it is necessary to look at the actual intersections of these histories. Such an empirical approach prevents us from imposing hierarchies on this relationship that are generated by specific theoretical concepts or even by political considerations. It is also important to make clear that contextualizing Jewish history and the history of antisemitism does not mean reducing these histories to mere aspects of their respective contexts. Even if antisemitism, for instance, is structurally and genealogically connected to racism, it is not just a variant of it. Rather, the substance and the implications of this connection can only be seen if the two phenomena are understood as being different.15 If this chapter calls for a critical and careful contextualization of Jewish history and of the history of antisemitism, it does not imply the marginalization of Jewish history in favor of the history of colonialism or the subsumption of antisemitism under an overarching concept of racism. It does imply, however, that Jewish history and the history of antisemitism cannot be properly understood on their own. This approach also rejects any notion that introduces a competition between the experiences of Jews and other groups, between the destructiveness of antisemitism and racism, or between the necessity of fighting against either of them. Instead, I assert in this chapter that antisemitism

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and racism can only be confronted together. German-Jewish studies should be a part of this combined struggle. This does not necessarily mean that scholars should turn themselves into activists of some sort or another. This must be everyone’s own choice. However, it does mean that it is imperative to engage intellectually and critically with the histories and presents of antisemitism, racism, and colonialism. In this sense, contextualizing German-Jewish history with respect to the history of colonialism and racism is itself a decidedly political approach. It contributes to a joint effort to criticize, deconstruct, and fight antisemitism, racism, and (neo)colonialism. But also on the analytical level, German-Jewish history addresses fundamental political questions that reach beyond its own field. If related to the context of colonialism and racism, it can be shown that the structures of inclusion and exclusion, of minority cultures and politics, and of discrimination based on religion, culture, or “race” that characterized German-Jewish history have a much broader significance than only for the relatively small Jewish segment of the society. German-Jewish history, and Jewish history in general, can serve as a specific yet paradigmatic and influential case for the study of some of the most basic tensions and dynamics of modern society. This includes questions of identity and belonging, conflicts about equality and difference, and the relationship between universalism and particularism.16 Historically, German-Jewish studies have always been a political endeavor. In their best traditions, these studies have been understood as a way to confront domination, discrimination, and delusion. This was true, for example, for the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century, for the German-Jewish émigré scholars who set up the Leo Baeck Institute after World War II, for George Mosse and his students in the United States, and for the founders of the discipline of German-Jewish history in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. The scholars who represented these traditions knew that the political significance of their work reached beyond Jewish history itself. If future scholarship in German-Jewish history wants to live up to these traditions, its protagonists need to be as politically alert and as open-minded as their predecessors. They must not see Jewish history as a completely separate entity, vigorously defending its boundaries and jealously guarding its singular significance. This, in fact, is a sure recipe to make it insignificant. Instead, they must lead the field into an active conversation with other fields and disciplines, including colonial history and postcolonial studies. Contextualizing German-Jewish history, especially if this context is the history of colonialism and racism, not only appreciates the full historical weight of this history but also allows this history to speak to the social, cultural, and political problems of today. It is exactly this potential of German-Jewish studies that also makes the field a compelling one for me. If German-Jewish history is considered and studied within its historical and political contexts, it can serve as a key to understanding some of the most important elements of modern society and to assessing their political relevance, both historically and for today. If it is seen as related and intertwined with colonial history, it can be a starting point for confronting racism and antisemitism, both in their historic and in their current manifestations, together and without the need to decide which of

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the two is more serious, dangerous, or evil. To be sure, Jewish history is also relevant in its own right, both because of the pervasiveness and aggressiveness of anti-Jewish sentiments, ideologies, and politics and because of the co-constitutive role of Jews in the process of creating modern (and also premodern) society. This relevance, however, is greatly enhanced if Jewish history is seen as actively related to its historical and political contexts. Considering how deeply and comprehensively colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial structures are woven into modern societies, including German society, colonialism must be seen as one of the most important of these contexts, maybe even the most important one. The following case study will provide a glimpse into this. It is part of a larger endeavor to write the history of the relationship of colonialism and the Jews in Germany.17

Ernst Vohsen and the German Colonial Society Established in 1887, the German Colonial Society was actually a merger of two previous organizations, the Deutscher Kolonialverein (German Colonial Association) and the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation (Association for German Colonization). From these two precursors, it inherited a somewhat ambivalent character. Whereas the Kolonialverein was led by an illustrious assemblage of representatives of finance and industrial capital, prominent scholars, and influential politicians, the Gesellschaft was dominated by a crowd of “agitated petit bourgeois,” as Klaus Klauß has noted.18 The agenda and the ideological position of the two organizations also differed significantly. The Gesellschaft, in which radical nationalist, völkisch, and also antisemitic ideas were particularly prominent, immediately embarked on projects of colonial acquisition and settlement—especially in East Africa. The Kolonialverein, in contrast, had a more liberal-conservative profile and concentrated on propagating the colonial idea in the German public, mobilizing business interests for colonial politics and lobbying politicians to this end. It was also much closer to the government and strove to establish itself as a counseling institution for the latter rather than an oppositional force to it. After the merger, the now established Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft incorporated elements of both these profiles. However, the more moderate and less petit bourgeois character of the former Kolonialverein clearly dominated the new organization. The membership of the German Colonial Society was significantly more middle class than its leadership.19 The vast majority of the members were small or medium-size business owners, medium and lower-level officials of state, provincial or municipal governments, military and naval officers, and professionals such as lawyers, physicians, teachers, and priests. The number of members rose from an initial fifteen thousand in 1887 to a bit more than forty-three thousand in 1914, declining again during and especially after World War I. Nevertheless, the Colonial Society remained a strictly elitist organization, especially when compared to other nationalist pressure groups. Not only

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did the middle-class members represent the upper strata of the local societies in the small and midsize towns where the organization was strongest but the hierarchical structure of the organization also guaranteed that its politics were determined by the representatives of big business, politicians, and military figures who populated its presidium, executive committee (Ausschuss), and board of directors (Vorstand). It is impossible to determine how many of the members of the Colonial Society were Jewish, as the surviving membership lists do not provide religious affiliations.20 The available information, however, suggests that a significant number of Jews—or people considered Jewish by some members of the non-Jewish public—were among them. If we look at the higher echelons of the Society, for example, we are able to identify a number of prominent Jewish bankers, politicians, and professionals. Here we can find, for instance, the bank director Hugo Oppenheim, the member of the Reichstag and of the Preußische Abgeordnetenhaus (Prussian State Legislation) Otto Arendt, the biologist and Zionist activist Otto Warburg, and the businessman Eduard Arnhold. Another member of particular prominence was Ernst Vohsen. Vohsen was born to Jewish parents in Mainz in 1853.21 He was nonobservant and a “free thinker,” as described by a contemporary. Nevertheless, Vohsen never converted to Christianity, instead remaining Jewish throughout his life.22 Moreover, although he did not refer to his Jewish background in any of his publications or public statements, it was obviously common knowledge. After the Franco-Prussian War, Vohsen went to France and began working for French colonial trading companies. He worked for several years for one of those companies in the British colony of Sierra Leone before replacing Carl Peters as the head representative of the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (German East-African Society, DOAG) in East Africa, which at that time executed the sovereignty and administrative powers assumed there by the Germans.23 After the uprising in the coastal area in 1888 and 1889 and the subsequent transformation of East Africa into a regular German colony, Vohsen returned to Germany, where he took over the publishing house Dietrich Reimer in Berlin, turning it into one of the most important publishers of scholarly colonial literature and cartography of the time.24 He also became a top-ranking official and held a number of offices within the movement. He was, among other things, a member of the board of directors and the executive committee of the German Colonial Society, a director of the Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Settlement Society for German Southwest Africa), the founder and coeditor of the journal Koloniale Rundschau, and a member of the Kolonialrat (Colonial Council), which was an advisory body to the Foreign and Colonial Offices. He was also active in a number of other “patriotic” organizations, notably the Deutsche Flottenverband (German Naval Society), where he was a member of the board of directors, and the Hauptverband deutscher Flottenvereine im Ausland (Association of German Naval Societies Abroad), of which he was the vice president. Within the Colonial Society he was one of the most active and vocal among the leading members. Vohsen died in June 1919, just a few days before Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles and thus reluctantly ended its colonial endeavor.

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One topic that Vohsen was particularly committed to was the so-called “Eingeborenenpolitik”—the question of the cultural potentials of Indigenous populations, their roles in the economy and society of the colonies, and the policies that should be directed toward them. Here,Vohsen held pronouncedly moderate views, especially compared to the radical views of many other members of the Colonial Society. On many occasions, he spoke out against the exploitation of black workers on the plantations and the inhumane conditions they had to live in, against the expropriation of Indigenous communities by declaring their land to be “unclaimed” and thus belonging to the state, and against the various forms of forced labor which existed in the colonies.25 Vohsen vehemently argued against the racist ideology that claimed Blacks were not able to or would shy away from work. “The negro is not a better or a worse person than the European,” he wrote. “Just as the European, he is willing to work as soon as he is allowed to make use of the products of his work.”26 Vohsen tirelessly tried to convince his colleagues that the economy of the colonies should not be based on plantations and settlements but on “Eingeborenenkulturen,” small-scale agricultural and artisanal production by the Africans themselves. This form of production, Vohsen argued, not only would improve the life of the Indigenous population but also was capable of producing significant profits and would thus benefit both the colony and the Reich.27 Emphasizing the economic efficiency of a more humane “Eingeborenenpolitik” was a major instrument for Vohsen to gather support for his ideas, but it was also a genuine reason why he believed such a policy was necessary. To be sure, Vohsen was convinced that the colonizers had a humanitarian obligation toward the colonized.28 However, the guiding principle of his attitude toward the colonies was the “Nutzbarmachung der Eingeborenen,” the activation and utilization of the Indigenous population.29 For Vohsen, the right of Germany to exploit the colonies economically was never in doubt, and neither was its right to dominate the colonized societies.30 He fully subscribed to the notion that Germans, and more generally Europeans, were culturally superior to Africans. Colonialism, he believed, would be to the benefit of African populations because it provided the possibility for their cultural and moral advancement. They would be able to enjoy the enormous achievements of German culture and thus eventually accept German rule.31 In line with many widespread colonial convictions and racial theories of the time, Vohsen was also convinced of the existence of an essential difference between the white and the black races, and that the mixing of races should be prohibited wherever possible.32 What set Vohsen apart from many of his colleagues in the Colonial Society, however, was that he objected to an aggressive pronouncement of the supposed superiority of whites and to the legal discrimination of Blacks.33 For him, the hierarchy between races was a result of culture and history, not of biology. In fact, he insisted that “the negro is distinguished from the European only by his color.”34 Vohsen wrote these words in his introduction to the German edition of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, which he published, along with other works of the African American leader, in his own publishing house. For Vohsen, Washington had shown that through cooper-

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ation and education, Blacks were able to join Europeans “as people equal in rights and equal in abilities” in the endeavor to advance mankind.35 Not only did Vohsen insist that the “improvement” of Africans should not destroy their ethnic identity, but he also considered the development of a racial consciousness among Blacks to be a cultural achievement.36 On this basis, Vohsen called for a collaboration between Europeans and Africans. “Only if the two races cooperate [zu gemeinsamer Tätigkeit sich verbinden],” he wrote in the first editorial to his journal Koloniale Rundschau, “if the negro becomes, in a sense, our associate [Mitarbeiter], will it be possible to lift the treasures of our colonies and to create important goods for the global trade.”37 These ideas earned him a lot of dissent and even anger among his colleagues in the Colonial Society. In fact, his suggestions and motions in the field of “Eingeborenenpolitik” were almost always rejected by the majority of the Society, which insisted on clear separations and strict hierarchies between colonizers and colonized.38 At least in this respect he was pretty isolated in the leadership of the colonial movement. A case in point was the debate on this topic after Bernhard Dernburg, another colonial reformer of Jewish descent, had assumed the post of colonial secretary in 1907.39 In March 1908, Dernburg presented his vision of a reformed colonialist policy, which was more or less identical to Vohsen’s, to the Reichstag. The Colonial Society immediately felt the need to develop a stance with respect to this new policy. Initially, they entrusted Vohsen with the task of reporting about the Reichstag debates and recommending a position. Vohsen, of course, suggested following Dernburg’s path. The Colonial Society, he argued, should adopt the idea of “Nutzbarmachung” of the Indigenous population; support the development of “Eingeborenenkulturen” instead of plantations and settlement; and fulfill its humanitarian obligation to promote decent working conditions, social welfare, and cultural “improvement” of Africans. Vohsen urged his colleagues to acknowledge and appreciate the existence of a community of interests between Africans and Europeans, although he insisted that “we are the educators and they are the pupils.”40 Obviously, this concept was far from calling European domination into question. Nevertheless, it provoked a sharp critique from other leading members of the Society. Wilhelm Schroeder-Poggelow, for instance, who was a member of the executive committee, wanted the Society to unequivocally support the plantations and to dismiss all calls for a better treatment of the Blacks. Richard Hindorf, one of the founders of Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial Economic Committee), a suborganization of the Society, rejected vehemently any concession toward the equality of the Africans and insisted that the Germans must maintain their position as “Herrenvolk” (master folk).41 Already in the meetings of the executive committee ahead of the June general assembly, it became clear that Vohsen stood very much alone. At the general assembly itself, the majority strongly rejected his position, with many of the discussants voicing radically racist convictions and calling for a rigid racial hierarchy in the colonies. Instead of a statement of support for the new colonial secretary, the Society finally passed a resolution to the Reichstag, which, with only little diplomatic adornment, expressed its discontent with Dernburg’s policy. It demanded that “the supremacy of

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the white population in the colonies over the natives . . . must be retained” and that “everything must be avoided that might endanger the existence and the purity of the German People [Volkstum] and subvert respect for the whites.”42

Vohsen versus Gerstenhauer Whereas Vohsen’s adversaries in the Colonial Society did not refer to his Jewish descent in this conflict, at least not publicly, they did so on other occasions. A particularly interesting case is his confrontation with Max Robert Gerstenhauer in 1905. Gerstenhauer was a member of the Pan-German League and active in various völkisch circles before he became one of the leaders of the antisemitic Deutschbund in 1911. In his capacity as chairman of the Meiningen chapter of the Colonial Society, he launched a vigorous attack against the Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika, of which Vohsen was one of the directors. Gerstenhauer accused Vohsen of using the Siedlungsgesellschaft to actually obstruct the settlement efforts in the colony by driving up the prices for land and cattle. This, he believed, had to do with Vohsen’s unduly pro-Indigenous position and his objection to the assertion of supremacy of white German settlers over Africans. A fierce dispute ensued in the pages of the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung and other papers, as well as at the general assembly meeting in Essen in June 1905.43 In this dispute, Gerstenhauer’s allegations against Vohsen clearly had an antisemitic subtext. To begin with, picking Vohsen, who was only one of the leading figures of the Siedlungsgesellschaft, was hardly an accidental choice. Gerstenhauer targeted him not only in this capacity but also as a prominent figure in the Colonial Society, where he felt that Vohsen had way too much influence.44 The charges themselves were full of antisemitic stereotypes. Gerstenhauer accused Vohsen of exploiting the settlers through speculation with land and cattle, and of pursuing a colonial policy “that is not to the benefit of the German people as a whole but serves the interest of certain groups.”45 Moreover, he insinuated that Vohsen had played a crucial role in instigating the uprising of the Hereros by weakening the settlers and calling for a reduction of the Schutztruppe, the German military forces in South West Africa, and that he had therefore endangered German rule in the colony.46 Finally, Gerstenhauer claimed that Vohsen would subvert the race consciousness and national identity of the Germans when he propagated equal rights for Blacks instead of “total subordination” and when he supported Black self-affirmation by publishing Booker T. Washington’s autobiography.47 Vohsen understood this antisemitic subtext very well. At the time, antisemitism was a well-established political force in the Kaiserreich, even if the antisemitic parties were already past their heydays. Organizations such as the Pan-German League and the Gobineau Society developed it into an ever more radical ideology based on racial theories, while many social circles and certain professions were still inaccessible for Jews, legal equality notwithstanding.48 Vohsen, of course, knew all this. At the general assembly meeting in Essen he concluded that his adversaries had attacked him “for

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reasons which I do not want to go into but must only be too obvious to you gentlemen.”49 Vohsen pointed to the fact that he was singled out for this attack, despite the Siedlungsgesellschaft being actually a foundation of the Colonial Society, and that the accusations against him amounted to nothing less than charging him with “Vaterlandsverrat,” treason against the nation.50 Also, the unusual vigor with which he rejected these accusations indicates that he felt there was more at stake than his position in the Siedlungsgesellschaft. Vohsen published a series of self-defending and counterattacking articles in various newspapers, and he turned to a rather aggressive tone when speaking against Gerstenhauer and his associates in Essen.51 From his reactions it is obvious that he considered this an existential threat to his position. Despite all this, however, Vohsen refrained from calling Gerstenhauer’s antisemitism by its name, and he never acknowledged that he was Jewish. Rather, he emphasized his belonging to the leadership of the Colonial Society and that those attacks would therefore insult not only him but also his peers. His strategy against the antisemitic assaults was thus to stress his integration into the national community of which the Society saw itself as a standard bearer. In the specific case under investigation, this strategy worked. The leadership of the Society did in fact defend Vohsen against the accusations, and his speech in Essen was met, as the protocol notes, with “prolonged applause.”52 This also suggests that even if antisemitism was pervasive in significant parts of the German society, including its elites, it was not part of the official self-image of the German Empire, and its range and vigorousness were still fluid. Open aggression against German Jews in particular was not usually considered permissible among respectable and pro-government circles such as the leadership of the German Colonial Society.53 The antisemitic attacks against Vohsen, however, did not subside. The colonial movement, it seems, was an ambivalent place for Vohsen. On the one hand, it provided the possibilities for extraordinary social advancement and profound integration. Despite being Jewish, Vohsen was generally accepted as one of the leading representatives of this movement. In fact, his Jewishness was never officially an issue in the Colonial Society, and there is not a single case where it had openly been discussed there. Even in the volume of the Koloniale Rundschau that was dedicated to his memory, it was mentioned only once and in passing.54 On the other hand, the colonial movement was a place where Vohsen had to deal directly with antisemitism. Even though the German Colonial Society did not endorse antisemitic views, and despite its official religious and political neutrality, it contained strong antisemitic currents.55 Vohsen had to navigate these currents, and he did so by de-emphasizing both his own Jewish background and the antisemitism within the Society. His position in the Society was very strong and very central, but it was nevertheless also precarious. Against this background, the fact that his Jewishness was rarely mentioned, and the fact that Vohsen chose not to emphasize the antisemitic content of the attacks against him, can also be seen as a sign of incomplete acceptance, of an integration under reserve. It suggests that this integration was only possible if this Jewishness was deliberately disregarded. If a nationalist organization such as the German Colonial Society, with an open flank

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to antisemitism, was an important location for the inclusion of German Jews into the bourgeois society, this inclusion could only be precarious and incomplete. In Vohsen’s case, this corresponded with his specific political position within the colonial movement. It was not by accident that his adversaries combined their accusations with the critique of his “soft” approach in the field of “Eingeborenenpolitik,” as it allowed them to cast doubts on his national reliability. This, of course, was an allegation that was only too familiar to Jews. Similar accusations were made against other Jewish colonialists such as Bernhard Dernburg, who was also criticized that he was too “friendly” toward the colonized.56 While this did not really work in Vohsen’s case, his position on these issues certainly placed him at the margins of the Society, despite all his prominence and activism. It is interesting to note that the obituary that the secretary of the Colonial Society contributed to the edition of the Koloniale Rundschau dedicated to Vohsen’s memory was not only short but also rather distanced in tone. Written in 1919, just after Germany’s defeat, it also focused on Vohsen’s close relationship to France, as well as on his work to protect the birds of paradise in the South Pacific, rather than on his colonialist achievements.57 Due to the lack of personal documents, it is not possible to say much about the motives that led Vohsen to his views. Obviously, both humanistic and economic reasons were involved. It is possible, however, that in the striving of the colonized for self-determination he discerned an echo of the Jewish struggle for emancipation. His interest in the writings of Booker T. Washington can be seen as an indication for this. In any case, Vohsen’s was a quite specific version of colonialist ideology that was shared by only a small number of colonial activists in Germany. Not only did he argue for a more humane treatment of Africans, but he also ascribed to them an unusually high level of autonomy and equality. At the same time, it was a colonialist ideology in every respect. Vohsen was totally convinced that Europeans were culturally superior to Africans, that it was necessary to educate and “advance” them, and that European countries had every right to dominate and exploit their colonies. Vohsen’s colonialist ideology, it seems, was as ambivalent as his position in the colonial movement and in the German Colonial Society.

Conclusion Vohsen’s position was by no means that of a critic of colonialism, not even that of a proponent of a “humanitarian” colonialism (which is a contradiction in terms anyway). It was, however, a position at the margins of the colonial movement, despite his prominent role in the German Colonial Society. Whereas the mainstream of the movement increasingly insisted on a racially defined Herrenstandpunkt (position as unrestricted masters) of the Germans vis-à-vis the colonized, Vohsen emphasized the necessity of the development of their economic agency. In doing so, he presupposed a certain amount of autonomy and “cultural ability” (Kulturfähigkeit) and rejected the

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crudest racial theories that ascribed to Africans a natural laziness and a principal lack of culture. This marginal position obviously had something to do with his being Jewish. It is very possible that his particular experience as a Jew, especially with the history of emancipation and the presence of antisemitism, contributed to his relatively moderate attitudes toward the Indigenous population of the colonies. And there can be no doubt that antisemites in the Colonial Society linked these attitudes with his Jewishness and took it as a proof for Vohsen’s alleged national unreliability. At the same time, colonialism was a field in which Vohsen was able to act not as a Jew, that is, as a member of a minority, but rather as a member and a representative of the hegemonic collective, the German nation. Vohsen participated in the German colonial movement not as a Jew but as a German. The German colonial movement saw itself as a constitutive element of the endeavor to “complete” the project of nation building, a process from which, according to Max Weber, then member of the Pan-German League, Germany “should have refrained . . . if it was meant as the concluding and not as the starting point for the striving for German world power status.”58 Colonialism seems to have provided for Vohsen a path to participate in this endeavor, even if he, as a Jew, was not recognized as a full member of the German nation, all formal legal equality notwithstanding. Accordingly, his support for German colonial interests vis-àvis competing imperialist powers was enthusiastic and unambiguous.59 This path, however, remained precarious and inconsistent. It didn’t protect from antisemitic attacks, and it led to the margins rather than into the center of the colonizing national collective. Regarding the initial question about the relationship between Jewish history and colonial history, this means that colonialism, and colonial racism, was not automatically connected with antisemitism. Colonialism could constitute a space not only where Jews were accepted but also where they could achieve a significant amount of social respectability and success. At the same time, however, colonialism was greatly attractive to antisemites who saw an elective affinity between the ideology on which colonialism was based and their own antisemitic convictions, and who could also exert their antisemitism within the colonial movement. Most importantly, colonialism and colonial racism contained a number of ideological and political elements that could easily be integrated into an antisemitic argument, and vice versa. This could even include, as in the case of Gerstenhauer’s attacks against Vohsen, the claim that Jews and colonized peoples formed some sort of alliance that was directed against German national interests. In fact, the idea that Jews, Africans, and also Poles (as a colonized or to-be-colonized people of the European East) conspired to threaten the well-being, the status, and even the existence of the German nation became an increasingly prominent element of German nationalist thought. As recent studies show, it was especially through this notion of a combined threat that antisemitism and racism could mutually inspire, explain, and affirm, as well as radicalize, each other.60 As a context for German-Jewish history, colonialism was so important because it provided a space in which racism and antisemitism could actually meet. It also provided a space in which the potentials, and the limits, of the participation of Jews in the pro-

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cesses of German nation building were tested and contested. Moreover, colonialism provided a space in which the structures and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion could be transferred from one marginalized sector of society to another. Therefore, colonialism must be recognized as a crucial context for German-Jewish history. In addition to identifying mutual influences and connections, Jewish history and the history of colonialism can also help answer each other’s questions. Each in their specific way, they are structured by similar processes and conflicts. Together, Jewish history and the history of colonialism can serve as a key for addressing some of the most important unresolved questions of modernity, most notably one that has once been posed by Theodor W. Adorno. How, he asked, will it be possible to attain a condition “in which one could be different without fear”? 61 If, through the recognition of their contextuality, scholars of German-Jewish studies commit to searching for answers to this question, and to the question of why this condition has still not been achieved, their work will indeed constitute much more than just another academic discipline. Stefan Vogt is adjunct professor of Jewish history at the Martin Buber Chair for Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of Subalterne Positionierungen: Der deutsche Zionismus im Feld des Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1890–1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), as well as other books and articles on German-Jewish history, the history of Zionism, and the history of nationalism and antisemitism. He is also the editor of Colonialism and the Jews in German History (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) and the co-editor of Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, forthcoming, with Derek J. Penslar and Arieh Saposnik).

Notes 1. I refrain from citing examples of the many enraged and one-sided contributions to these controversies. For more nuanced overviews on the first two debates, see Gideon Botsch et al., eds., Islamophobie und Antisemitismus: Ein umstrittener Vergleich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Volker Langbehn and Mohammed Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Routledge, 2011). For a sensitive discussion of the singularity and universality of the Shoah, see Enzo Traverso, Moderne und Gewalt: Eine europäische Genealogie des Nazi-Terrors (Köln: ISP-Verlag, 2003). 2. The German Colonial Society is remarkably understudied. There are only two monographs on the Society, both of which are unpublished dissertations written in the mid-1960s. See Richard V. Pierard, “The German Colonial Society, 1882–1914” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1964); Klaus Klauß, “Die Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft und die deutsche Kolonialpolitik von den Anfängen bis 1895” (PhD diss., Humboldt Universität Ostberlin, 1966). There are also two works that look at the early years of the German Colonial Society and its precursors: Klaus J. Bade, Friedrich Fabri und der Imperialismus in der Bismarckzeit: Revolution—Depression—Expansion (Freiburg: Atlantis-Verlag, 1975); Elfi Bendikat, Organisierte Kolonialbewegung in der Bismarck-Ära (Brazzaville: Kivouvou Editions Bantoues, 1984). In addition, an MA thesis on the colonial movement in the Rhineland was published in the early 1990s: Ulrich Soénius, Koloniale Begeisterung im Rheinland während des Kaiserreichs (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1992). Important

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

studies of German nationalism in the Kaiserreich treat the Society in a much more cursory way than they treat other “nationaleVerbände.” See, for instance, Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980); Peter Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse: Radikaler Nationalismus im deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). On these potentials of antisemitism see, for instance, Christina von Braun, ed., Das “bewegliche” Vorurteil: Aspekte des internationalen Antisemitismus (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004); Samuel Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne. Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien imVergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010). Important contributions to the analysis of this role include Moishe Postone, “Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus: Ein theoretischer Versuch,” in Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, ed. Dan Diner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), 242–54; Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus: Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001). For an analysis of the role of antisemitism in the context of nineteenth-century Germany, see especially Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978): 25–46; Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987); Uffa Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger: Bürgerliche Juden und Protestanten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). See for instance Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Die jüdische Minderheit in Königsberg/Preußen, 1871–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996); Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Ulrich Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg: Kriegserfahrungen, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuentwürfe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001); Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004); Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger; Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites:Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mirjam Rürup, Ehrensache: Jüdische Studentenverbindungen an deutschen Universitäten 1886–1937 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008). For a good discussion of this see Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 41 (1996): 291–308. Steven E. Aschheim, “German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junctions and Interdependence,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 316–17. See Stefan Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen: Der deutsche Zionismus im Feld des Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1890–1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016). For Hall’s concept of positioning, see Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–37; Stuart Hall, “Politics of Identity,” in Culture, Identity, and Politics: Ethnic Minorities in Britain, ed.Terence Ranger,Yunas Samad, and Ossie Stuart (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 129–35. The literature on German colonial history is vast. Pathbreaking studies include Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1997); Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Köln: Böhlau, 2003); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation

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10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

im deutschen Kaiserreich (München: Beck, 2006); Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). Important collections include Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., German Colonialism and National Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011); Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). For a pioneering study see Christian S. Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). See especially Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop, Imperialist Imagination; Perraudin and Zimmerer, German Colonialism and National Identity; Naranch and Eley, German Colonialism in a Global Age. It has convincingly been argued that the Wissenschaft des Judentums should be seen as a form of anti-colonial resistance against this kind of domination. See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Christian Wiese, “Struggling for Normality: The Apologetics of Wissenschaft des Judentums as an Anti-colonial Intellectual Revolt against the Protestant Construction of Judaism,” in Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, ed. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 77–101. See Jonathan M. Hess, “Sugar Island Jews? Jewish Colonialism and the Rhetoric of ‘Civic Improvement’ in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1998): 92–100; Ulrike Hamann, Prekäre koloniale Ordnung: Rassistische Konjunkturen im Widerspruch. Deutsches Kolonialregime 1884–1914 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016). See, for instance, Claudia Bruns, “Towards a Transnational History of Racism: Wilhelm Marr and the Interrelationship between Colonial Racism and German Anti-Semitism,” in Racism in the ModernWorld: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, ed. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt (NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2011), 122–39; Stefan Vogt, “From Colonialism to Antisemitism and Back: Ideological Developments in the Alldeutsche Verband during the Kaiserreich,” in Colonialism and the Jews in German History: From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan Vogt (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). For a nuanced theoretical analysis of the differences between antisemitism and racism, which nevertheless acknowledges the intersection between the two, see Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus. For an ambitious attempt to do this with regard to the colonial and postcolonial world, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colonies:The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Critique (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). This endeavor includes a monographic study in preparation by the author, tentatively titled “Colonialism and the Jews in Germany, 1880–1918”; and the edited collection Vogt, Colonialism and the Jews in German History. Previous publications in this field include Stefan Vogt, “Zionismus und Weltpolitik: Die Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Zionisten mit dem deutschen Imperialismus und Kolonialismus, 1890–1918,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 60 (2012): 596–617; Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Decent; Hamann, Prekäre koloniale Ordnung; Axel Stähler, Zionism, the German Empire, and Africa: Jewish Metamorphoses and the Colors of Difference (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). Klauß, Die Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 158. Membership data is taken from Pierard, German Colonial Society, 106–10. Lists do exist, for example, for the Berlin (1894/95), Magdeburg (1909), Bonn-Bad Godesberg (1900), Solingen (1905), and Breslau (1896) chapters, as well as for the Deutsche Kolonialverein (1883 and 1885). There is no scholarly biography of Vohsen, and his personal records are lost. The most comprehensive biographical information can be found in the memorial edition of the Koloniale Rundschau, which appeared after his death in 1919. See Koloniale Rundschau 11, no. 4/6 (1919): 67–128.

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22. August Wilhelm Schreiber, Carl Meinhof and Julius Richter, “Eingeborenenschutz, Kongo-Liga und Missionswesen,” Koloniale Rundschau 11, no. 4/6 (1919): 114. Due to the lack of personal documents, however, it is impossible to determine what his Jewish background actually meant to him. 23. The only study on the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft to date is Bruno Kuntze, Die DeutschOstafrikanische Gesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Schutzbriefgesellschaften und zur Geschichte Deutsch-Ostafrikas (Jena: Fischer, 1913), but see the biography of Carl Peters: Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856–1918: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Axel Fichtner, Die völker- und staatsrechtliche Stellung der deutschen Kolonialgesellschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002), where the DOAG is dealt with in a rather narrow juridical perspective. 24. These included, for instance, geographical and ethnographic accounts of the colonies as well as maps designed by the famous cartographer Heinrich Kiepert. 25. See, for example, “Bericht über die am 4. Dezember 1902 und 1. Mai 1903 stattgefundenen Sitzungen des Kolonialratsausschusses über die Landfrage in Kamerun, 8.5.1903,” Bundesarchiv Berlin (henceforth BAB), R 8023/142; “Protokoll der Sitzung des Kolonialrats v. 21.11.1901,” BAB, R, 8023/142; “Bericht über die Hauptversammlung der DKG in Danzig am 5. und 6. Juni 1914,” BAB, R 8023/122; “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG vom 3. April 1914,” BAB, R 8023/920; Ernst Vohsen, “Denkschrift über die Vorgänge in Ostafrika während meiner Leitung der Geschäfte der Deutsch-Ostafrikanischen Gesellschaft vom 14. Mai 1888 bis 16. Januar 1889, 12.4.1889,” BAB, R8124/3; “Negerarbeit in Afrika: I. Der afrikanische Neger als Lohnarbeiter,” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (1909): 65–75; “Dernburg,” Koloniale Rundschau 2 (1910): 337–39; “Zur Jahreswende,” Koloniale Rundschau 3 (1911): 1–4; “Zum neuen Jahr!” Koloniale Rundschau 4 (1912): 1–4; “Zukunftssorgen,” Koloniale Rundschau 6 (1914): 65–67; Ernst Vohsen, “Der Kongostaat und die Revision der Kongoakte,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (17 September 1903): 379–81; Ernst Vohsen, Deutschland und der Kongostaat: Ein Appell an die deutschen Handelskammern; Referat erstattet in der Sitzung vom 8. Oktober des Kolonialwirtschaftlichen Fachausschusses der Handelskammer in Berlin (Berlin: Reimer, 1908). 26. Ernst Vohsen, Zur Deutsch-Ostafrikanischen Seenbahn-Fragen (Berlin: Reimer, 1901), no pagination (after p. 18). See also Ernst Vohsen and Dietrich Westermann, “Unser Programm,” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (1909): 1–7; “Negerarbeit in Afrika I”; “Negerarbeit in Afrika: II. Selbständige Produktion der Eingeborenen,” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (1909): 129–38; “Zum neuen Jahr,” Koloniale Rundschau 2 (1910): 1–2; Ernst Vohsen, “Der Kongostaat”; Ernst Vohsen, “Eingeborenenarbeit in Afrika,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (24 October 1908): 755–56. 27. See, for example, “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 26. September 1902,” BAB, R 8023/915; Ernst Vohsen, “Denkschrift über die Vorgänge in Ostafrika”; Negerarbeit in Afrika II”; “Die Entwicklung Deutsch-Ostafrikas im Jahre 1907/08,” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (1909): 193–203; “Reformpläne in Belgisch-Kongo,” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (1909): 641–44; “Kakao in Westafrika,” Koloniale Rundschau 2 (1910): 201–8; “Afrikanische Baumwolle,” Koloniale Rundschau 2 (1910): 273–76; “Zum Amtsantritt des Staatssekretärs v. Lindequist,” Koloniale Rundschau 2 (1910): 465–69; “Die Entwicklung einer ostafrikanischen Kolonie,” Koloniale Rundschau 3 (1911): 337–41; “Das überseeische Deutschland,” Koloniale Rundschau 5 (1913): 385–88. 28. See, for example, “Zum Amtsantritt des Staatssekretärs v. Lindequist”; “Die Kolonialverhandlungen des Reichstags,” Koloniale Rundschau 6 (1914): 193–96; Vohsen, “Der Kongostaat.” 29. “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 27. März 1908,” BAB, R 8023/524a; Ernst Vohsen, “Vorwort,” in Booker T. Washington, Vom Sklaven empor: Eine Selbstbiographie (Berlin: Reimer, 1902), vi. 30. See, for example, “Die Entwicklung Deutsch-Ostafrikas im Jahre 1907/08”; “Die Entwicklung Togos im Jahre 1907/08,” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (1909): 385–99; “Zum neuen Jahr (1910)”;

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31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

“Zum Amtsantritt des Staatssekretärs v. Lindequist”; “Bericht über die Hauptversammlung der DKG in den Räumen des Künstlervereins in Bremen am 12. Juni 1908,” BAB, R 8023/524a. See, for example, Vohsen and Westermann, “Unser Programm”; “Negerarbeit in Afrika II”; “Die Entwicklung Togos im Jahre 1907/08”; “Die Entwicklung Deutsch-Ostafrikas im Jahre 1907/08”; “Zum neuen Jahr (1910)”; “Zum Amtsantritt des Staatssekretärs v. Lindequist”; “Deutsche Missionspflichten,” Koloniale Rundschau 5 (1913): 1–5; “Das überseeische Deutschland.” See, for example, Vohsen, “Denkschrift über die Vorgänge in Ostafrika”; “Zum Amtsantritt des Staatssekretärs v. Lindequist.” Ibid. Vohsen, “Vorwort,” vi. Other books by Booker T. Washington published by Vohsen included: Charakterbildung: Sonntags-Ansprachen an die Zöglinge der Normal- und Gewerbeschule von Tuskegee (Berlin, 1910) (Character Building, New York, 1902); Handarbeit (Berlin, 1913) (Working with the Hands, New York, 1904). Vohsen, “Vorwort,” v. The idea and term of “improvement” was prominent both in the more moderate segments of the colonial discourse and in the early non-Jewish discourses on Jewish emancipation. See especially Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2 vols. (Berlin: Nicolai, 1781–83). Jonathan Hess has shown that already with Dohm, colonial concepts played into this idea. See Hess, “Sugar Island Jews.” When Vohsen used the term in the colonial context, he must have been aware of this connection. Vohsen and Westermann, “Unser Programm,” 3. See also, for example, “Bericht über die Hauptversammlung der DKG 1908,” 26. See, for example, “Bericht über die am 4. Dezember 1902 und 1. Mai 1903 stattgefundenen Sitzungen des Kolonialratsausschusses”; “Protokoll der Sitzung des Kolonialrats v. 21.11.1901”; “Bericht über die Hauptversammlung der DKG 1914”; “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 26. September 1902”; “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG vom 24. Mai 1912,” BAB, R 8023/919. The case of Dernburg is treated extensively in Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent, 196–245. See “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 27. März 1908”; “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 11. April 1908,” BAB, R 8023/524a.; “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 22. April 1908,” BAB, R 8023/524a.; “Bericht über die Hauptversammlung der DKG 1908.” “Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses der DKG am 22. April 1908.” “An den Deutschen Reichstag,” 26 January 1909, BAB, R 8023/524a. See also “Eingabe an den Reichskanzler Bethmann Hollweg,” 28 June 1912, BAB, R 8023/148. See “Die Südwestafrikanische Siedlungsgesellschaft des Herrn Vohsen,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (24 June 1905): 242; Max Robert Gerstenhauer and Ernst Vohsen, “Erklärung,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (1 July 1905): 261; “Die Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika in der Hauptversammlung in Essen,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (1 July 1905): 261–65; Max Robert Gerstenhauer, “Die Angriffe gegen die Siedlungsgesellschaft II,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (22 July 1905): 312–16. See also the summary of the dispute by Gerstenhauer in: Rundschreiben der Abteilung Meiningen der Deutschen Kolonial-Gesellschaft an die verehrl: Abteilungen der Gesellschaft, 15 September 1905 (Meiningen: n.p., 1905). Gerstenhauer was seconded in his attacks by E.Th. Förster, the editor of the journal Die Deutschen Kolonien, who, for instance, attested Vohsen to “speak, for a man of Jewish descent, remarkably refined German.” E. Th. Förster, “Die Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika und Herr Konsul Vohsen,” Die Deutschen Kolonien 4 (1905): 355. See also E. Th. Förster, “Eine eigenartige Spekulation,” Deutsche Tageszeitung, 15 January 1905; E. Th. Förster, “Eine eigenartige Spekulation,” Die Deutschen Kolonien 4 (1905): 80–86; E. Th. Förster, “Die Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika und Herr Konsul Vohsen,” Die Deutschen

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

Kolonien 4 (1905): 302–10; E. Th. Förster, “Die Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika und Herr Konsul Vohsen,” Die Deutschen Kolonien 4 (1905): 321–29. “Rundschreiben der Abteilung Meiningen,” 2. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7. In 1904, the Herero in South West Africa rose against the German colonial regime, which increasingly threatened their livelihoods and established racist policies. After initial successes, they were defeated by the reinforced German troops under Lothar von Trotha, who conducted a war of extermination against the Herero. See Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2016). Ibid. The classic study on the history of antisemitism in the Kaiserreich is Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites. Protocol of Vohsen’s speech in Essen, printed in “Die Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika in der Hauptversammlung in Essen,” 264. Ibid., 262. The leadership of the Colonial Society had to intervene and urge both Vohsen and Gerstenhauer to retract personal insults leveled at each other. See “Eine eigenartige Spekulation,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung,” 27 May 1905: 201–2; “Die Südwestafrikanische Siedlungsgesellschaft des Herrn Vohsen,” 242. “Die Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwestafrika in der Hauptversammlung in Essen,” 265. There are, however, notable exceptions to this, and as a rule, such restraint did not apply to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. For a notorious example, see Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” Preußische Jahrbücher 44 (1879): 559–76. August Wilhelm Schreiber, Carl Meinhof and Julius Richter, “Eingeborenenschutz, Kongo-Liga und Missionswesen,” Koloniale Rundschau 11 (1919): 114. Another example for this: Approached by the antisemite Friedrich Lange in 1909 to join the nationalist and antisemitic bloc he intended to build, the secretary of the German Colonial Society, Curt Winkler, answered that the Society was not able to do so due to its commitment to political neutrality, but “has the greatest sympathies for your endeavor.” Letters from Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft to Friedrich Lange, 31 August 1909 and 13 September 1909, BAB, N 2165/20. Generally, it seems that Jewish members of the colonial movement were more likely to be moderate than radical colonialists. This is not to say, however, that Jews, by default, took on moderate colonialist positions. In addition to Jewish anti-colonialists such as Rosa Luxemburg, we can also find Jewish supporters of harshly racist colonial policies, such as Otto Arnold, who was a close friend of Carl Peters. Moreover, it must be emphasized that also a moderate colonialism of the Vohsen or Dernburg type was racist. Much research is still needed to determine to what extent Vohsen’s example can be generalized. Major A. D. Winkler, “Tätigkeit in der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” Koloniale Rundschau 11 (1919): 98–102. Max Weber, “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik: Akademische Antrittrede (1895),” in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 23. Weber was from 1893 to 1899 a member of the Pan-German League. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, MaxWeber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974), 58–59. See for instance “Das überseeische Deutschland,” Koloniale Rundschau 5 (1913): 385; Ernst Vohsen, “Der Weltkrieg,” Koloniale Rundschau 7 (1915): 1–10. Hamann, Präkere koloniale Ordnung; Vogt, “From Colonialism to Antisemitism and Back.” Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflektionen aus einem beschädigten Leben, 22nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 131.

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Bibliography Periodicals

Deutsche Kolonialzeitung Deutsche Tageszeitung Die Deutschen Kolonien Koloniale Rundschau

Archives

Bundesarchiv Berlin

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100 | STEFAN VOGT van Rahden, Till. Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Vogt, Stefan. “Zionismus und Weltpolitik: Die Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Zionisten mit dem deutschen Imperialismus und Kolonialismus, 1890–1918.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 60 (2012): 596–617. ———. Subalterne Positionierungen: Der deutsche Zionismus im Feld des Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1890–1933. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016. ———. “From Colonialism to Antisemitism and Back: Ideological Developments in the Alldeutsche Verband during the Kaiserreich.” In Colonialism and the Jews in German History: From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, edited by Stefan Vogt. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Vohsen, Ernst. Zur Deutsch-Ostafrikanischen Seenbahn-Frage. Berlin: Reimer, 1901. ———. “Vorwort.” In Booker T. Washington, Vom Sklaven empor: Eine Selbstbiographie, v–vii. Berlin: Reimer, 1902. ———. Deutschland und der Kongostaat: Ein Appell an die deutschen Handelskammern; Referat erstattet in der Sitzung vom 8. Oktober des Kolonialwirtschaftlichen Fachausschusses der Handelskammer in Berlin. Berlin: Reimer, 1908. Volkov, Shulamit. “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code. Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978): 25–46. ———. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites:Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. von Braun, Christina, ed. Das “bewegliche” Vorurteil: Aspekte des internationalen Antisemitismus. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004. von Treitschke, Heinrich. “Unsere Aussichten.” Preußische Jahrbücher 44 (1879): 559–76. Walkenhorst, Peter. Nation—Volk—Rasse: Radikaler Nationalismus im deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. Weber, Max. “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik: Akademische Antrittrede (1895).” In Gesammelte Politische Schriften, edited by Johannes Winckelmann, 5th ed., 1–25. Tübingen: Mohr, 1988. Wiese, Christian. “Struggling for Normality: The Apologetics of Wissenschaft des Judentums as an Anti-colonial Intellectual Revolt against the Protestant Construction of Judaism.” In Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, edited by Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter, 77–101. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Wildenthal, Lora. GermanWomen for Empire, 1884–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Joachim Zeller, eds. Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen. 3rd ed. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2016. Zimmerman, Andrew. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

 CHAPTER 5

The Place of Yiddish in German-Jewish Studies

 Nick Block

The Institutional Location of Yiddish in German Studies Departments In conceptualizing the future of German-Jewish studies, the constructs “German” and “Jewish” serve as a starting point into an interrogation of German-Jewish border figures. Both Jewish studies and German studies examine their historical topics as they intersect with their respective counterparts, non-Jews and non-Germans. My research to date focuses on German Jews and Eastern European Jews in a historical context and German Jews and Muslims in a contemporary context. Bringing these historically disparate studies together is the navigation of Jewish identity in Germany and Austria. Speaking to the future of the field of German-Jewish studies, this chapter addresses how Yiddish has institutionally embedded itself within German studies in the United States and Canada. The global center for Yiddish instruction, certainly in terms of raw institutional numbers, is in North America. A second reason for this choice of focus is the data presented in the journal Monatshefte that allows me to track institutional change, but it is limited to the United States and Canada. I present statistics based on the Monatshefte annual Personalia report and job market trends to show the place that has just recently been created forYiddish within German studies.Yiddish studies faculty are now more often housed in German studies departments than in Jewish studies, with Yiddish studies presently offered at one-third of all German studies doctoral programs. My research as discussed in the second section on the turn of the twentiethcentury Yiddishist Nathan Birnbaum argues that the way forward for the fields of German studies and Yiddish studies, and all the more so for German-Jewish studies and Yiddish, is symbiotically together.

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Under the radar, Yiddish has institutionally become a part of German studies in the United States and Canada over the last decade, the 2010s. Departmental websites show that seventeen German studies departments house faculty teaching or have recently taught Yiddish language.1 In contrast, other universities place Yiddish-language instruction exclusively in Jewish studies.2 Other universities where German studies is subsumed under “language” departments have also chosen to locate Yiddish there and not in Jewish studies.3 The last group is different from the first in that it is less clear whether the placement of Yiddish is designed to align it with German interests specifically or simply to consider it as a world language, which it undoubtedly is. When comparing German or Jewish studies interests, this world languages option is thus a third, less-utilized option. Of the three options, Yiddish is more often housed in German studies (17 departments) than in Jewish studies (9 departments). Doctoral degree-granting institutions are heavily represented here. The 2019 Monatshefte annual Personalia report claims a total of 243 US and Canadian German studies programs, 53 of which offer a doctoral degree in German studies. Combined with the information on the individual universities I collected, Yiddish language is therefore only being taught within 7 percent of all German studies programs, but within 32 percent of all German studies doctoral programs. Assuming these tenure-track lines will still be there following the pandemic to shape the field further, there can only be a prediction of growth of Yiddish instruction given that several of these departments have recently tenured their faculty who teach Yiddish: the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2014, and Emory University in 2016. Since these faculty attract students and mold future academics, the Personalia also lists a growing trend in German studies dissertations with Yiddish in the titles. There were no dissertations with the word Yiddish in the title in 2010 and 2011, but in the following years, we find a number of dissertations with Yiddish in the title: 2012 (two dissertations), 2013 (one), 2014 (one), 2015 (one), 2016 (one), 2017 (one). Being that these dissertations stem from German studies departments, we naturally find that most are comparative in nature, taking into account German-Jewish concerns: Samuel Spinner (2012), “Jews Behind the Glass: The Anthropological Impulse in GermanJewish andYiddish Literature, 1900–1948”; Nick Block (2013), “In the Eyes of Others: The Dialectics of German-Jewish and Yiddish Modernisms”; Sylvia Irwin (2014), “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval and Early Modern German and Yiddish Works”; Emma Woelk (2016), “Folk Fiction: Yiddish and the Negotiation of Literary Legacy in Germany after 1945”; and Sonia Gollance (2017), “Harmonious Instability: (Mixed) Dancing and Partner Choice in German-Jewish and Yiddish Literature.” There are other dissertations, of course, that treat Yiddish to various degrees without naming it specifically in their titles, but searching “Yiddish” in the title allows one to compare periods before and the significance of Yiddish to the dissertation. The institutional breakdown above suggests that when Yiddish programs are created, sometimes externally funded by donors, university administrations have to make

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a decision where to put Yiddish. Seemingly they believe, more likely than not, that it makes sense to place Yiddish language instruction in German studies departments. A case in point is Emory University. A new search for a tenure-track line in Yiddish was initiated in 2007, and, according to the department chair at the time, Peter Höyng, Yiddish was basically handed over to the German studies department without the department having requested it. The reason at Emory University, and probably at many others, for German studies to house Yiddish is that Jewish studies is often not its own department but rather an interdisciplinary program. If a new appointment is to have a departmental home, a full department that can provide a locus of tenure (such as German studies) is needed. Given the self-aware nature of German studies to justify its position within academia, it seems that this is one area where German studies can, believably and with some success, state that it envisions itself working interdisciplinarily and multilingually with a Yiddish line, whether tenure-track or not. The inclusion of Yiddish seemingly has not been an orchestrated effort on the part of German studies, but given that Yiddish is a constitutive element of twenty-first-century German studies programs, how does German studies respond? The question for German studies going forward is, should this relationship withYiddish be cultivated—and if so, how? I believe the answer should be yes and that individual German studies departments should, before any plans for Yiddish at the university have been discussed, actively inform their administrations of this relationship in the annual reports written to the administration that flesh out a department’s future goals. Faculty specializing in German-Jewish studies can act as a bridge between Germanists and Yiddishists. Preemptively asking for a Yiddish studies position sets the stage for a time when the position becomes open. Housing a Yiddish faculty member, and any non-German-language faculty member for that matter, brings with it a number of questions, including the coordination of departmental events across languages. Most of the German studies departments offering Yiddish do not include any wording in the German major/minor specifically about how Yiddish fits. Some include wording such as “Any course with a GERM course number can count toward the German major,” from which the student might assume that the Yiddish course would then also count. As part of its requirements, Emory University has, like many universities, optional courses that students may take to fulfill the German major or minor. I was involved in the process to modify the wording to incorporate Yiddish studies within the German studies major/minor: “Students may substitute a maximum of 7 credit hours in courses on German-related topics approved by the German Studies Department and taught by either the German Studies Department or another department, such as Film Studies, History, Art History, Music, Political Science, or Philosophy. These courses may be taught in German, English, or Yiddish.” The simple insertion of the last two words serves a dual purpose of (1) integrating Yiddish (and concomitant faculty members) within German studies; and (2) placing Yiddish on the students’ radar as an option for fulfilling the major. Certainly it behooves those German studies departments already

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hosting Yiddish faculty to explain in writing how they envision Yiddish language and literature complementing the department and/or fulfilling the major. Enrollment in Yiddish is a concern that is exacerbated by the lack of integration within the home department. Yiddish-language courses are notorious for low enrollment. Introductory language courses might have ten to fifteen students, but enrollment quickly atrophies in the intermediate level. One to three students in a class is possibly the norm. During my time as visiting assistant professor at Emory University, I taught a course called “Yiddish for German Speakers” in an effort to ascertain German studies students’ potential interest in the Yiddish classes. A course with this title has been taught only rarely and sporadically over twenty years at places like Emory University, Ohio State University, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, and Yale University. This course was only a one-credit exploratory course, meeting at the same time as the third-semester Yiddish course taught by Miriam Udel (who has a half appointment in German studies and a half appointment in Jewish studies) in order that a couple of the class sessions could be held together during the semester. The students who enrolled in my course were dramatically different from the average class sample for standard Yiddish language classes. There were eight students in my “Yiddish for German Speakers” class: two were Jewish Americans, two were international students from China, and the remaining four were non-Jewish Americans, one of whom was a German heritage speaker. The parallel third-semester Yiddish course had three students, all of whom were Jewish Americans. In the final evaluations for the “Yiddish for German Speakers” course, students responded positively. One student expressed a desire for the class to be a full course: “I would make the class a little longer—maybe make it two credit hours because the class meetings always felt rushed and there is so much more to learn.” This German studies student is the target audience to increase the enrollment of the Yiddish program. A “Yiddish for German Speakers” course allows for a broadening of the German curriculum. Within the framework of a full three-credit-hour course, such a “Yiddish for German Speakers” course could flesh out German dialects comparatively by examining excerpts from dialect works such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalist play Die Weber and Alfred Döblin’s modernist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in conjunction with Middle High German works, like Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan. Winifred Davies warns against linguistic prescriptivism and calls for consumers of language to be more flexible with understanding nonstandard German: “More stress on active and creative listening would undoubtedly help to ease certain communication problems in today’s globalised world where, as a result of ever-increasing mobility, people with varying degrees of competence in a range of different languages come into frequent contact, and it would also be in line with the plan in the EU to promote greater use of passive or receptive multilingualism as a communication strategy.”4 Bending the German student’s ear first with Yiddish to show comprehension beyond standard textbook German would serve as a bridge to understanding German dialect works. A “Yiddish for German Speakers” course could symbiotically help both Yiddish and German studies.

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German students would be exposed to linguistic questions of German dialects and dialect literature, while Yiddish might gain a couple of students it otherwise might not have, possibly opening these students to intersections between Yiddish and German. The historical connections between German and Yiddish and the coterritorial nature of Yiddish and German make an obvious case forYiddish to be housed in a German studies department. Yiddish as a Germanic language evolved from Middle High German, which arrived with population migrations to Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century and evolved there into what would be Eastern Yiddish. The Yiddish of those Jews who stayed in Dutch or German lands evolved into Western Yiddish. But with the rise of legal emancipation in Western Europe and the concomitant adoption of the various national vernaculars by Jews, by the twentieth century Western Yiddish had ceased to exist among German Jews in a meaningful way, leaving only certain marks in German-Jewish speech and writings. Jargon became a term used to describe and deride everything from these Jewish speech patterns in German to fully developed Yiddish itself. For early twentieth-century German-Jewish writers, the language of Eastern European Jews was a hot item: Kafka worked with one of the traveling Yiddish theater troupes while they were in Prague; Arnold Zweig had to learn to write in Yiddish as part of his military service as a journalist in World War I; Bertha Pappenheim was one of several German translators of Yiddish. Yiddish made an appearance in the works of Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Else Lasker-Schüler, and others. As German’s uncanny other,Yiddish offered hope for German Jews to express alterity.5 This might have only been possible at a time when Jargon was considered a German dialect. Later politics and institutional changes, rather than any objective changes in the language itself, led to Yiddish being labeled a separate language around the beginning of the twentieth century, which itself was largely due to German(-speaking) Jews. The change in people’s impression of Yiddish as a dialect and Jargon to a language represented a monumental shift. The Viennese-born Nathan Birnbaum learned Yiddish and started the Yiddishist movement at the Yiddish Language Conference of Czernowitz in 1908. His son Solomon became the first professor of Yiddish at the University of Hamburg in 1922.6 Max Weinreich, born in Russia, present-day Latvia, to a German-speaking family, learned Yiddish and became the preeminent proponent of forging a standardized Yiddish out from under the shadow of German. His famous dictum taught in linguistic courses today, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy,” was originally stated in 1945, in reference to the debates on Yiddish as a German dialect.7 His son Uriel wrote the textbook College Yiddish (1949), still taught today.8 Working between the languages as I do, one might see that I seek to work against Birnbaum and Weinreich and reclaim Yiddish as Jargon, a German dialect, and discuss the possible impact this has on German studies. For example, it might lead to placing Yiddish faculty in German studies departments rather than in Jewish studies, or to teaching German studies students Yiddish as an introduction to the rich expression of German dialect literature (Bavarian, Swiss, Platt, etc.).

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In an era when requests for new tenure-track lines in German are rarely granted due to limited funding at every university, it seems counterintuitive for German studies departments to be asking for something as tangential as a Yiddish instructor. My argument here is only coming at a time now that it has already happened and Yiddish has been gifted to German studies. German-Jewish studies should use Yiddish to its advantage. Many departments bear some permutation of the name “Germanic Languages and Literatures,” perhaps with historical roots in previous decades when Dutch and Middle High German were more widely taught.Yiddish is one way to justify the continued use of the name “Germanic Languages and Literatures” to the administration and demonstrate a cohesive mission. By requesting aYiddish instructor position, a university might ideally also grant a German line to support a department that has a broader vision, one that intersects with other departments’ desires. Looking to the future as more Yiddish professors graduate with PhDs in German, the hires can be versatile enough to teach German-language courses when the need arises, just as they are capable of teaching courses in German-Jewish studies. German-Jewish studies is compelling for me exactly at this moment as I have watched these developments with few people noticing and nothing explicitly addressed at the German Studies Association or at the Association for Jewish Studies.Yiddish is still seen as existing within the domain of Jewish studies, even when the facts on the ground have changed. Ultimately, the arrival of Yiddish studies (sometimes perhaps as an “uninvited” guest) into German studies is an amazing opportunity for German-Jewish scholars, offering an influx of new collegial support and material to think about German studies through a transnational lens.

The Place of Yiddish in German-Jewish Research: The Case of Nathan Birnbaum As the author of one of those dissertations in the 2010s with Yiddish in the title and granted by a German studies doctoral program, my research lies at the nexus of German-Jewish and Yiddish studies. As I have presented elsewhere,9 I show Nathan Birnbaum’s (1864–1937) meandering life between Central and Eastern Europe to exhibit the fruitful contribution of Yiddish studies to German-Jewish studies, or vice versa, the contribution of German-Jewish Studies to Yiddish studies. My work on border figures between Central and Eastern Europe of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relies heavily on the recognition that these cultural influencers (Martin Buber, Bertha Pappenheim, David Pinski, etc.) wrote in multiple languages.10 Birnbaum was in succession: second in command under Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress, president at the first Yiddish convention in 1908 after he left Zionism to fight for Yiddishism, and then head of the Orthodox Agudath Israel after he left Yiddishism.11 The famous religious awakening of the Viennese-born Birnbaum included an assumption of an Eastern European Jewish identity, one that, I argue, is rooted in his reading of Yiddish literature’s desire for a German-Jewish redeemer. Birnbaum

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was a German translator of Yiddish works, including Y. L. Peretz’s short stories,12 and knew about the fantastic, messianic, and also the damning reception of German Jews in Yiddish literature. He leveraged his intercultural position among European Jewry to convey an image of himself as a potential messiah. A 1910 cartoon (see figure 5.1) shows the average Eastern European Jew, in the middle, choosing between two paths: Achad Ha’am’s Hebraist path to the left or Nathan Birnbaum’s Yiddishist path to the right. How did Birnbaum, a Viennese Jew, become so entrenched within Eastern European culture as to be seen as a leader? Birnbaum’s multilingual writings were central to his intercultural position between Western and Eastern Jewries, and an overview shows how his Yiddish and German writings work with and against each other. This approach exposes greater complexity in his internalization of what Western Jews constructed as the Other, the Ostjude persona. Namely, Birnbaum became the Eastern Jew in religiosity, language, and dress as informed by his knowledge of the German-Jewish daytsh stereotype inYiddish literature, and he also came to personify the mythical folkloric figure for Eastern European Jews who saw him as a prophet or messiah. The German Jew in the context of Eastern European Yiddish folklore came to encompass Western Jewry at large. Dan Miron and Israel Bartal have focused on the German Jew as a rich, irreligious stock character in the poor shtetl literary landscape.13 He is almost exclusively marked as male with a shaved face. His clothing is Western, often a suit and top hat, and illustrations frequently show checkered pants. I focus on the image of the German Jew as he garnered a messianic aura through a couple of literary transitive relationships. Elijah the Prophet is thought to bring forth the advent of the Messiah, but traditional Midrashic tales told of Elijah hiding himself as an unlikely fig-

Figure 5.1. In dem yidishn kultur-vogn (In theYiddish Culture Wagon). Originally published in Der yidisher gazlen: Illustrated Journal forWit and Humor, 26 August 1910, 8–9. Courtesy of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives.

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ure (Arab, prostitute, etc.) to be discovered by Jewish peasantry. In the time of emancipation in the West, German Jews visiting Eastern Europe were cast in Yiddish folklore as likely candidates for Elijah the Prophet—not just Elijah but even possibly the hidden Messiah himself. Two quick tales exhibit Elijah dressed as an acculturated German Jew.14 The first is told about Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Alter (1798–1866), the founder of the Ger Chassidic group. As the story goes, the three-year-old future rabbi became ill with sunstroke. His mother sat down exhausted on a stone and wept bitterly as she saw the state of her young boy: “Suddenly she caught sight of a passer-by who was dressed like a German Jew, with something like a traveler’s bag around his neck. . . . Taking a bottle out of his pocket, he poured a few drops of its contents onto a lump of sugar which he had, and gave it to the child.” Then the stranger vanished. The story concludes by stating that years later, when Rabbi Yitzchak Meir recounted this episode from his childhood, he would add, “That ‘German Jew’ was Elijah.”15 Elijah masked in the garb of a German Jew plays a central role in this folktale ostensibly dating from an event in 1801. The second tale is told about Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Tzemach Tzedek, (1789–1866) of the Chabad Lubavitch Chassidic sect: The righteous man was brought to the hospital in critical condition. There at the hospital, a Jewish doctor in modern clothing like a yekke, a “daytshl ” as Chassidim would call them, worked with the rabbi with incredible, extraordinary loyalty. Between one treatment and the next, the doctor read Psalms, crying out tremendously to the extent that the Tzemach Tzedek wondered if such a great Jew can even be used as a doctor. In the end, the holy saint was saved from the difficult danger and he testified that the doctor prayed for him. Righteous people said he was one of the 36 saints or that an angel was sent from heaven to heal the rabbi.16 The association of the German Jew with Elijah the Prophet and angels should not be taken at face value as a sign of praise. In Elijah tales, his mode of dress serves to disguise him in a form not normally associated with holiness. Seen in this light, the disguise of a rich, irreligious German Jew serves as condemnation. A visiting German Jew might turn out to be Elijah the Prophet, but only because he is the last person in whom one would expect to find holiness. In the 1880s, the eastern European representations of Germans started to shift modes as the mythic representations became laden with a strong sense of ironic distance.17 A late representation of the German Jew from Yiddish writer Sholem Asch (1880–1957) exemplifies this turn to realism. In 1926, Sholem Asch published the short story “The Little German Jew” in the Warsaw-based newspaper Haynt (Today).18 Asch’s story is of a group of young writers who regularly meet in a coffeehouse “on one of the Jewish streets in Warsaw.” There, the group often finds itself in need of the old “German Jew” Herr Albert Borenshteyn, who sits in the corner with his coat full of books and speaks a German learned only from such quintessential enlightenment texts as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, whose Jewish protagonist

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was supposedly modeled on Moses Mendelssohn. The group relies on Borenshteyn, a perceived German Jew, to cover the cost of their drinks when they run out of money: “Today when I think back on him from quite some distance, it seems to me that he sat there at that table just to wait and help one of us in trouble. It was some sort of Elijah the Prophet who sent him to that coffee house. Because how else is it possible for a person to always have change? He was never without change, not even once. Every time someone availed themselves of him—which, as a sidenote, he understood from a mere wink, from a grumble—he always responded with the delightful, cheery words: ‘Aber bitte sehr!’ [my pleasure!]” Herr Borenshteyn, in turn, is glad to exchange a few lines with anyone who will listen. A Germanized Jew associated with money and Elijah the Prophet is a familiar trope that follows Yiddish literature well into the interwar period. Sholem Aleichem and Peretz, in neoromantic fashion of the 1880s and into the early 1900s, pull on traditional Yiddish literary antinomy to the Western Jew in associating the “irreligious” German Jew as somehow supernatural in their association of the German Jew and Elijah the Prophet. Asch in 1926 continued the legacy of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz thirty to forty years later, nodding to their neoromanticism while starkly breaking with this message. Asch, in an intertextual fashion, throws in a reference to Elijah the Prophet, but here the German Jew does nothing more miraculous than give some change to the younger crowd in the cafe when they ask him. Aside from the brief mention of Elijah the Prophet, everything else about Herr Borenshteyn is terribly banal. The cultural divide vis-à-vis Western Jews among Yiddish-speaking Jews had faded by the 1920s, even if there is a recognition that, a few decades earlier, German Jews held a place of fascination for Eastern European Jews. Theodor Herzl’s messianic reception among Eastern European Jews in the 1890s can thus be understood in this context of a generation aware that Western Jewry was something traditionally shunned and yet the object of wonder. Born into the German-speaking milieu of Budapest, Herzl spent his life as a journalist in Vienna and Paris before writing his Zionist treatise The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) in 1896. Within a few years, his work was translated into Yiddish so that this originally German-focused Zionist movement could reach a wider international audience. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, recalled that when Herzl visited his childhood home of Plonsk, a rumor spread “that the Messiah had arrived—a tall, handsome man, a learned man of Vienna, a doctor no less—Theodor Herzl.”19 Ephraim Moses Lilien’s Zionist-infused Jugendstil art reinforced this with multiple provocative drawings that compared Herzl to Moses. Herzl was but one German-speaking Jew to evoke such messianic notes to the East. The Viennese Nathan Birnbaum also made his political career within this context, where Eastern European Jews awaited a savior from the West and German Jews carried certain messianic cultural cache. For the writer Shemarya Gorelik, Birnbaum embodied the prophet Jeremiah, was “a Jew in Jeremiah’s mold,” and had “a Jeremiah countenance.”20 Jewish historian Simon Dubnow dubbed Birnbaum the “Knight of Eastern Jewry.”21 An Orthodox publicist from Bratislava referenced Birnbaum as “the honorable prophet in the wilderness.”22 The leader of the first Zionist youth group Blau-Weiß,

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Chaim Nagler, wrote about his impressions of Birnbaum when he saw him at the age of fifteen: “And there stood on the podium a true, a real man from Vienna. . . . At that time he appeared to me like a prophet, no, like an army leader who was calling his people to battle and was belting out the inspirational war cry.”23 Quote after quote shows Eastern European Jews were explicitly seeing Birnbaum in a prophetic, messianic light, but also the reception shows that this was a messianic moment where other Western Jews like Herzl were also seen as saviors. Intimate knowledge of how Eastern Jews perceived German Jews informed Birnbaum’s work. Not only did he translateYiddish into German, but Birnbaum specifically translated Yiddish literary pieces about German Jews, such as Peretz’s “The Magician” and “Seven Good Years” in a German volume of collected Peretz stories.24 In Peretz’s “Seven Good Years,” Tuvye the shtetl Jew meets a German Jew in green hunter’s gear who provides seven years of wealth and is later revealed to be Elijah the Prophet. One of Birnbaum’s intentional mistranslations obscures the fact that this fantastic Yiddish tale originally centered on a supernatural German Jew. In Birnbaum’s translation, the man in hunter’s gear is identified as a “stranger” (der Fremde).25 He avoided translating the word daytsh as “German Jew” in his translation for a German audience because of the unseemly or confusing supernatural portrayal. Birnbaum wanted to exhibit Yiddish folklore for German consumption, yet he concealed part of its message when it came to uncomfortable points in the text to maintain the overall positive image of the Eastern European Jew he was trying to cultivate in Germany. Birnbaum’s understanding of the fantastic and sometimes critical westward gaze on German Jews in Yiddish literature led him to neutralize this criticism when curating the Eastern Jew before a German-Jewish audience. His translations exhibit his interest in inverting the negative reception of Eastern Jews in German in a sublimation of their holistic, traditional lifestyles. Subscribing to the efforts of literary nationalism, he strove to show German Jews what Jewish folktales could look like, as opposed to the familiar German ones.Yet he also sought to protect the image of these Yiddish authors by making changes when necessary to avoid any unflattering misunderstandings. This process of translating, editing, and omitting reveals Birnbaum’s role as curator of the Eastern Jew. Birnbaum tapped into other themes of Yiddish literature for his assumed identity to be legible. The name Nathan itself would have immediately evoked Lessing’s exemplary enlightened Jew, Nathan the Wise. Asch’s story “The Little German Jew” ends with Herr Borenshteyn dying with the words of Lessing’s play on his lips in place of the hallowed words of the shema prayer that Jews traditionally say before they pass away. Alongside the supernatural German-Jewish figure, other themes involving GermanJewish characters in Yiddish literature further help to place Birnbaum’s transition into perspective. The prodigal son is a recurring character inYiddish literature, in which the native son leaves his hometown to return unexpectedly many years later, transformed and warmly received.26 This plotline sometimes intersects with the plotline of the German Jew who visits the shtetl in that the visiting daytsh turns out at times to be the prodigal son in Western dress.27

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Even though Birnbaum himself was not born in Galicia, he used his parents’ story to fashion a narrative of himself in line with that of the prodigal son: his parents left Galicia and had a child abroad, and that son has returned to save the town. A necessary component of this self-fulfilling prophecy was a claim to Eastern Jewish roots. To accomplish this, Birnbaum positioned himself as an Eastern Jew in Yiddish and wrote about German Jews as if he were not one. A shift can be seen in Birnbaum’s writings in 1909, when he began using the first-person pronoun “we” to assume the voice of an Eastern European Jew and to separate himself from Western Jewry.28 One 1914 biographical article emphasized his Eastern European legacy in its opening statement: “Nathan Birnbaum was born on the tenth of Iyar (at that time, May 16) 5624 (1864) in Vienna as the son of Eastern European Jewish parents.”29 His self-representation as Western Jew but also Eastern Jew became so interchangeable that even Hersh Nomberg, a Polishborn Yiddish essayist who worked with Birnbaum, was confused about whether or not Birnbaum was born in Galicia, and he wrote conflicting descriptions on two different occasions of Birnbaum as both a Viennese-born Westjude and as a native-born Galician.30 Capturing the moment when the prodigal son returns, an impressive 1907 picture for the Austrian parliamentary election, taken from a high angle, shows Birnbaum at the front of a throng of townspeople from the city of Buczacz, his father’s hometown (see figure 5.2). Along the edges of the largely Jewish crowd are non-Jewish Ukrainian women in white headscarves, attesting to Birnbaum’s multiethnic support.

Figure 5.2. Nathan Birnbaum Austrian parliamentary election candidate photograph, Buczacz, 1907. Courtesy of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives.

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Even though he lost this election (reportedly due to fraud), the scene is striking with Birnbaum front and center in the crowded town square. The Yiddish storylines of the German Jew and the prodigal son intersect here in the figure of Nathan Birnbaum. Whereas Jess Olson dismisses the negative reception of the intellectually peripatetic Birnbaum, I am more interested in the negative reception for what can be gleaned from the difference between contemporary German and Yiddish articles written about Birnbaum.31 The Yiddish reception reveals Birnbaum’s explicit messianic statements that are lacking in German.Yiddish journalist Moyshe Shalit wrote a piece titled “The New Birnbaum,” which presents a firsthand account of Birnbaum’s religious turn. Shalit describes Birnbaum’s arrival in Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania) on the last day of 1911 and depicts the Austrian Jew as he descended from the train onto the platform, dressed “in a thin, short coat . . . shivering from the cold.” Shalit describes Birnbaum on the platform: “His tall prophet-like figure with the quite characteristic face, the forehead, the nose, and the beard forced us to look up.”32 Shalit describes Birnbaum as a prophet to foreshadow a conversation during that visit in which Birnbaum told Shalit and writer Shemarya Gorelik in no uncertain terms about his intention to be the Messiah. Birnbaum begins speaking, after which Shalit shares his thoughts: “Zionism has missed the mark, and the other movements are also helpless. There needs to be a new powerful religious movement of believers, a movement at the head of which stands a messiah. Do you know what?” He lowers his voice—“I feel called to it. I want to set myself up as the head of such a movement. I want to be the Messiah of the Jews! . . . I can’t tell you all the details, but you will hear about it. The time will come.” I looked over to Gorelik—and we both decided, as if on our own, not to say a word. We just looked at Birnbaum and understood that in this man’s head some deranged thoughts were growing, to which it is difficult to say if they were going to take on a dangerous or a productive character. Nevertheless something irrational planted itself into this man’s brain. And there was also something funny sounding about the “I,” the obsession with “I.” Gorelik’s relationship to Birnbaum from that time on was especially negative. As an aside, Gorelik was carrying around religious ideas of his own then. Birnbaum didn’t say a single word about it and did not make anything else known, as if he never had the discussion with us. As far as we were concerned, we also left the subject alone. It wasn’t anything more than an episode, a secret conversation among three people.33 It becomes clear to Shalit and Gorelik that Birnbaum had taken on the messianic mantle and was spreading the gospel among his Eastern European brothers. The only problem is that Shalit was thoroughly confused. The awkwardness in the air as Birnbaum tells Shalit and Gorelik that he wants to be the Messiah is tangible in Shalit’s retelling eight years later. The year 1912, the same year that Birnbaum began on this visit to Vilna, has been noted as a turning point in Birnbaum’s thought as he began to produce more re-

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ligiously infused works, beginning with “We have sinned. . . .”34 Of further note in my research is a rebuttal found in the Birnbaum archives. Birnbaum wrote Shalit a letter questioning the exchange and specifically taking umbrage with Shalit’s use of the word “messiah.” In his response, Shalit defends the article (“What I wrote is, of course, exact and correct”) but suggests that Birnbaum misinterprets his use of the term. Though ostensibly softening his wording for Birnbaum, Shalit essentially repeats himself that “you felt called to work for a religious renewal of Jews and to execute this process.”35 Despite the fact that Birnbaum bristled at the word “messiah,” Shalit did not retract what he said. This exchange again shows the significance in reception and re-reception between Eastern and Western Jewry. Where Shalit wrote to a Yiddish-speaking audience, criticizing this Western European interlocutor, Birnbaum attempts to intervene and soften that message. Birnbaum’s writing is tinged with messianism. In the article “On the Ocean: Thoughts and Memories,” Birnbaum recalls a religious event he had on a ship to the United States in 1907/1908. He compares this experience with that of the biblical figure of Jonah, the prophet famous for his encounter with God and a big fish on the open seas.36 More directly in his 1918 work God’s People, Birnbaum wrote, “I did not find God, as one says today so nicely and so dishonestly. I did not need to find him. He announced himself in me and then entered suddenly into my consciousness. I recognized him immediately.”37 He translated God’s People into Yiddish within a few years, exposing German and Yiddish audiences to his divine mission.38 As his intellectual interests developed in Orthodox Judaism and its politics, he continued writing about the Messiah, but in a more detached way. At the end of his life in Dutch exile from the Nazis, he published the volume Callings. In this 1936 compilation of his most recent German-language articles, the last essay is titled “Moschiach,” the transliteration of the Hebrew word for messiah.39 The tone here had notably changed from personal attachment with the Messiah to a more traditional religious essay on belief in a messiah, but the article completed a messianic strain in Birnbaum’s thinking through most of his life. Birnbaum’s messianism, as traced here both in his own writings and in the writings of others about him, peaked in a period between 1907 and his Yiddish translation of God’s People in 1921. In a career that began in the 1880s and ended in the 1930s, this period of fourteen years reflects the broader messianic and revolutionary atmosphere among European Jewish intellectuals before, during, and after World War I.40 Birnbaum was but one of the mediators between German and Yiddish. Rather than become religious in the neo-Orthodox German fashion, he looked eastward, combining a foreign Jewish life—linguistically, religiously, and culturally—with the literary portrayals of the Jewish Other. He wove both of these aspects into his layered Jewish identity and cultivated a messianic image easily legible for an Eastern European audience. Birnbaum’s life was the aesthetic culmination of his mediation between Western and Eastern Jewries. I have argued here thatYiddish literature and Zionist culture of the fin de siècle and World War I periods made messianic longing a central motif. Nathan Birnbaum performed both theYiddish representation of the German Jew as supernatu-

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ral redeemer, the daytsh, and the German reception of the authentic Eastern European Jew, the Ostjude. This back and forth of reception, transmission, and re-reception of Jewish lifestyles furthers our understanding of the cultural exchanges between German- and Yiddish-speaking Jewish populations. To date, scholarship has often treated the Jewish modernist projects in the East and in the West independent of each other. After reading the geographically determined titles of works such as Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany and Ken Moss’s Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, one is left with the question: how were these two contemporary, neighboring “Jewish renaissances” related? Knowledge of Yiddish brings forth intimate details of multilingual Central European Jews. A Jewish cultural renaissance swept across Central and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. To those works that touch on an exchange, it is limited geographically and temporally to Weimar Berlin: Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov’s edited volume Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, Rachel Seelig’s Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933, and Marc Caplan’s Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin. My research demonstrates that the German and Yiddish modernist projects were co-constitutive partners with an awakening across many countries and languages centered on a newfound relationship between German-speaking Jews and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Migration served as the catalyst for the cultural exchange between German-Jewish and Yiddish worlds in the mobile half century between the 1880s and 1930s. The mass westward migration of Eastern European Jews radically reconfigured the way in which Western and Eastern Jews related to one another. The cultural contact points were omnipresent. In a Prague theater, Franz Kafka introduced a traveling Yiddish theater troupe to German-speaking Jews. In Czernowitz, the Viennese Nathan Birnbaum founded a Yiddishist literary movement for Eastern European Jews. In Munich, the Galician-born artist E. M. Lilien helped craft the artistic style Jugendstil, using it to market Zionism in Germany and back home. And in Berlin and later Paris, the Russian-born Jew Marc Chagall capitalized on German-Jewish interest in the East by selling his now famous paintings of shtetl (small-town) Jews. My research, together with other recent studies, represents a current wave of scholarship on this subject. The recent localization of Yiddish studies in American and Canadian German studies departments will further the discovery of these interconnections. Innovations in German studies, both on contemporary topics and historical Habsburg and Central Europe, properly require scholars to think about multiculturalism and the relationship between language, ethnicity, nation, and empire. Yiddish provides a vital tool in this direction. With one-third of German doctoral programs in the United States and Canada having some connection to Yiddish through language instruction and/or recent tenure lines, the field of German studies is currently being shaped by a new infusion of German-Yiddish scholarship by recent graduates. The question remains what the knock-on effect will have for the future of North American Jewish studies and German-Jewish studies internationally.

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Nick Block is assistant professor of the practice for German studies at Boston College. His research interests engage with the cultural transfers between German and Yiddish modernism, and German-Jewish intellectual history more broadly. He has published on memorial culture in Germany, contemporary German Jewish-Muslim relations, and several essays on Jewish ex libris art. His current book project is titled Schlepping Culture:The Jewish Renaissance between German and Yiddish, 1880–1940.

Notes 1. Columbia University, Emory University, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Ohio State University, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of Chicago, University of Illinois-UrbanaChampaign, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas-Austin, University of Toronto, University of Virginia, University of WisconsinMadison, and Yale University. 2. Brandeis University, Drexel University, Harvard University, Jewish Theological Seminary, McGill University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, University of Maryland, and University of Michigan. 3. University of California–Santa Cruz, University of Ottawa, and York University. 4. Winifred V. Davies, “Myths We Live and Speak By:Ways of Imagining and Managing Language and Languages,” in Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History, ed. Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl, and Olivier Moliner (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 46. 5. In the section of my dissertation where I provide a reading of Kafka’s speech on Yiddish “Jargon,” I write about “one of the underpinnings of Jewish modernism, in which self-definition through the Jewish Other became central.” Nicholas A. Block, “In the Eyes of Others: The Dialectics of German-Jewish and Yiddish Modernisms” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2013), 45, 78–81. See also Franz Kafka, “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” in Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de siècle, ed. Mark Anderson, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (NewYork: Schocken, 1989 [1912]), 263–66. 6. Solomon Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 2nd ed., with new essays by David Birnbaum and others (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). 7. Max Weinreich, “Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt,” YIVO Bleter 25, no. 1 (January– February 1945), 13. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2008). 8. Uriel Weinreich, College Yiddish (New York:YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1949). 9. Nick Block, “On Nathan Birnbaum’s Messianism and Translating the Jewish Other,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 60 (2015): 61–78. 10. Buber translated Yiddish Chassidic legends as well as the Hebrew Bible into German. Pappenheim translated the Yiddish Tsene-rene and Glikl’s memoirs into German. Pinski wrote plays in Yiddish and German. See Martin Buber, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt, 1905); Bertha Pappenheim, Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln (Vienna: Meyer & Pappenheim, 1910); David Pinski, Eisik Scheftel: Ein jüdisches Arbeiterdrama in drei Akten, trans. Martin Buber (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1905). 11. On Birnbaum’s life and work, see especially Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 12. On Birnbaum as a translator of Peretz into German, see, e.g., Jeffrey A. Grossman, “From East to West: Translating Y. L. Peretz in Early Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Transmitting Jewish Tra-

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13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

ditions: Orality,Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed.Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2000), 278–309. Israel Bartal, “The Image of Germany and German Jewry in Eastern European Jewish Society During the 19th Century,” in Danzig, between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 27. For more examples, see Block, “In the Eyes of Others,” 68–71. Shlomo Yosef Zevin, “A Revelation in Disguise,” in A Treasury of Chassidic Tales on the Torah: A Collection of Inspirational Chassidic Stories Relevant to the Weekly Torah Readings, trans. Uri Kaploun (New York: Mesorah, 1992), 2:296–97. Shlomo Yosef Zevin, Sipure Hasidim (Tel Aviv: Avraham Tzioni, 1967), 69–70. “Refue un yortsaytn,” Hamaspik gazet, no. 143,Yiddish edition (October 2016), 21 (English translation is mine—NB). Bartal, “Image of Germany,” 13. Y. L. Peretz, Rayze bilder (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1909); David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing:The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7. Sholom Aleichem (Sholem Aleichem), “The PocketKnife,” in Jewish Children, ed. and trans. Hannah Berman (New York: Bloch, 1926), 187–209. Sholem Aleichem, “A frier peysekh: A mayse vos ken zikh farloyfn af der groyser velt,” Der fraynd (28, 30, and 31 March 1908), 2, 2, and 2–3, respectively. Sholem Asch, “Der kleyner daytsh,” Haynt 111 (14 May 1926), 5–6. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers:The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 84. Shemarya Gorelik, “Dr. Nosn Birnboym,” in Eseyen (Los Angeles: Mariv, 1947), 266, 70. Simon Dubnow, “Ein Gruß aus dem Osten dem Ritter des Ostjudentums,” Die Freistatt 2, no. 2 (1914): 76–78. Cited in Olson, Nathan Birnbaum, 324. Chaim Nagler, “Über Birnbaum,” Die Freistatt 2, no. 2 (1914): 85. J. L. Perez (Y. L. Peretz), “Die sieben guten Jahre,” in Volkstümliche Geschichten. Heiligen- und Wunderlegenden (Berlin: Welt, 1913), 12–17; and “Der Zauberkünstler,” in ibid., 29–36. Peretz, “Die sieben guten Jahre,” 16. This figure also appears in nineteenth-century German-Jewish literature (e.g. the stories of Leopold Kompert). Dan Miron, Image of the Shtetl, 27. “Wir sind das Leben, ihr seid der Todeskampf.Wir sind das Wesen, ihr seid der Schatten.Wir sind der Stamm, ihr seid die Splitter” (We are life, you are battling death. We are the life form, you are its shadow. We are the trunk, you are the splinters). Nathan Birnbaum, “Die Emanzipation des Ostjudentums vom Westjudentum,” in Ausgewählte Schriften zur jüdischen Frage (Czernowitz: Buchhandlung Dr. Birnbaum & Dr. Kohut, 1910), 2:28. “Biographische Daten über Dr. Nathan Birnbaum (Mathias Acher),” Die Freistatt 2, no. 3 (1914): 146. Hersh Dovid Nomberg, “D’r Birnboyms iberkerung,” in Mentshn un verk:Yidishe shrayber, Gezamelte verk (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1930), 9:203; Hersh Dovid Nomberg, “D’r Nosn Birnboym: Tsu zayn yubileum,” in ibid., 207–8. Olson, Nathan Birnbaum. Moyshe Shalit, “Der nayer Birnboym,” in Literarishe etyudn, vol. 1 (Vilna: Sh. Shreberk, 1920), 69–70. Ibid., 70–71. David Bondy, “Dr. Nathan Birnbaum,” Jüdische Presse 23, no. 14 (9 April 1937), 1. Nathan Birnbaum, “Wir haben gesündigt . . . ,” in Um die Ewigkeit: Jüdische Essays (Berlin: Welt, 1920), 9–20.

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35. Letters held at Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives. Birnbaum wrote to Shalit on 19 January 1926 (4 Shvat 5686), and Shalit’s response was written on 6 February 1926. 36. Nathan Birnbaum, “Auf dem Meere: Gedanken und Erinnerungen,” Der Israelit (4 January 1926), 8. 37. “Ich habe Gott nicht gesucht, wie man das heute so schön und so verlogen ausdrückt, ich brauchte ihn nicht zu finden. Er hatte sich in mir angekündigt und trat dann plötzlich in mein Bewußtsein ein. Unmittelbar erkannte ich ihn.” Nathan Birnbaum, Gottes Volk (Vienna: R. Löwit, 1918), 5. 38. Nathan Birnbaum, Gots Folk [God’s people], trans. Nathan Birnbaum (Berlin: Welt, 1921). 39. Nathan Birnbaum, “Moschiach,” in Rufe: Sieben Aufsätze (Antwerp: Messilo, 1936), 81–90. 40. Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

Bibliography Asch, Sholem. “Der kleyner daytsh.” Haynt 111 (14 May 1926), 5–6. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers:The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Bartal, Israel. “The Image of Germany and German Jewry in Eastern European Jewish Society During the 19th Century.” In Danzig, between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, edited by Isadore Twersky, 1–17. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. “Biographische Daten über Dr. Nathan Birnbaum (Mathias Acher).” Die Freistatt 2, no. 3 (1914): 146–51. Birnbaum, Nathan. “Die Emanzipation des Ostjudentums vom Westjudentum.” In Ausgewählte Schriften zur jüdischen Frage, 2:13–33. Czernowitz: Buchhandlung Dr. Birnbaum & Dr. Kohut, 1910. ———. GottesVolk. Vienna: R. Löwit, 1918. ———. “Wir haben gesündigt …” In Um die Ewigkeit: Jüdische Essays, 9–20. Berlin: Welt, 1920. ———. Gots Folk. Translated by Nathan Birnbaum. Berlin: Welt, 1921. ———. “Auf dem Meere: Gedanken und Erinnerungen.” Der Israelit (4 January 1926), 8. ———. “Moschiach.” In Rufe: Sieben Aufsätze, 81–90. Antwerp: Messilo, 1936. Birnbaum, Solomon. Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar. 2nd ed., with new essays by David Birnbaum and others. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Block, Nicholas A. “In the Eyes of Others: The Dialectics of German-Jewish and Yiddish Modernisms.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2013. Block, Nick. “On Nathan Birnbaum’s Messianism and Translating the Jewish Other.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 60 (2015): 61–78. Bondy, David. “Dr. Nathan Birnbaum.” Jüdische Presse (9 April 1937), 1–2. Buber, Martin. Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman. Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt, 1905. Davies, Winifred V. “Myths We Live and Speak By: Ways of Imagining and Managing Language and Languages.” In Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History, edited by Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and Olivier Moliner, 45–69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. Dubnow, Simon. “Ein Gruß aus dem Osten dem Ritter des Ostjudentums.” Die Freistatt 2, no. 2 (1914): 76–78. Gorelik, Shemarya. “Dr. Nosn Birnboym.” In Eseyen, 265–74. Los Angeles: Mariv, 1947. Grossman, Jeffrey A. “From East to West: Translating Y. L. Peretz in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.” In Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, edited by Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni, 278–309. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2000. Kafka, Franz. “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language.” In Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de siècle, 263–66. Edited by Mark Anderson. Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Schocken, 1989.

118 | NICK BLOCK Löwy, Michael. Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Miron, Dan. The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Nagler, Chaim. “Über Birnbaum.” Die Freistatt 2, no. 2 (1914): 85. Nomberg, Hersh Dovid. “D’r Birnboyms iberkerung.” In Mentshn un verk: Yidishe shrayber, Gezamelte verk, 9:203–6. Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1930. ———. “D’r Nosn Birnboym: Tsu zayn yubileum.” In Mentshn un verk: Yidishe shrayber, Gezamelte verk, 9:207–10. Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1930. Olson, Jess. Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism,Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pappenheim, Bertha. Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln. Vienna: Meyer & Pappenheim, 1910. Peretz,Y. L. Rayze bilder. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1909. ———. “Die sieben guten Jahre.” In Volkstümliche Geschichten. Heiligen- und Wunderlegenden, 12–17. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1913. ———. “Der Zauberkünstler.” In Volkstümliche Geschichten. Heiligen- und Wunderlegenden, 29–36. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1913. Pinski, David. Eisik Scheftel: Ein jüdisches Arbeiterdrama in drei Akten. Translated by Martin Buber. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1905. “Refue un yortsaytn.” Hamaspik gazet, no. 143,Yiddish edition, October 2016, 21. Roskies, David G. A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Shalit, Moyshe. “Der nayer Birnboym.” In Literarishe etyudn, 1:66–82. Vilna: Sh. Shreberk, 1920. Sholem Aleichem. “A frier peysekh: A mayse vos ken zikh farloyfn af der groyser velt.” In Der fraynd (28, 30, and 31 March 1908), 2, 2, and 2–3, respectively. ———. “The Pocket-Knife.” In Jewish Children, 187–209. Edited and translated by Hannah Berman. New York: Bloch, 1926. Weinreich, Max. “Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt.” YIVO Bleter 25, no. 1 (January–February 1945): 13. ———. History of the Yiddish Language. Edited by Paul Glasser. Translated by Shlomo Noble. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2008. Weinreich, Uriel. College Yiddish. New York:YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1949. Zevin, Shlomo Yosef. Sipure Hasidim. Tel Aviv: Avraham Tzioni, 1967. ———. “A Revelation in Disguise.” In A Treasury of Chassidic Tales on the Torah: A Collection of Inspirational Chassidic Stories Relevant to the Weekly Torah Readings, 2:296–97. Translated by Uri Kaploun. New York: Mesorah, 1992.

 CHAPTER 6

Metaphysik der Gottferne Negativity, Intellectual Communities, and German-Jewish Studies



Matthew Handelman

The Possibilities of Negativity Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), written in exile from Nazi Germany, is a monument to negativity. A cornerstone of critical theory, the text shows the entwinement of reason with its opposite(s), barbarism and antisemitism, and creates a narrative bridge from the Enlightenment (as idea and historical period) to the attempted annihilation of the European Jews. Emancipation and equality, on which many Jews had staked their hopes for social advancement in the German-speaking world, are just the other side of the control and domination brought by instrumental reason, scientific rationality, and their application in the culture industry. Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno along with figures like Walter Benjamin have become celebrated in popular venues like the New Yorker as “naysayers” for their skepticism of mass culture.1 And yet, at numerous points in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the text not only criticizes and rejects but also affirms. Consider the following example: The disenchanted world of Judaism propitiates magic by negating it in the idea of God. The Jewish religion brooks no word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion. . . . The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition. Such observance, “determinate negation,” is not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which false-

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hood and truth are equally void. Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth.2 This passage maintains thought’s potential to read “truth” in the “falseness” of “idols” and “the absolute.” It connects the biblical Bilderverbot with Hegel’s idea of “determinate negation,” setting a positive program for critical thought that turns false “images” (ideology) into the knowledge offered by critique (“script”) as the “the denunciation of illusion.” Even if Horkheimer and Adorno’s text remains committed to dialectical negativity, the passage stands at the end of a tradition of Jewish thought in Weimar-era Germany, which, from cultural critique to theology, drew productively on the negative.3 The fecundity of negativity and the ways that German-Jewish thinkers mobilized it to address intellectual and aesthetic challenges constitute, at least in part, the enduring contribution of German-Jewish thought in the age of technological reason. Questions of negativity and the interdisciplinary attempts to address them, which forged links between the study of culture and literature and subjects like mathematics and philosophy, were factors that initially attracted me to German-Jewish studies.While nothing makes the idea of negativity specifically “German,” “Jewish,” or “German-Jewish,” the discipline of German-Jewish studies itself has often been framed, as Liliane Weissberg describes the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute in 1955, by negativity: “Similar to the Institute’s calling, the field of German-Jewish Studies was conceived as one that dealt with a culture that was lost.”4 Reading negativity can mean more than just a “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” focusing our attention instead to questions that ask, as in the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, how something finite like human thought can take account of the infinitude of God and eternity.5 Beyond its ability to communicate, what does language say through, in Benjamin’s words, “the noncommunicable,” “the inexpressible,” and “the unsaid”? 6 Franz Kafka’s modernist literature points to the fault lines between language and the bureaucratic terror of modern life, which, according to Siegfried Kracauer, “the face of truth eludes.”7 What are students of the German-Jewish experience to do with reason itself when it seems so inextricably entwined with unreason? Tarrying in the negative enabled German-Jewish intellectuals during the interwar period to formulate compelling responses to these questions, but not by somehow mystically expressing the inexpressible. Rather, negativity pointed the way through conceptual and aesthetic aporia when inherited modes of thinking and writing no longer felt adequate to capture the intellectual complexities of modern life. In order to explore negativity in German-Jewish thought, my research focuses on the interdisciplinary topics overlooked in the writing of German-Jewish intellectual and cultural history. These topics include the natural sciences, technology, and, in particular, mathematics, which, in the ways it influenced Kracauer, Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, was the subject of my first book, The Mathematical Imagination: On the

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Origins and Promise of Critical Theory (2019). Research for this book was supported by a Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, which allowed me, among other things, to conduct research at the Gershom Scholem Archive at the National Library of Israel. Mathematics is often regarded as a marginal topic in comparison to concerns more central to the discipline, such as the history and literature of German Jews.8 And yet mathematics was a key source for metaphors that broadened the horizons of conceptual thought for these figures and without which, I contend, the more radical dimensions of German-Jewish thought remain hidden.9 The interdisciplinary nature of this work consists less in looking at Jewish mathematicians in Germany (of whom there were many) than in exploring the ways that negativity in mathematics helped German Jews address issues like loss and privation.10 For Scholem, to take an example from the book, mathematical logic allowed him to represent the negativity of the erasure of Judaism and Jewish particularity through acculturation to the cultures of German-speaking countries. The austere syntax of mathematical logic and its eschewal of meaning shed new light for Scholem, who graduated with a Staatsexamen degree in the subject in 1922, on the limits of language, but not simply by reifying their existence.11 Rather, mathematics’ restriction of linguistic meaning allowed it to capture ideas that lay beyond language, such as mathematical truths. For Scholem, restricting poetic language could likewise symbolize the loss of the Jewish tradition after generations of assimilation. Scholem eventually left the study of mathematics for mysticism. But the ability of mathematics to indicate what lies beyond language by restricting it set the stage for a history of kabbalah that, in converse, linked the repeated flourishing of mystical writings to periods of privation and despair in Jewish history. Tied to an educational background in mathematics, my research draws inspiration from the ways in which German-Jewish intellectuals found in mathematics a source of productive negativity, but also a way of thinking in which one cannot simply invest blind faith. As Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer surely recognized, mathematics enjoys perhaps more than any other discipline a “special epistemological status,” as Bettina Heintz put it, in cultural imaginaries that affords to it ahistorical, intersubjective “truth.”12 But they and other German-Jewish intellectuals also showed a profound awareness of the erasure associated with mathematization and the conversion of quality into quantity, the concrete into the abstract. For instance, Kracauer’s essay “The Mass Ornament” (1927) on Weimar-era dance revues warns of the seductiveness of the dancers’ geometric patterns and synchronized movements, because “community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability.”13 As I discovered while writing The Mathematical Imagination, these German-Jewish thinkers even force us to reconsider what we understand under the term “mathematics” itself. Mathematics—perhaps captured best in the plural abbreviation “maths” in British English—can refer not only to apodictic “calculations” like 5 + 7 = 12 but also to historical-cultural debates, such as those over the teaching of infinitesimal calculus in secondary education, and an array of epistemological textures, from the spatiality of geometry to the syntax of algebra to the

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interplay of motion and rest in infinitesimal calculus.14 Taken together, German-Jewish intellectuals like Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Kracauer, Rosenzweig, and Scholem offer a path between the extremes of a naïvely positivistic application of mathematics to cultural phenomena and the often overwrought skepticism of its critique. What makes my research approach distinct is bringing this potentially generative but also critical relationship between the so-called “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities to bear in the digital age.15 My work is based on the assumption that computational approaches to the past can augment traditional methods of historical and literary analysis, revealing aspects of German-Jewish intellectual life that would have otherwise been inaccessible to scholars. At the same time, it contends that the theories of culture and aesthetics formulated by these thinkers in a period increasingly dominated by technological reason help contemporary scholars and critics excavate the ideological assumptions and consequences at work in digital technologies.The relationship between cultural theory and technology is and always has been reciprocal. My research sees one possible future for German-Jewish studies—if not for the humanities more generally—in the reciprocity of what digital methods can tell us about cultures and the sensitivity to the social consequences of technology offered by German-Jewish intellectuals. My approach advances the discipline of German-Jewish studies by harnessing mathematical and computational modes of thinking—which digital technologies have made ubiquitous—for the study of German-Jewish culture and thought. As Jonathan Hess pointed out, mass digitization has made historical and literary sources, especially from the nineteenth century, accessible to scholars and students of the German-Jewish experience at an unprecedented scale.16 Building on these insights, I contend that digital technologies also offer ways, like mathematics, to tap productively into negativity. This idea was already present in the work of German-Jewish intellectuals on technological media such as film. While film detaches the image from the “aura” of the original, it also “can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens,” Benjamin writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1939), “but not to the human eye.”17 Kracauer’s Weimar-era feuilletons pick up a similar thread when they claim that as consciousness must confront in photography the “unabashedly displayed mechanics of industrial society, it also faces, thanks to photographic technology, the reflection of the reality that has slipped away from it.”18 For Benjamin and Kracauer, technological media came with a trade-off: they forfeit certain elements (the “aura” or the “memory image”) while offering others, such as insight into previously invisible processes. Computation functions in much the same way, in that it allows us to focus in on and accentuate details that may have otherwise gone overlooked as it—and because it—disregards others. Since these results come via negativa (e.g., by negating certain features of the object), they necessitate further elucidation, which becomes the task of hybrid methods of computational and cultural analysis. The example of my research presented in the next section adapts the trade-off that Benjamin and Kracauer locate in photography and film to digital approaches to cultural

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phenomena. It explores a computational model of correspondence networks among German-Jewish intellectuals during the Weimar Republic, which blends out the content of the letters to investigate the overall structure of an intellectual community. Even as it ignores what usually constitutes the appeal of intellectual correspondences (the ideas, debates, and friendships contained within them), a digital approach to German-Jewish correspondences renders legible the larger social configurations at play in German-Jewish intellectual history that may otherwise evade scholarly scrutiny. While it is important to keep in mind that any reconstruction remains as provisional as the archive itself, I argue that the negativity of digital technologies such as network visualization helps scholars address the negativity of the German-Jewish experience mentioned above—in particular, the displacement of individuals due to exile and the loss and fragmentation of their archives. To be sure, I am claiming neither that computational techniques restore some past unity to German-Jewish intellectual communities nor that they recreate them in full. Rather, they bring into new constellations historical data that, because of the forced diaspora of German Jews, are otherwise separated, stored in different languages, archives, and archival standards in institutions across the globe. Far from an end in themselves, these constellations are meant to augment the analytic work of intellectual history and cultural theory. One of the many contributions that German-Jewish studies continues to make to the humanities is a perceptiveness of the social and political effects of technology on the human, especially those in precarious or minoritized positions. Take Kracauer’s analysis of Berlin’s “Broadcasting House” (1931, Haus des Rundfunks today), built in 1929 to accommodate the burgeoning new media. As the building resembles more the “administrative building of a concern” than the site of artistic creation, the text diagnoses the commodification of culture in “the idea of radio.” The new technology strives to be a “large-scale enterprise, which transforms the productions of researchers, writers, and artists into ready-to-use products,” a process that dampens radio’s potentially positive social impact. Indeed, German Jews recognized in these technologies many of the same problems we grapple with today. Antisemitism and conspiracy theories flourished in the networks created by technological media such as film and radio, which were ripe for right-wing propaganda. Horkheimer and Adorno captured this nexus well when they wrote that “ideology hides itself in probability calculations.”19 While these ideologies mattered to these thinkers as Jews (and, often, as Marxists), it was in part their disjointed, outsider position as Jews in German society that made them particularly attuned to (among other things) the incongruence between technological forms and the world of meaning.20 It is worth paying attention to their work as it spells out the consequences of these incongruences, which propagandists used—and continue to use—media technologies to exploit. An enduring point of relevance of German-Jewish thought thus lies in the ways it helps decipher the ideological assumptions and implications of digital technologies. It suggests that any connection between the STEM fields and the humanities must be a two-way street: while technology opens new avenues to read literature and history,

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scholars of culture and media help us address the problems of language, representation, race, gender, and class brought by new digital technologies. The German-Jewish experience teaches us to question the necessity of the technological world, which, to start locally, proves useful for forging alternatives to the naive antagonisms between the STEM fields and the humanities that define the current university.

Intellectual Communities in “a World Abandoned by God” Negativity in German-Jewish thought often circles around the problem of God in an increasingly secularized and rationalized world, especially in the early twentieth century. Scholars such as Miriam Hansen and Inka Mülder-Bach have shown that the idea of an absent or concealed Godhead participated in the pessimistic narrative of the fallenness of modernity, linked to Max Weber’s characterizations of modernity as the “disenchantment of the world.”21 Aspects such as meaning, community, and spiritual connection wither amid the rational organization of capitalist society and the rise of technology. Georg Lukács captured these sentiments in his oft-cited formulation from Theory of the Novel (1920): “The novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God [Der Roman ist die Epopöe der gottverlassenen Welt].”22 While we will return to Lukács, we see in his negative formulation the productive interconnection of intellectual influences. The postwar “neo-gnostic-spirit,” as Benjamin Lazier calls it, combined with Hegelian aesthetics to link aesthetic forms (“the novel”) to philosophical-historical periods (a modern world in which technology and rationality have shattered any sense of totality).23 The idea of divine abandonment put into words the spiritual losses of the technologized world, but it also contained a social element, one not immediately visible in Lukács’s formulation. Indeed, the phrase “a world abandoned by God” circulated widely among German-Jewish intellectuals in the early Weimar Republic, and, as I claim here, its circulation refocuses attention to the often-overlooked figure of Margarete Susman, who helped set the idea into motion. The following analysis puts into practice the theoretical considerations about negativity in the previous section by analyzing the idea of “a world abandoned by God” with the help of computational methods. A traditional approach to intellectual history demands that I explain the cultural factors that led to the term’s emergence and trace its development in the works of key thinkers with the help of close reading. But, since Lukács and Susman were also avid letter writers, what if we were to complement this approach with a model of the correspondence networks among German-Jewish intellectuals who employed the idea of divine abandonment? Network analysis allows us to tap into negativity in two ways, offering visual and quantitative perspectives on the social forces that shaped the term. At the cost of the content of the letters, visualizing their correspondence network provides an image of an intellectual community surrounding “a world abandoned by God” and anchored by Susman. By foregoing visual intuition, network metrics also demonstrate Susman’s centrality in this network

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by showing that she has the greatest number of connections to other members of the network. Combined with close reading, network analysis helps capture Susman’s contributions to the idea of “a world abandoned by God,” which have gone unnoticed because of her (and other women’s) often marginal role in German-Jewish intellectual history.24 My analysis thus takes up Nils Roemer’s call for “a better understanding of the social networks that informed and propelled” thinkers such as Susman, Arendt, and Selma Stern, which “might indeed improve our insight into the social process by which ideas circulated.”25 It also suggests that scholars of German-Jewish intellectual history view a concept such as divine abandonment itself as a “social process” that not only responded to societal conditions but also was determined by a social dimension irreducible to its conceptual content. The material for this article is drawn from a larger research project into GermanJewish intellectuals’ use of technological media as a means of conducting Kulturpolitik (cultural politics) during the Weimar Republic. Initially designating the cultural initiatives of the state (e.g., culture ministries), the term “cultural politics” came in the early twentieth century to mean conducting politics through culture and its interpretation.26 For Adorno, Benjamin, Lukács, and Kracauer, technology was always already a political issue, contributing to a sense of abandonment by old figures of authority (God included) and establishing new means of social control, culminating in the culture industry.27 And yet technological media like newspapers, radio, and film also held hope for these and other German-Jewish intellectuals that they could be deployed in the cultural realm to combat the rising antisemitism and right-wing extremism of the age. This larger project explores the material dimension of German-Jewish thought—its technological modes of dissemination, technological practices, and social constellations. My analysis here borrows archival data that I collected while researching one of these social constellations: the network of authors and editors at the feuilleton of the liberal, pro-democratic newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, up to 1933.28 The dataset from this research includes letters to and from authors such as Susman, Benjamin, Kracauer (also an editor), and Ernst Bloch and the editors Rudolph Geck and Benno Reifenberg; I have also added letters from Lukács and Rosenzweig, because they participated in debates about divine abandonment.29 A visualization of the full dataset (figure 6.1) shows that Kracauer commanded an expansive network of Jewish authors, cultural critics, and religious thinkers, which connected them with a popular (and non-Jewish) venue in the feuilleton and helped promote antifascist standpoints. Before the rise of Hitler and World War II became historical inevitabilities, these German-Jewish intellectuals engaged in a vigorous yet ultimately abandoned attempt to employ modern mass media such as the feuilleton to conduct leftist politics through cultural critique. While the larger project on cultural politics runs up to the end of the Weimar Republic, the analysis of the phrase “a world abandoned by God” presented here focuses on its development and circulation up to 1925. For Lukács, Susman, Bloch, Kracauer, and Rosenzweig in particular, the phrase gained currency amid the upheaval of World War I and the chaos of the early Weimar Republic.30 Along with its usage in their

Ernst, Paul

Bloch, Ernst

Blei, Franz

Jacob, Benno Hallo, Rudolf

Benjamin, Walter Borries, Achim von

Cohen, Hermann and Martha Family Rosenzweig

Figure 6.1. Correspondence network of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Rudolf Geck (editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung), Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Franz Rosenzweig, Benno Reifenberg (editor at FZ), and Margarete Susman (up to 1933). Figure by Matthew Handelman.

Horkheimer, Max

Bermann Fischer, Gottfried Benn, Gottfried Scholz, Wilhelm von Hohenlohe, Max Roth, Joseph Klages, Ludwig Hausenstein, Margot

Kracauer, Siegfried

Gubler, Friedrich Traugott and Ella

Buber, Martin

Dienemann, Max Weizsäcker, Viktor von

Ullmann, Regina Scheler, Max Rosenzweig, Franz Adorno, Theodor W. Wegner, Armin Theophil no name data Rychner, Max Ehrenberg, Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf Wolfskehl, Karl Rosenstock-Huessy, Margrit Kracauer, Elisabeth Kolb, Annette Baeck, Leo Landry, Harald Oppenheim, Gertrud Rosenstock, Eugen Mann, Klaus Reifenberg, Benno Ehrenberg, Victor Frank, Leni Hahn, IlseCohen, Hermann Löwenthal, Leo Sternberger, Dolf Rosenzweig, Edith Beckerath, EmilFrank, Helene Ehrenberg, Rudolf and Gritli Hausenstein, Wilhelm Ehrenberg, Eva Meier-Graefe, Julius Hahn, Edith Markowicz, Ernst Geck, Rudolf Rosenzweig, Franz and Adele Strauss, Ilse Picard, Max Simon, Ernst Strauss, Eduard Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen and Margrit Paquet, Alfons Ehrenberg, Julie Rosenzweig, Franz and Edith Frank, Gertrud Zweig, Stefan Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin Rosenzweig, Adele Cohen, Martha Rosenzweig, Franz et. al. Rosenzweig, Rafael Morgenstern, Soma Kesten, Hermann Küpper, Hannes Rosenzweig, Rafael and Edith Schickele, René Glatzer, Nahum S.-Fischer-Verlag (Berlin)

Gubler, Friedrich Traugott

Mannheim, Karl

various

Muehlon, Johann Wilhelm

Beer-Hofmann, Richard Seligmann, Caesar Mayer, Eugen

Susman, Margarete Bendemann, Eduard von Huebner, Friedrich Markus

Weber, Max

Busoni, Ferruccio Simmel, Georg Enckendorff, Marie Luise Groethuysen, Bernhard Frankfurter Zeitung Salomon, Albert Lehmann, Wilhelm Korrodi, Eduard

Vaihinger, Hans

Bertaux, Félix

Friedländer, Salomo

Lukács, Georg

Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf

Piper, Reinhard

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books, articles, and reviews, the network of their correspondences during this turbulent period offers a model of the possible channels through which an idea like divine abandonment could have spread (see figure 6.2), as these correspondences provided a space for the exchange and negotiation of ideas. The correspondence network up to 1925 contains 326 nodes—the circles, which represent individuals—and 424 edges—the interlinking lines, which designate a correspondence between two individuals. A network analysis metric that is instructive in evaluating a network as a whole is network density, which measures the percentage of existing correspondences against the number of total possible correspondences (i.e., if all individuals were connected to all other individuals in the network).31 While denser than figure 6.1 (0.2 percent), the network in figure 6.2 is still not dense (0.7 percent), meaning that only a small portion of individuals (53 nodes) are connected to multiple others while the majority (273) are connected to only one individual. While it disregards contextual information, the density measure for this network suggests that ideas like “a world abandoned by God” would have spread first among key thinkers and then out to those on the network’s periphery. Overall, the network visualization shows that the idea of “a world abandoned by God” would have circulated between two main German-Jewish intellectual communities. Visible on the left of figure 6.2, Bloch, Lukács, and Susman belonged to the circle of thinkers surrounding Georg and Gertrud Simmel in Berlin and participated in the weekly colloquia at the Simmels’ home.32 This group interpreted the modern condition through the lens of urbanization, the social effects of industrialization and rapid transportation, and, as we see in the idea of divine abandonment, the destabilization of traditional religious and cultural norms through the natural sciences and social transformation.33 Toward the right of figure 6.2, we find figures more closely associated with Jewish religious and cultural renewal efforts in Frankfurt, organized around Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel and, after Nobel’s death in 1922, Rosenzweig’s work at the Free Jewish Lehrhaus.34 Sharing a similar diagnosis of modernity, these thinkers found in Judaism and a renewed sense of Jewish identity ways to address the disorientation of modern life. Even if discussions such as the one over divine abandonment started in a place like the Simmels’ salon, they expanded and intensified in the exchanges of letters between individuals. The visual perspective provided by network analysis suggests that, as the ideas spread, Susman and—to a lesser extent up to 1925—Kracauer and Martin Buber (whose node is located in the middle of figure 6.2) served as the primary points of connection between these two German-Jewish intellectual groups. One point of entry for the phrase “a world abandoned by God” into the orbit of this set of German-Jewish intellectuals was Susman’s essays for the Frankfurter Zeitung, where she wrote for the feuilleton starting in 1906. For German-Jewish intellectual history, this may come as a surprise, since Susman’s work, as Anke Gilleir writes, stands on the brink of being forgotten as she often appears as an interlocutor amid other, better-known personalities.35 And yet it was texts like her review of Lukács’s Soul and

Weber, Max

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Hahn, Edith

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Frank, Helene

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Rosenzweig, Franz et. al.

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Hahn, Ilse

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Huebner, Friedrich Markus

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Friedländer, Salomo

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Ernst, Paul

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Figure 6.2. Correspondence network of Benjamin, Bloch, Geck, Kracauer, Lukács, Rosenzweig, Reifenberg, and Susman up to 1925 (labels included for nodes with a degree of 2 or higher). Figure by Matthew Handelman.

Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf

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Form (1910) that set the stage for the wider usage of the idea of divine abandonment later in the Weimar Republic. Her review claims that a loss of guidance by an Absolute constitutes the “spiritual currents of our time,” in which meaning and value have become “problematic and questionable.” The work of a “modern, faithless mystic,” Soul and Form follows the path of “the abandoned individual soul, who can no longer capture in its small, isolated mirror an Absolute in its gigantic divine form, pursu[ing] a deity of life abandoned by God [einer von Gott verlassenen Göttlichkeit des Lebens].” Susman’s text connects the “modern” spirit (Geist) to the phrase “abandoned by God” (von Gott verlassen); here, the latter refers not to the world but rather to a “divinity” that once oriented the individual but now must be sought in the concept of aesthetic form. Her review also interprets one of the book’s central points (form as a “path to the absolute”) as a “character feature,” as Lukács put it in a letter to Susman.36 More than a summary, Susman’s review assumes the form of a generative engagement that not only elaborates on the original work but also puts a finger on the current intellectual climate, giving voice to the tragedy of the modern soul that remains “unexpressed” in Lukács’s work.37 Before the devastation of World War I, the modern world appeared as devoid of spiritual authority, which the tragic individual must now find in the realm of art and which the critical review is tasked with revealing. Lukács’s Theory of the Novel picks up on Susman’s formulation and transforms it into the phrase “a world abandoned by God” that underpins the text’s philosophical-historical account of literary form. Before its publication as a book in 1920, Theory of the Novel appeared in two installments in the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1916, placing it in closer proximity to Susman’s review of Soul and Form. Indeed, Lukács’s pre–World War I letters to Susman (the line connecting their nodes on the bottom left) suggest that her review of Soul and Form influenced the idea of divine abandonment in Theory of the Novel. While they do not mention the phrase “abandoned by God” directly, the letters focus on the metaphysics of history (“the lack of a final, indissoluble conclusion”) that Susman’s review renders legible.38 Theory of the Novel places this historical-philosophical framework at the center of its discussion of literary form: “a world abandoned by God” refers to the metaphysical conditions of the novel as they contrast with the “closed” world of imminent meaning of the epic; it sets the crumbling backdrop for the demonic hero; it brings into relief the ideal’s “lost utopian homeland” in the novel’s signature irony; it marks the incommensurability of “soul” and “action”; and, perhaps most notably, it translates into Lukács’s depiction of modernity as the age of “transcendental homelessness.”39 As Susman’s “divinity abandoned by God” described the fate of the individual, Lukács’s phrase “a world abandoned by God” expands it to encompass the modern epoch as such. If the novels of Flaubert, Goethe, and Tolstoy are prime representatives of this modern condition, then those of Dostoevsky offer for Lukács a glimpse beyond it. Theory of the Novel marks two important developments in the usage of “a world abandoned by God.” First, it provides Susman’s formulation of divine abandonment with a more definite metaphysical and historical context. It not only marks modernity

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as a metaphysical stage in a historical process following a stage of “closed cultures,” personified, for Lukács, by Greek antiquity. It also specifies this point of transition as concurrent with the rise of the novel Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) amid increasing secularization and changing forms of subjectivity “at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to abandon the world [der Gott des Christentums die Welt zu verlassen beginnt].”40 This specification solidifies the association of a clearly defined metaphysics of “a world abandoned by God” and a historical period, including the present day, which became prevalent during the early Weimar Republic. The second point (see figure 6.3) is the potential social reach and circulation of the idea of divine abandonment with Susman’s and Lukács’s usage of the phrase. Together, their correspondences encompass 226 of the total 424 exchanges among 238 of the total 326 individuals in the network, which accounts for over 50 percent of the correspondences. As confirmed by the visualization of the correspondence networks up to 1925 (figure 6.3), the network contains mainly friends of Susman and Lukács (i.e., nodes with only one degree of separation), including figures like Bloch and Simmel, but not Benjamin and Ernst Simon. If we think of a correspondence network as a model of the potential influence of ideas, then the network here indicates that Susman’s and Lukács’s use of “a world abandoned by God” would have reached the orbit of intellectuals associated with Simmel already during World War I, but not yet core groups surrounding what would become the Frankfurt School (Benjamin and Adorno) or the broader Jewish Renaissance community around Rosenzweig. It was Susman’s philosophical reviews that not only set the idea of divine abandonment into motion before the war but also reengaged the idea, continued its circulation, and further modified it after the war’s end. The idea resurfaces, for instance, in her review of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1918), published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1919. Susman had met Bloch and (with trepidation) forged an intellectual relationship with him in the circles surrounding Simmel in Berlin.41 Her review interprets Bloch’s work as a new epoch in metaphysics devoted to a utopian “self-encounter” (Selbstbegegnung) with the human and invokes the language of divine abandonment in its dramatic conclusion: “So ascends from the present, which is seen, grasped and judged in its depths, a sorrowful, radiant metaphysics of divine distance [Metaphysik der Gottferne].”42 Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia makes reference to “this epoch of divine distance” and, in the second edition (1923), locates it in the current intellectual state.43 But it is Susman’s review that ties the state of divine abandonment most immediately to the postwar period, to “this hour of the world” characterized by “world darkness” and “the entire hardship of our time.” “The measureless divine abandonment [Gottverlassenheit] of our world today,” she writes, “precisely these longest and darkest life nights turn [for Bloch] into the advent night of a newly breaking forth historical-philosophical epoch.”44 Susman’s review is timely in a way a book could not be, translating its apocalyptic vision into the disorientation after defeat, the fall of one regime, and the turbulent rise of another. Further underscoring the importance of the review genre, her discussion of Bloch’s Spirit of

Huebner, Friedrich Markus

Ullmann, Regina Rang, Christian Buschmann, Mechthild Leppmann, FranzGoldstein, Ida Kircher, Elsbet Bendemann, Eduard von Fischer, LuiseArthur Stein, Arthur Liebert, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin) Kutscher, Artur Wolfram, Irma Overbeck, J. Bendemann, Felix

Enckendorff, Marie Luise

Susman, Margarete

Mayer, Eugen

Figure 6.3. Correspondence network from figure 6.2 with labels from nodes connected directly to Lukács and Susman. Figure by Matthew Handelman.

various

Rosenzweig, Franz

Seligmann, Caesar

Zschech, Fritz Piper, Reinhard Goedecke, M. L. Kircher, Erwin Simon, Heinrich Emmerling, Anita Bendemann, Erwin von Möller-Coburg, Clara Scheid, Richard Groethuysen, Olga Paula Susman, Goldstein, Margarete Susman, Jenny Wiegler,Sternthal, Paul Friedrich Sachau,Joël, Gerhard Sachau, Ruth Hedwig Heinrich, Foerster, Friedrich WilhelmWalter Zoozmann, Richard Oppler, Alice Weitbrecht, Carl Meyer, Ida Therese Medicus, Fritz Fechheimer, Sigfried Merzbach, Grabowsky, Adolf Wolff, Kurt Unruh, Fritz von Drei-Masken-Verlag (Berlin, München) J.-G.-Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger (Stuttgart) Strecker und Schröder (Stuttgart) Susman, George Röttger, KarlKäthe Klesper, Neumann, Adolf Junghans, G. Kantorowicz, Berl, Heinrich Gertrud Korrodi, Eduard Joël, Karl Weiss, Robert Michel, H. Frauer, E. Mayer, Gustav Welt-VerlagSchneelin, (Berlin) E. Stern, Friedrich Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Heymann-Rheineck, Carl Lejeune, R. Karl Goldstein, Kurt Witkop, Diederichs, Eugen Kaulla,Wolfskehl, Anne Philipp Verlag Roques, KurtJüdischer Rüdiger von Mayer, Flora Malik-Verlag (Berlin) Bernhard Groethuysen, Guillain, Lang-Kurz, MinnaAlix Streiff-von Wyss, Hedwig Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen Landauer, Gustav Fuld, Flora Natanson, Jastrow, Anna Aline Seligmann, Ella Ernst-Hoesch, Lucy Susman, Adolph and E. Jenny Egidy, Emmy von Bovet, Jordan, L. and Kauffmann, Robert Stein,fürHedi Deutschland Cohen, J. Zionistische Vereinigung Lachmann, Hedwig Schmalenbach, HermanKauffmann, J. ESRA (Wien) Reichstein, Gustava Zuckmayer, Carl Plaut, Theo and Meta Schlesinger, Paul Frankfurter Lehmann, Wilhelm Hummel, Max Wiskovatoff, L. Zeitung Wiener, Alfred Aeschlimann, Haase, Hermann Rudolf

Weber, Max

Simmel, Georg

Buber, Martin

Kracauer, Siegfried

Muehlon, Johann Wilhelm

Bloch, Ernst

Friedländer, Salomo

Lukács, Georg

von Eckhardt, Hans Weber, Marianne Zalai, Béla Ferenczi, Sári Jászi, Oskar Lask, Emil Hevesi, Sándor Antal, Friedrich Gundolf, Friedrich de Waard,Fejér, Beatrice Troeltsch, Ernst Lipót Konnerth, Hermann von Gebsattel, Emil Mehlis, Georg Külpe, Oswald Gothein, Marie-Luise Worringer, Wilhelm Radbruch, Gustav Rickert, Heinrich Seidlitz, Leonie Fülep, Lajos Bánóczi, László Weber, Alfred Ziegler, Leopold Popper, Leo Polányi, Karl Blei, Franz Salomon, Gottfried Kaffka, Margit Grabenko, Max Jelena Frischeisen-Köhler, Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf Cohn, Jonas Béla Balázs, Jaspers, Karl Benedek, Ignotus Marcell Babits, Mihály Alexander, Bernát Bortstieber, Gertrud Gothein, Eberhard Bertaux, Félix Hegedüs, Gyula Salomon, Albert Seidler, Irma Franck, Hans Neumann, Carl Curtius, Ernst Robert Kahn, Harry Lukács, József Ritoók, Emma Mannheim, Lederer-Seidler, EmmyKarl Beer-Hofmann, Richard Ernst, Else Felix Bab, Julius Somló, Baumgarten, Franz Schwarz, Berthold Mahrholz, Werner Kernstok, Greiner, Leo Károly

Hans Ernst, Paul Vaihinger, Szilasi, Wilhelm

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Utopia articulates the idea of a full-fledged metaphysics of divine abandonment and ties it to the experience of social and cultural destabilization following World War I. The specific connection between divine abandonment and the early Weimar Republic solidifies further, as well as takes on a generative tone, in Susman’s review of contemporary philosophical currents, “The Exodus from Philosophy” (June 1921). The review reads the works of Simmel, Rosenzweig, Bloch, and Max Scheler (among others) as sharing a rejection of “pure thought” and “idealism” and a need to address the whole, concrete, singular person amid the “hardships, despair, collapse, and changes that we have lived through.” The review again codes the early years of Weimar as “our divided world, abandoned by God [von Gott verlassene Welt] and surrendered to annihilation” after “the World War ripped open the abyss.”45 Beyond linking divine abandonment and the Weimar Republic, Susman’s omnibus review puts its finger on a trend that is indicative of the productive negativity of German-Jewish thought in general: divine abandonment does not entail resigned pessimism but rather a call for action to work on the messianic future and world-sublating redemption. “The soul knows itself,” in the case of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, “not to be abandoned by God, but rather to be beloved by Him.”46 Putting the Zeitgeist into concrete terms does not make Susman’s philosophical reviews unoriginal. Rather, they read the world-historical state in various modes of intellectual expression, cultivating a cultural-critical form that her correspondents (namely, Kracauer) adopted. Describing postwar thought with first-person plural (“our time,” “our divided world”) and in terms of a shared biblical “exodus,” Susman’s reviews sought to remediate the very condition they diagnosed and build a community of thinkers despite the (seeming) divine abandonment of the present. Complementing this close reading, a network analysis of German-Jewish correspondences renders legible and emphasizes Susman’s centrality to the circulation of the phrase “a world abandoned by God.” Susman’s 1966 epitaph in the Frankfurter Zeitung summed up her work as a “centering and connecting force like the women of the Romantic period,” about whom she published the book Women of Romanticism (1929). Just because she held such a central intellectual-social position, however, does not mean we should conclude, as Gilleir paraphrases criticism of Susman, that she “was only brought to thought through the inspiration of others.”47 Centrality implies connectivity but also authority within a social network—to use the parlance of network science. In the network modeled by the data from these correspondences up to 1925 (which, as with any historical analysis, is only a reconstruction of the “complete” correspondences), Susman has the highest degree (see table 1). Degree measures a node’s connections and represents the total number of correspondences going to and from each individual; one can think of high degree as an indication of “popularity” in a social network. As we see in the visualizations, Susman is popular in these networks because she connects together Lukács and Bloch (left), Kracauer (and, with him, Benjamin and Adorno, top), and Buber and Rosenzweig (right).48 Measuring eigenvector centrality further underscores Susman’s influence over these intellectual networks. Eigenvector centrality calculates the centrality of an individual

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Table 6.1. Network metrics. © Matthew Handelman. Name Susman, Margarete Lukács, Georg Rosenzweig, Franz Kracauer, Siegfried Bloch, Ernst Buber, Martin Simmel, Georg

Out Degree 113 67 20 16 4 4 1

In Degree 27 21 56 7 16 3 3

Degree 140 88 76 23 20 7 4

EigenCentrality 1.0 0.4319 0.4097 0.2203 0.2066 0.1897 0.1455

Page Rank 0.1596 0.0957 0.0699 0.0233 0.0213 0.0056 0.0037

by taking into account the relative importance of the neighbors to whom an individual connects (i.e., they too have a high number of connections).49 As scholars have noted, thinking in dialogue was significant for Susman, and, in eigenvector centrality, we see not only that Susman was connected to a proportionally high number of individuals but also that the figures to whom she was connected were also well-connected.50 Her centrality is visible in figures 6.2 and 6.3, as Susman acts as a hub connecting a diverse set of thinkers, including those associated with Simmel and the Jewish renewal movement, as well as figures associated with the early Frankfurt School. To be sure, these measurements and visualizations cannot answer questions regarding the originality of Susman’s work, because they, by definition, ignore content. Instead, they imply that future work into interwar German-Jewish thought will have to take Susman’s thinking and writing into closer consideration as a central force during the early Weimar Republic. One of the areas in which Susman’s work on the idea of “a world abandoned by God” in the Frankfurter Zeitung exerted social and conceptual influence was on Kracauer’s lapsarian narrative of modernity, which he too disseminated in the newspaper’s feuilleton. Between 1920 and 1922, Susman and Kracauer engaged in a rich correspondence, and Susman had a hand in securing his initial publications and his first job as a local reporter at the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1921. As Ingrid Belke shows in her study of the correspondence, their friendship deteriorated around his polemic against Rosenzweig and Buber’s Bible translation, which, at the same time, solidified his relationships with later members of the Frankfurt School, such as Benjamin and Bloch.51 Kracauer’s early feuilletons synthesized these intellectual influences, evoking a sense of disorientation and loss in modern life while refusing to make proclamations about the coming utopia or messianic kingdom. As with Susman and Lukács’s Soul and Form a decade earlier, it was a review of Theory of the Novel from October 1921 that helped Kracauer establish his critical take on the metaphysical void of the period following World War I. His review embraces Susman’s and Lukács’s terminology: “An unnamable homesickness for meaning that has vanished also burns and bores in Lukács himself, that same feeling that animates all great humans who have become conscious

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of their stay in our world abandoned by God [unserer gottverlassenen Welt] as a type of banishment [Verbannung].”52 Kracauer’s review accepts Lukács’s philosophical-historical narrative (the path to a godless world began with the waning power of the Church) but stops short of Susman’s call to action. Instead, it picks up and doubles down on her method of reading in its subject (Lukács) the metaphysical conditions of modernity. For Kracauer, “Lukács himself ” embodies life in the early Weimar Republic not only as existing in “a world abandoned by God” but also as a type of “banishment” of the individual from the divine realm. Kracauer’s essays at the start of his tenure at the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Zeitung thus further developed not only the review form employed by Susman but also the concept of modernity as “a world abandoned by God,” turning it into a web of interlinking ideas. Many of these texts read in the contemporary interest in religion, philosophical resignation, and relativism the larger metaphysical dynamics of the age, such as a lack of authority in the chaos of regime change and revolution, the erasure of meaning in the value-free sciences, and the dissipation of religious moorings in the secular state (among others). Distance from God remained the operative phrase: thinkers like Simmel are indicative of a “late civilization, distant from God” (gottfern), Scheler’s philosophy is bound to “despair over the estrangement from God” (Gottentfremdung), the literary response to Oswald Spengler is “a godless product of a godless time” (gottlose Zeit), and in the modern era “the ego tears itself loose from its attachment to God and the world of God” (Gotteswelt).53 A number of different ideas converge in the way these texts, as well as Kracauer’s review of Lukács, formulate divine abandonment. In phrases like “distant from God” or “a world abandoned by God,” it is God who turns away from the modern individual. In contrast, “banishment” and “estrangement from God” imply a distance between the individual and a lost “world of God.” In a “godless time,” God is simply absent. Kracauer’s texts combine Susman’s and Lukács’s idea of divine abandonment with the theological terms of religious renewal (“godless,” “distant from God”) and terms with a sociological valence (“banishment” and “estrangement”). As it connects to a variety of related concepts, we can think about Kracauer’s concept of divine abandonment as a network itself, which stands in and responds to a complex web of meanings, intellectual influences, and social contexts. Beyond its conceptual content, a way to model the phrase “a world abandoned by God” as a conceptual network would be the correspondence networks of Susman, Lukács, Bloch, Kracauer, and, as we shall see, Rosenzweig, inasmuch as the idea circulated among these figures. Assigning direct lines of influence can be an imprecise task in intellectual history; here, the network visualization complements this mode of inquiry by offering a quantitative and visual perspective on the different forces influencing Kracauer’s early Weimar-era reviews. Even if this German-Jewish intellectual network was not dense, the average distance separating individuals—i.e., the number of steps through intervening nodes it requires to move from one node to another—is relatively short. Members of the network are just over a friend of a friend of a friend apart (with an average path length of 3.25), meaning that ideas could spread easily through the

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network.54 This proximity suggests that a phrase like “a world abandoned by God” not only would have been known by many but also could have easily come into contact with different schools of thought. Furthermore, the network reveals the different groupings of thinkers that could influence an idea like divine abandonment, which we can analyze with a modularity calculation. This metric detects clusters of densely connected nodes that have sparse connections to other nodes and clusters, dividing the network here into seven primary intellectual neighborhoods (see figure 6.4).55 Accordingly, we can think of divine abandonment as a concept in which Kracauer and Susman mediated between Bloch and Lukács’s focus on the political (in particular, Marxist) dimension of aesthetics and Rosenzweig and Buber’s sense that a Jewish renewal countered the spiritual poverty of modernity. Even as we notice the pull of critical theorists (Adorno and Benjamin, top) on Kracauer, what stands out is that Susman serves as the main point of connection between these groups. While scholarship has often focused on Kracauer as an intersection of cultural criticism and religious thought, it has underemphasized Susman’s role in the conceptual exchange and synthesis among German-Jewish intellectuals captured by this network. If the idea of “a world abandoned by God” interlinked ideas about the role of God in the modern era, it also contained divisions that defined the term and German-Jewish intellectual life during the Weimar Republic. Consider, as a final link in the idea’s circulation, Rosenzweig and Kracauer’s correspondence, which Susman helped establish in the 1920s.56 At points tense, Rosenzweig’s letters object to the idea of the present (or any time) as being distant from God: Yet time as historical time is never distant from God (gottfern) or close to God (gottnah). Because that again totally depends on God, and not the time. Time may be conditioned by whatever factors; if God wants to intervene in it, these do not matter. His arm is long enough even for times that are “distant from God” (“gottferne” Zeiten).57 For Rosenzweig, the observance of religious practice linked finite experience (in “historical time”) with the eternity of God, bridging the distance between the world and redemption. What the network visualization in figure 6.4 models as connection between Rosenzweig and Kracauer was actually disagreement over, among other things, the omnipotence of God. Here, the visualization gives an overall impression of the structure of the network, but it also abstracts away from content, “hiding,” as Wendy Chun writes of network analysis, “conflict as friendship.”58 Connection yet also contention defined the concept “a world abandoned by God,” a social nuance that evades the network visualization methods applied here. It is thus incumbent on scholars of German-Jewish intellectual history to fashion ways to understand and represent not only the conceptual but also the social tensions that underpinned such ideas. Indeed, capturing and rendering legible this sort of negativity—disjunction and disagreement— was, at least as Susman introduced it in 1911, the assignment of a phrase like “a world abandoned by God” in the first place.

Figure 6.4. Correspondence network from figure 6.2 divided into seven modularity neighborhoods around Geck, Lukács and Bloch, Kracauer, Rosenzweig, Rosenzweig family, Susman, and Reifenberg and the Frankfurter Zeitung. Figure by Matthew Handelman.

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Conclusion: Intellectual Networks What, then, does combining close reading of the idea of “a world abandoned by God” with a computational model of the correspondence networks of German-Jewish thinkers who used it tell us about German-Jewish intellectual life in the early Weimar Republic? Given Susman’s broad social reach and her use of similar terminology in the Frankfurter Zeitung already in 1911, it suggests that an intellectual atmosphere of divine abandonment had set in among these German-Jewish intellectuals before the end of World War I. It also suggests that, as German-Jewish thinkers formed interlinking intellectual communities that their exchanges of letters intensified and spread, certain individuals like Susman played important mediating roles between groups. Her connection to and authority in more than one group would have helped continue, adapt, and expand the idea of divine abandonment after the war’s devastating conclusion. Even though network analysis leaves out features of these correspondences, Susman’s centrality to the network implies that her thinking, which read the metaphysics of the present as a historical period in the intellectual “character features” of her contemporaries, helped lay the foundation for the interpretation of modernity in the urban miniatures, dance revues, and films canonized by Kracauer and Benjamin.59 In Susman’s case, writing letters and reviews set the terms of debate and put ideas into circulation, making it less an activity marginal to an intellectual community and more like the overlooked work that makes intellectual community possible. Visualizing and quantifying correspondence networks alongside close reading tells us that if German-Jewish intellectual history needs, as Roemer writes, “a better understanding of the social networks that informed and propelled” women thinkers (and women in general), then it also needs ways to think of concepts as embodying “social networks.” As noted, the example of “a world abandoned by God” acts as a conceptual node that encounters related ideas—the retreat of God, humanity’s exile from paradise, and God’s ability to bridge distance—as it moves among and evolves with individual thinkers. Viewing ideas as networks recognizes that concepts have not only a historical but also a social if not also political dimension, as they circulate in intellectual communities, creating friendships and lines of influence as well as rivalries and power differentials. Alongside close reading, network analysis provides ways of capturing these communities and conversations visually and quantitatively. Indeed, the conversation over “a world abandoned by God” persisted in modified form beyond its lifespan as a descriptor for the metaphysical conditions of the early Weimar Republic. It reappears in Susman’s descriptions of the worlds in Kafka’s fiction in her essay “The Job Problem in Kafka” (1929).60 The Weimar-era debates over a fallen reality that has yet to be redeemed also left a lasting impression on Kracauer’s thinking—e.g., his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960)—from these interwar intellectual exchanges to his pioneering work on cinema. German-Jewish intellectuals’ work on the idea of “a world abandoned by God” and the mapping of its circulation explored in this chapter also help us come to terms with

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the persistent metaphysical and existential questions technology raises in the present. The anxiety of Susman’s original formulation of divine abandonment expressed legitimate concern for the incommensurability of a demythologized world and the social, religious, and cultural realities of human life. This concern persists—or, perhaps, should persist—as we increasingly confront the results of the isolation brought by the fully networked world and the conflict of the digital world with the norms and ideals of liberal democracies. What Kracauer writes regarding photography and nature can also be said to apply to digital approaches to German-Jewish intellectual history itself: they help scholars see what may have been invisible before their advent. They contain “the capacity to stir up” the elements of this history and to “suspen[d] every habitual relationship” among these elements, in order to “combin[e] parts and segments to create strange constructs”—such as the network visualizations above.61 The German-Jewish intellectuals discussed in this chapter teach us to engage the “strange constructs” presented by digital technologies, but also to insist resolutely on negativity—abandonment, loss, incongruence, and falseness—in our interpretations of them. In both theory and practice, addressing this duality and the uncomfortable trade-offs presented by digital technologies constitutes one of the legacies and enduring points of relevance of German-Jewish thought during the Weimar Republic. Matthew Handelman is associate professor of German and core faculty in the digital humanities at Michigan State University. His interests include German-Jewish intellectual history, critical theory, and the intersections of technology and culture. He is the author of The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory (Fordham, 2019). His articles have appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, The Germanic Review, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, and Scientia Poetica.

Notes 1. Alex Ross, “The Naysayers:Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the Critique of Pop Culture,” New Yorker, 14 September 2014, retrieved 12 May 2022 from https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers. 2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 17–18. 3. I understand Horkheimer and Adorno as German-Jewish intellectuals less in the racialized terms of heredity than in terms of the significance of Jewishness for their biographies and intellectual trajectories, as scholars have previously noted. Although Adorno showed “relative indifference to questions of personal identity,” his and Horkheimer’s lives and intellectual trajectories were shaped by the Nazi “authoritarian state that defined citizenship” and Jewishness and Jewish identity “in explicitly racist terms.” Peter E. Gordon, “Adorno: A Biographical Sketch,” in A Companion to Adorno, ed. Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020), 6. As Steven Aschheim writes, thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin remain relevant today “because they included but also went beyond this particular”—i.e., Jewish—“dimension.” Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 100. Furthermore, Martin Jay describes a “muted but nonetheless palpable

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

Jewish impulse” as an important factor in Adorno’s intellectual constellation (along with others, such as Marxism), encompassing his reaction to the Holocaust, his and Horkheimer’s research on antisemitism, and their refusal to name the Absolute. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 19. On Adorno’s Jewish identity and the “Jewish life paths” of the Frankfurt School, see Evelyn Wilcock, “Negative Identity: Mixed German Jewish Descent as a Factor in the Reception of Theodor Adorno,” New German Critique, no. 81 (2000): 169–87; Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Liliane Weissberg, “Reflecting on the Past, Envisioning the Future: Perspectives for GermanJewish Studies,” German Historical Institute Bulletin (2004): 19. On the relationship to negative theology, see Michael Fagenblat, ed., Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). On describing thinkers as “Jewish,” see Scott Spector, “Modernism without Jews: A Counterhistorical Argument,” in Modernism without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 31–34. Salo W. Baron, History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964), 63–64. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:67 and 74. Siegfried Kracauer, “Das Schloss: Zu Franz Kafkas Nachlaßroman,” in Werke: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011), 5.2:494. In 1929, Margarete Susman reads Kafka in a similar vein, as evoking the “pure negativity of a world created by humans and abandoned by God.” Margarete Susman, “Das Hiob-Problem bei Kafka,” in Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden: Essays und Briefe, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992), 190. Notable exceptions include Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Julia Ng, “‘+1’: Scholem and the Paradoxes of the Infinite,” Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 8, no. 2 (2014). Here, I refer to Hans Blumenberg’s practice of metaphorology, which reads in the history of metaphors the seismic shifts of conceptual thinking; see Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). On Blumenberg’s relationship to the German-Jewish experience, see Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2015), 11–13. See Moritz Epple, Birgit Bergmann, and Ruti Unger, Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German-Speaking Academic Culture (Berlin: Springer, 2012). On his mathematical education, see Scholem’s autobiographical accounts in From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012); Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003). Bettina Heintz, Die Innenwelt der Mathematik: Zur Kultur und Praxis einer beweisenden Disziplin (Berlin: Springer, 1999), 18. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78. Mathematics not only has history but also a “historiography of mathematical practices and sciences,” as descried in Moritz Epple, “Genies, Ideen, Institutionen, mathematische Werkstätten: Formen der Mathematikgeschichte,” Mathematische Semesterberichte 47, no. 2 (1 December 2000): 132. German-Jewish thinkers anticipate the trend in postwar German media studies to question the “technophobia” of the humanities; see Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 6. Jonathan M. Hess, “Studying Print Culture in the Digital Age,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 53, no. 1 (2009): 33–36. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4:254. Later in the essay, Benjamin calls this the “optical unconscious,” 266. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament:Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 62. As Kracauer later put it: “Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent” such as the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Theory of Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 300. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116. Here I draw on a sociological definition of Jews and Jewishness. For example, Georg Simmel affords a special epistemological status to Jews as outsiders in Soziologie (1908), which defines the stranger as a “synthesis of nearness and remoteness” that bestows a “distinctly ‘objective’ attitude” toward the majority group. Jews exemplify the social type of the stranger, especially in their historical economic position in Europe. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 145. Kracauer identifies Simmel as fulfilling this social type, enjoying “the freedom, everywhere he travels, to say the unsayable.” “Georg Simmel: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des geistigen Lebens unserer Zeit,” in Werke: Frühe Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Ingrid Belke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), 9.2:270–71. See Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 6–7. Georg Lukács, “Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11, nos. 3/4 (1916): 267. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 88. Lazier describes the interwar “gnostic revival” and its roots in nineteenth-century debates about gnosticism; Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 27–30. The idea of God’s “abandonment” of the world, “distance” to God, and even alienation and exile presents similar but ultimately different metaphorical textures with more existential overtones than the epistemological subcurrents of the (un)knowability of God in gnosticism—see Lazier’s discussion of Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) on pp. 23–24. See also Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), chap. 1; Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Gnostic Anxieties: Jewish Intellectuals and Weimar Neo-Marcionism,” Modern Theology 35, no. 1 (2019): 71–80. Weissberg makes this point for German-Jewish history in general; “Reflecting on the Past,” 22. A number of excellent publications take Susman’s philosophy and cultural criticism seriously; see Barbara Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity, trans. James McFarland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Anke Gilleir and Barbara Hahn, eds., Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, Philosophie und Kulturkritik: Über Margarete Susman (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012). See also Ingeborg Nordmann’s essay “Wie man sich in der Sprache fremd bewegt: Zu den Essays von Margarete Susman,” in Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden, 229–67. Nils Roemer, “New Perspectives on German Jewish Intellectual History,” German History 28, no. 2 (June 2010): 226. See the definition in Mayers Lexikon (7th ed.) from 1927 for “Kulturpolitik,” in Meyers Lexikon (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1927). See, for instance, Hansen, Cinema and Experience.

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28. Almut Todorow, Das Feuilleton der “Frankfurter Zeitung” in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1996), 83–87. Jörg Später, Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016), 268–69. 29. Data for these visualizations come from published and unpublished sources. Archival data were collected through “Kalliope | Verbundkatalog für Archiv- und archivähnliche Bestände und nationales Nachweisinstrument für Nachlässe und Autographen,” retrieved 22 March 2021 from https://kalliope-verbund.info/. The full dataset includes data from correspondences (with dates up to 1933) to and from the following individuals: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Franz Rosenzweig, Margarete Susman, and members of the editorial staff at the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Zeitung (Benno Reifenberg and Rudolf Geck). Data were also collected from published correspondences, such as Ernst Bloch, Briefe 1903–1975, ed. Karola Bloch et al., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985); Georg Lukács, Briefwechsel, 1902– 1917, ed. Éva Fekete and Éva Karádi (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1982); Margarete Susman, Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden. I borrowed data from Rosenzweig’s archives collected for Matthew Handelman, “A Messianic Theory of Digital Knowledge: On Positivism and Visualizing Rosenzweig’s Archive,” in Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies, ed. Clifford B. Anderson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 31–55. As with all digital work, the dataset used in this publication is a partial reconstruction and does not represent the “complete” correspondences among these individuals. Factors such as exile and war, archival practices (including archives who do not publish robust and accessible metadata, as is the case for Bloch and Lukács), and the decisions made in collecting and cleaning the data shaped these data and, hence, the analyses used in this publication. On the contingent and mediated nature of data, see Lisa Gitelman, ed., “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 30. On the changing temperaments in Weimar-era thought and aesthetics, see Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 31. For a discussion of graph density and centralization, see Wayne E. Baker and Robert R. Faulkner, “The Social Organization of Conspiracy: Illegal Networks in the Heavy Electrical Equipment Industry,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (1993): 848–50. 32. Nordmann, “Wie man sich in der Sprache fremd bewegt,” 232–33. 33. On Simmel’s conception of modernity, see Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), chap. 1. 34. On Nobel, see Rachel Heuberger, Rabbiner Nehemias Anton Nobel: Die jüdische Renaissance in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 2005). On Kracauer’s engagement with Nobel, see Später, Siegfried Kracauer, 79–83. 35. Anke Gilleir, “Einleitung: Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, Philosophie und Kulturkritik,” in Gilleir and Hahn, Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, 8–9. 36. Lukács to Susman on 25 September 1912, in Susman, Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden, 88. 37. Margarete Susman, “Georg Lukács: Die Seele und die Formen,” in Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden, 17–18. Lukács’s texts speak to this “tragedy” in the description of the drama described at the start of the essay “Paul Ernst”; Georg Lukács, Die Seele und die Formen: Essays (Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co., 1911), 327. 38. Lukács to Susman on 25 September 1912, in Susman, Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden, 88. 39. Lukács, “Die Theorie des Romans,” 234, 267–69; Theory of the Novel, 41, 88–90. 40. Lukács, “Die Theorie des Romans,” 395; Theory of the Novel, 103. 41. See Susman’s recollections of her encounter with Bloch from her memoir, Ich habe viele Leben gelebt (1964), reprinted in Susman, Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden, 97–100. 42. Margarete Susman, “Ernst Bloch: Geist der Utopie,” in Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden, 30. 43. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (München: Duncker & Humblot, 1918), 72. Bloch’s text also uses the terms “divine abandonment” (Gottverlassenheit, 215) and “being [Sein] abandoned by God”

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

(234), upon which Susman’s review draws. For Bloch, the book’s second edition (published in 1923 and the basis for the 2000 translation into English), makes the links to Imperial Germany, the lost war, and the failed revolution clear. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1923), 3–5. Susman, “Ernst Bloch,” 23. Margarete Susman, “Der Exodus aus der Philosophie,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 June 1921, retrieved 28 December 2020 from Barbara Hahn’s site, “Margarete Susman,” http://www.margarete susman.com/. Susman, “Der Exodus aus der Philosophie.” Gilleir, “Einleitung,” 7–8. For an overview of basic network metrics, see Derek L. Hansen et al., “Calculating and Visualizing Network Metrics,” in Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (Cambridge, MA: Elsevier, 2020), 80–82. For this publication, I have used Gephi; see “Gephi—The Open Graph Viz Platform,” retrieved 3 September 2020 from https://gephi.org/. Eigenvector centrality is similar to Google’s search algorithm, PageRank, which determines the value of a result based on the number of pages that link to it and the rank of those linking pages. Hansen et al., “Calculating and Visualizing Network Metrics,” 83–84. Nordmann, “Wie man sich in der Sprache fremd bewegt,” 233–40. Barbara Hahn, “Margarete Susman (1874–1966) Dialogisches Schreiben,” in Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften: Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah Arendt, ed. Barbara Hahn (München: C. H. Beck, 1994), 81–95. Ingrid Belke, “Siegfried Kracauer: Geschichte einer Begegnung,” in Gilleir and Hahn, Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, 35–61. See also Matthew Handelman, “The Forgotten Conversation: Five Letters from Franz Rosenzweig to Siegfried Kracauer, 1921–1923,” Scientia Poetica 15 (2011): 234–51. Siegfried Kracauer, “Georg von Lukács’ Romantheorie,” in Werke, 5.1:288. Siegfried Kracauer, “Das Lebensgefühl in der Epoche des Hochkapitalismus,” in ibid., 5.1:105; Siegfried Kracauer, “Katholizismus und Relativismus,” in ibid., 5.1:315; Siegfried Kracauer, “Spengleriana,” in ibid., 5.1:325; Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Wartenden,” in ibid., 5.1:383. On the small world problem, see David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 20. Modularity assesses the community structures of networks by comparing possible divisions between sets of connected nodes and a randomly generated network among the same points. See M. E. J. Newman, “Modularity and Community Structure in Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103, no. 23 (6 June 2006): 8578. In general, a positive and high modularity score indicates the presence of social structure.With a modularity of 0.630, the correspondence network considered in this chapter exhibits the structure of a social network (in comparison to a randomly generated network). Published in Stephanie Baumann, “Drei Briefe—Franz Rosenzweig an Siegfried Kracauer,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 63, no. 2 (2011): 166–76; Handelman, “Forgotten Conversation.” Rosenzweig to Kracauer on 25 May 1923, published in Baumann, “Drei Briefe,” 174. Easley and Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets, 77–81. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Queerying Homophily,” in Clemens Apprich et al., Pattern Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 86. See, for instance, Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Susman’s Kafka essay reuses the term “a world abandoned by God” (see note 7), but in a way that describes Kafka’s fictional worlds more than the immediate post–World War I period—e.g.,

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“[Kafka’s] world, abandoned by God and sunken into nothingness.” Susman, “Das Hiob-Problem bei Kafka,” here 201, also 190. 61. Kracauer, “Photography,” 61.

Bibliography Aschheim, Steven E. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Baker, Wayne E., and Robert R. Faulkner. “The Social Organization of Conspiracy: Illegal Networks in the Heavy Electrical Equipment Industry.” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (1993): 837–60. Baron, Salo W. History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964. Baumann, Stephanie. “Drei Briefe—Franz Rosenzweig an Siegfried Kracauer.” Zeitschrift für Religionsund Geistesgeschichte 63, no. 2 (2011): 166–76. Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 1:62–74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4:251–83. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bloch, Ernst. Geist der Utopie. München: Duncker & Humblot, 1918. ———. Geist der Utopie. Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1923. ———. Briefe 1903–1975. Edited by Karola Bloch et al. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. ———. The Spirit of Utopia. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Queerying Homophily.” In Pattern Discrimination, by Clemens Apprich et al., 59–97. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Easley, David, and Jon Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Epple, Moritz. “Genies, Ideen, Institutionen, mathematische Werkstätten: Formen der Mathematikgeschichte.” Mathematische Semesterberichte 47, no. 2 (1 December 2000): 131–63. Epple, Moritz, Birgit Bergmann, and Ruti Unger. Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German Speaking Academic Culture. Berlin: Springer, 2012. Fagenblat, Michael, ed. Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Fenves, Peter. Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. “Gephi—The Open Graph Viz Platform.” Retrieved 3 September 2020 from https://gephi.org/. Gilleir, Anke, and Barbara Hahn, eds. Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, Philosophie und Kulturkritik: Über Margarete Susman. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012. Gitelman, Lisa, ed. “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Goodstein, Elizabeth S. Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.

144 | MATTHEW HANDELMAN Gordon, Peter E. “Adorno: A Biographical Sketch.” In A Companion to Adorno, edited by Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky, 1–20. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020. Hahn, Barbara. “Margarete Susman (1874–1966) Dialogisches Schreiben.” In Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften:Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah Arendt, edited by Barbara Hahn, 81–95. München: C. H. Beck, 1994. ———. The Jewess Pallas Athena:This Too a Theory of Modernity. Translated by James McFarland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Handelman, Matthew. “The Forgotten Conversation: Five Letters from Franz Rosenzweig to Siegfried Kracauer, 1921–1923.” Scientia Poetica 15 (2011): 234–51. ———. The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. ———. “A Messianic Theory of Digital Knowledge: On Positivism and Visualizing Rosenzweig’s Archive.” In Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies, edited by Clifford B. Anderson, 31–55. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Hansen, Derek L., Ben Shneiderman, Marc A. Smith, and Itai Himelboim. “Calculating and Visualizing Network Metrics.” In Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL, 79–94. Cambridge, MA: Elsevier, 2020. Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Heintz, Bettina. Die Innenwelt der Mathematik: Zur Kultur und Praxis einer beweisenden Disziplin. Berlin: Springer, 1999. Hess, Jonathan M. “Studying Print Culture in the Digital Age.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 53, no. 1 (2009): 33–36. Heuberger, Rachel. Rabbiner Nehemias Anton Nobel: Die jüdische Renaissance in Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 2005. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Huyssen, Andreas. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Jacobs, Jack. The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. “Kalliope | Verbundkatalog für Archiv- und archivähnliche Bestände und nationales Nachweisinstrument für Nachlässe und Autographen.” Retrieved 22 March 2021 from https://kalliope-ver bund.info/. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. ———. Theory of Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. ———. “Georg Simmel: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des geistigen Lebens unserer Zeit.” In Werke: Frühe Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, edited by Ingrid Belke, 9.2:139–280. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004. ———. Werke. Edited by Inka Mülder-Bach. Vols. 5.1 and 5.2. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011. “Kulturpolitik.” In Meyers Lexikon. Vol. 7. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1927. Lazier, Benjamin. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Lethen, Helmut. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. Translated by Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Lukács, Georg. Die Seele und die Formen: Essays. Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co., 1911.

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———. “Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11, nos. 3/4 (1916): 225–71 and 390–431. ———. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. ———. Briefwechsel, 1902–1917. Edited by Éva Fekete and Éva Karádi. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1982. “Margarete Susman.” Retrieved 28 December 2020 from http://www.margaretesusman.com/. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Gnostic Anxieties: Jewish Intellectuals and Weimar Neo-Marcionism.” Modern Theology 35, no. 1 (2019): 71–80. Newman, M. E. J. “Modularity and Community Structure in Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103, no. 23 (6 June 2006): 8577–82. Ng, Julia. “‘+1’: Scholem and the Paradoxes of the Infinite.” Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 8, no. 2 (2014): 196–210. Nicholls, Angus. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth. New York: Routledge, 2015. Nordmann, Ingeborg. “Wie man sich in der Sprache fremd bewegt: Zu den Essays von Margarete Susman.” In Margarete Susman, Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden: Essays und Briefe, edited by Ingeborg Nordmann, 229–67. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992. Pollock, Benjamin. Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Roemer, Nils. “New Perspectives on German Jewish Intellectual History.” German History 28, no. 2 (June 2010): 219–27. Ross, Alex. “The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the Critique of Pop Culture.” New Yorker, 14 September 2014, retrieved 12 May 2022 from https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers. Scholem, Gershom. From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012. Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Walter Benjamin:The Story of a Friendship. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003. Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” In Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine, 143–49. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Später, Jörg. Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Biographie. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016. Spector, Scott. “Modernism without Jews: A Counterhistorical Argument.” In Modernism without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories, 31–34. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Susman, Margarete. Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden: Essays und Briefe. Edited by Ingeborg Nordmann. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992. ———. “Der Exodus aus der Philosophie.” Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 June 1921. Todorow, Almut. Das Feuilleton der “Frankfurter Zeitung” in der Weimarer Republik. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1996. Weissberg, Liliane. “Reflecting on the Past, Envisioning the Future: Perspectives for German-Jewish Studies.” German Historical Institute Bulletin (2004): 11–32. Wilcock, Evelyn. “Negative Identity: Mixed German Jewish Descent as a Factor in the Reception of Theodor Adorno.” New German Critique, no. 81 (2000): 169–87.

 Part III

Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in the 1930s and Beyond

 CHAPTER 7

Art without Borders Artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus and Jewish Visual Culture

 Kerry Wallach

Visual Culture and German-Jewish Studies Visual analysis is necessary for examining German-Jewish culture on an extralinguistic level. Whereas literary texts written in the German language are generally categorized as German literature, situating visual culture within a national or language-based framework can be more challenging. Take, for example, an oil painting of a dark-haired woman serving cocktails in a bar. What would make us consider such a painting “German,” “Jewish,” or “German-Jewish”? Images can operate either outside of language or in tandem with it, and images can also address audiences in different ways. If language is not an integral part of an image, other factors must be considered for us to read it as German, among them its creator, title, formal stylistic properties, subject matter, and production and reception history. Other factors affect how we see or recognize Jewishness in still and moving images, including how visual representations predispose viewers to perceive or feel toward Jews. Beyond this, we can also consider the extent to which images have the ability to reflect a specifically German-Jewish self-consciousness. Thinking about the visual—both what is visible as well as what is hidden or not shown—grants us insight into how different kinds of images convey meaning. The study of visual culture is concerned with the literal and symbolic messages of images, the historical contexts of meanings and subjects, the role of accompanying text, and the role of the viewer.1 Works of art are of interest, to be sure, but we can also look to forms of popular culture that are relevant for a large part of the population: photography, illustrated periodicals, advertisements, architecture, film, television, and other media. By studying images together with all of their contexts, we are able to compli-

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cate traditional studies of art history, which often emphasize artists’ nationalities, and thereby gain a more complex and nuanced understanding of German-Jewish culture.2 In my current work, a biography of artist and illustrator Rahel Szalit-Marcus (1888–1942; Rahel Szalit for short) and the first book-length study of this forgotten artist, I explore the paths of visual culture beyond the borders of Germany and beyond the German language.3 To be sure, this is common practice when looking at the work of artists, writers, and others who left Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933, as Szalit did, though lines of inquiry within German-Jewish studies generally focus on those who were originally “from” Germany or born in German-speaking locations.4 But just as the field of German studies has widened its gaze and is increasingly occupied with questions of migration and multilingualism, so too can we expand our definition of what it means to be “German” or “from Germany” as a social category within the field of German-Jewish studies. This is particularly applicable when we study transnational, multilingual artists of the early twentieth century who lived and worked in numerous places. The notion of “German-speaking” can certainly include non-native speakers. Szalit was born in Russian Lithuania and held Polish citizenship, but she lived in Germany for over two decades. Scholars do not always account for the participation of foreign Jewish artists such as Szalit in German art scenes prior to 1933.5 Moreover, many scholars view Berlin mainly as a mere waystation for East European artists, writers, and others who ultimately landed in Paris, London, New York, or elsewhere in the west.6 The catalog of an exhibition of works by German-Jewish artists that took place in London in June 1934 is particularly telling, though, in describing Szalit as an artist whose geographical affiliation was “formerly Berlin, now Paris.”7 Once she had left Germany, Szalit was considered by some to be “from Berlin.” I propose that we continue expanding our notion of what constitutes German-Jewish visual culture to be more inclusive, transnational/multinational, and multilingual. There is no convincing reason to omit artworks from our “canon” of visual texts simply because the artists who produced them did not hold German, Austrian, or Swiss citizenship or, in some cases, did not speak German well. Similarly, non-Jewish artists who worked in proximity to Jewish artists or depicted Jewish subjects in or around German-speaking contexts may also be worth studying. By using a wider lens to frame this subfield, we get access to a richer body of work as well as new perspectives on the German, the Jewish, and other elements at play. Claiming artists such as Rahel Szalit for German-Jewish studies enables us to broaden our understanding of how German culture at large has intersected with different waves of Jewish migration in and through Europe. It also allows us access to more minor figures who don’t fit neatly into standard categories and have thus been omitted from the historical record. As a field that is by definition anchored in the peripheral, German-Jewish studies can serve as a corrective to art historical narratives that have at times excluded or marginalized certain figures, especially women. It is indeed astonishing that surveys of Jewish culture and art history largely neglect women artists even now.8 Women artists, moreover, have tended to occupy separate or

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less central spaces in German history and art history. Studying female artists along with male German-Jewish artists is necessary for combatting this gender imbalance across the board, and it also helps us think through how women interacted with German and Jewish culture. There is still much to be done to recuperate the history of Jewish women who created visual culture, though a small group of scholars has already begun this important work.9 Let us examine in greater depth the factors that must fall into place for a visual artist’s work to be considered “German.” We might consider the artist’s background, place of origin or residence, or citizenship (past, current, or even future); the place a work was produced; and the relationship of the artist to the language and people of these places. Also worth factoring in are the work’s subject matter and the original language of a work’s title, as well as any other linguistic components (captions, stray words, symbolism). Using an example from Moyshe Vorobeichic’s 1931 Vilna photo book, Samuel Spinner has persuasively argued that there is no such thing as “Yiddish photography” and that the (language-oriented) category of German photography might also be a largely useless one for scholars. However, Spinner rightly goes on to suggest that questions of language did matter for those who produced, read, viewed, bought, sold, or exhibited visual culture.10 This reminds us of the all-important factor of viewers and audience, as well as what languages those audiences knew and where they were situated. If German-speaking audiences actively consumed certain forms of visual culture, or if a cultural product had a significant impact on Jews in German-speaking locations, then we may have sufficient reason to consider it as relevant for German and/or German-Jewish visual culture. To apply this to the painting mentioned above of the woman serving cocktails: because it was created and exhibited in Berlin in 1929, and has a German-language title, we have a strong case for regarding it as German on some levels. A different set of questions applies when determining what constitutes “Jewish” art or visual culture. The boundary between Jewish and non-Jewish is porous and at times contentious, and criteria for Jewish art are similarly hard to nail down. Here we might account for the relationship of an artist to Jewish identities and experiences, Jewish languages, or religious practice. Some art historians prioritize the artwork’s subject matter or political agenda; for Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, for example, both biblical themes and subjects connected to the “diasporic condition” of perpetual wandering can constitute Jewish art.11 Others look to the “Jewish experiences” that potentially inform an artist’s work—but it is more difficult to delineate the parameters of these experiences. Much of what was considered Jewish art from the early twentieth century connects in some way to East European folk art.12 Further consideration is needed to think through what this means for German-Jewish art. Here we must also engage Margaret Olin’s contention that there is a link between the concept of Jewish art and nationalism. As Olin and others have pointed out, this played out in German contexts in Martin Buber’s 1901 Zionist call for a Jewish Renaissance, which also involved looking eastward.13 The reception of Jewish art in

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early twentieth-century Germany was indeed bound up with the construction of a collective German-Jewish consciousness, and at times the interests and preferences of German-Jewish audiences zeroed in on Eastern Europe. This was perhaps also the case for the painting of the woman serving cocktails, Die Emigrantin als Bardame (Emigrant woman as barmaid), which Rahel Szalit exhibited in 1929. The experience of being a wandering “emigrant,” along with dark hair and eyes, coded this painting’s subject as both Jewish and East European or Russian (see figure 7.1).14 Szalit’s own East European Jewish background further affected how her work was received in Germany. Szalit’s art—paintings, drawings, and lithographic illustrations—presents only one aspect of the intersection between visual culture and German-Jewish culture. The field

Figure 7.1. Rahel Szalit, Die Emigrantin als Bardame (Emigrant woman as barmaid), 1929. In Die Frau von heute exhibition catalog, November 1929, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Signatur Nr. 1282/694. Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen 1867, no. 5114. Photo © Knud Peter Petersen, Berlin, used with permission.

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also encompasses developments in photography and film, which—together with the places these photos appeared—have made images more accessible to the masses over the last century.With the widespread use of inexpensive personal cameras beginning in the 1920s, photojournalism and illustrated periodicals helped images reach mass readerships very quickly. German-Jewish periodicals including Ost undWest and Israelitisches Familienblatt regularly featured reproductions of works of art, as well as original illustrations. Photographs and drawings were created specifically to complement texts published in these magazines and newspapers. Both male and female photographers helped circulate images of well-known and unknown Jews in German contexts. Full-length feature films gained prominence as German audiences sought out innovative forms of entertainment, and other moving images such as television shows joined the foray several decades later. Graphic novels and social media (for example: Instagram,Twitter, TikTok) have more recently joined the list of visual media relevant for the field. Recent scholarship has done a great deal to advance our understanding of the significance of these and other forms of visual culture for German-Jewish studies. Much of this work focuses on Jews and Jewishness with respect to German speakers or German-speaking contexts. Some scholars “treat the visual as a dimension in which Jewishness is worked out, experienced and expressed, by Jews as well as non-Jews.”15 This can be applied to still images, film, architecture, material objects, and museum exhibitions and installations. In analyzing films, scholars examine the appearances and performances of characters with respect to clothing, physicality, gestures, mannerisms, and other potentially coded or symbolic elements.16 Photographs, too, can be studied in many of these ways. For example, Lisa Silverman has argued that images created by German-Jewish photographer Lotte Jacobi reveal how Jews engage with anxieties about Jewish visibility and perceptions of Jewish difference.17 A number of scholars have begun exploring how to interpret Jewish family photo albums and other “vernacular photographs” from early twentieth-century Germany.18 Rebekka Grossmann has called attention to the mobility of German-Jewish photojournalists and the images they produced, pointing out that images can travel faster and farther than words.19 At the intersection of film studies and German-Jewish studies, scholars are especially attentive to this mobility of images as well as the broad impact that German-Jewish and other Central European filmmakers and actors have made on Hollywood, British, and other film industries. Both filmmakers’ origins and their previous filmmaking activities (especially in German-speaking locations) affect whether they are considered “German-Jewish.” The roles of the viewer and of audiences based in different locations become especially meaningful here. For Darcy Buerkle, who has argued for the importance of viewers’ affective responses, spectatorship is bound up with “the unconscious allegiances it demands as an aspect of history”; Buerkle further suggests that the “Jewish spectator” was not necessarily Jewish in an essentialized sense.20 Moving away from an essentialized notion of both Germanness and Jewishness helps us focus on the ways in which Jewishness is expressed through visual codes or signifiers, or through the experience of being a sympathetic or like-minded viewer. To identify in-

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stances where Jewishness (or Germanness) is not readily apparent, we need to consider the creators, production contexts, and audiences of images, as well as how the images themselves advance the field.

Rahel Szalit’s Biography The second part of this chapter explores in greater depth what we can learn from the example of artist Rahel Szalit. Unquestionably the best-known Jewish woman illustrator in 1920s Germany, Szalit was considered by some to be “the best modern female illustrator” or—as art historian Karl Schwarz once suggested—the best Jewish illustrator regardless of gender.21 As one of only a few Jewish women artists from Eastern Europe active in Weimar Germany, Szalit brought a different perspective. Szalit’s life and work have much to teach us about art created by Jewish women, the intersections of Jewishness with expressions of gender and sexuality, migration and exile, and the crossing and blurring of boundaries. Beyond the fact that the migratory aspect of her biography complicates how we understand her national identity, Rahel Szalit’s artistic career and oeuvre blur or nullify many of the binary discourses that we rely on in German-Jewish studies and adjacent fields. She was at once Eastern and Central European (and also spent time in Western Europe), Yiddish and German-speaking, and well-known within Jewish and mainstream German circles. Further, many of Szalit’s depictions of Jews and Jewishness, particularly those with an Expressionist current of distortion, invited both sympathy and repulsion for the circumstances of East European Jews. In this way, her work helps reframe our understanding of Jewish art: it not only includes nostalgic or so-called authentic representations but is also sharply critical, humorous, and even satirical. Several of Szalit’s works offer close-up inside perspectives on East European Jews while also maintaining an ironic distance; they highlight tragedy and suffering by using grotesque humor and striking, absurd imagery. Other works suggest Szalit was eager to foreground Jewish women as the subjects of Jewish art. Still other works by Szalit engage Jewishness only peripherally or not at all. It is instructive to begin our study of Rahel Szalit with a brief comparison of Szalit and her far better-known contemporary Marc Chagall. Few would dispute that Chagall (1887–1985) was one of the most significant Jewish artists of the twentieth century, as well as a key figure in Jewish history.22 Yet almost no one would categorize Chagall as a German artist; he is widely referred to as Russian or French, and often both Russian and French. His biography and work make a case for the national traditions with which we associate him: Born Moyshe Shagal, Chagall was a native Yiddish speaker from Vitebsk (today Belarus) who spent much of his life in France. He also spent time in Berlin, most notably in 1914 and 1922–23. Several Berlin exhibitions played a major role in Chagall’s early career, and while in Berlin he moved among East European circles and in others, including those of such prominent German-Jewish artists

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as Hermann Struck and Ludwig Meidner. Chagall contributed illustrations to several German-language mainstream periodicals, and articles featuring his work appeared in a number of Jewish periodicals published in Germany.23 Although a few of his works contain German words, Chagall did not speak much German but rather Yiddish, Russian, and French.24 He was a citizen of the Russian Empire, then stateless, and finally French. Chagall’s art prior to 1945, though in conversation with German Expressionism, had stronger ties to the avant-garde modernist art created by mainly foreign artists associated with the School of Paris.25 Another key factor to consider is how important Chagall was for German-Jewish audiences, and how they viewed his cultural participation.26 In fact, several German critics compared Chagall’s work with that of Szalit, who might have been as well-known as Chagall in some circles.27 In contrast to Chagall, Rahel Szalit spent over two decades of her life in Germany and was active in different Berlin cultural scenes for many years. She was born Rahel Markus in 1888 in Telz (today: Telšiai, Lithuania), a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement in Russian Lithuania; spent her childhood in Łódz´; studied in Munich beginning in 1910; moved to Vienna in 1914; and lived in Berlin from 1916 to 1933, when she fled to Paris, where she was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz.28 In Berlin, Szalit was associated with Jewish Expressionist artists (Ludwig Meidner, Jakob Steinhardt) as well as non-Jewish artists (Karl Hofer), including numerous women artists. Beginning around 1920, she enjoyed support from Jewish art historians Karl Schwarz and Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein and caught the attention of such prominent critics as Adolph Donath and Max Osborn. In my view, there is a strong case for “claiming” Szalit and her work as German-Jewish in addition to East European. Indeed, I do this here by including her in a volume on German-Jewish studies. This is despite the fact that Szalit never held German citizenship and only occasionally depicted subject matter with obvious connections to Germany, such as Berlin city scenes. But, unlike Chagall, Szalit’s chosen home never matched her citizenship.29 To consider her only as a Polish, Lithuanian, or East European artist is thus shortsighted in several respects. Szalit was a native Yiddish speaker who spoke German fluently; she also spoke Polish and French, though not as well. It was in Berlin that Szalit engaged with numerous and varied German-language projects and found an impressive level of success, especially among Jewish audiences. Just as we consider Chagall to be both Russian and French, so too should we think of Szalit as both East European and German. A closer look at Szalit’s biography offers insight into the history of Jewish migration, both within Eastern Europe and to and through Germany. Piecing together details of her life is challenging, as Szalit left behind no diaries, memoirs, or family papers, and she penned only a few short autobiographical sketches. The available primary sources include public records, periodicals, a handful of letters, and other archival materials. The Markus family had origins in the Lithuanian town of Užventis, though they moved around within Kovno Province (Kaunas Gubernia) in the nineteenth century. Emigration proved a common solution for Jews who sought to escape pogroms, persecution,

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and poverty in the Russian Empire. In addition to the more than two million Jews who left the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1930, many others migrated internally from small towns to such cities as Odessa, Warsaw, Łódz´, and Vilna.30 Anti-Jewish violence may have influenced the Markus family’s decision to leave Telz for Łódz´.31 The city of Łódz´, which had the second largest Jewish community in Congress Poland, also provided social and economic opportunities. Łódz´ was known for rapid industrial growth and textile production and thus held appeal for Rahel’s father, an artisan and brushmaker. But Łódz´ was not home to many great Jewish artists at that time. To study among Europe’s finest avant-garde artists, Rahel followed other artists from Łódz´ to Munich, with additional study trips to Paris and London. Rendered an enemy alien by the outbreak of war, she was forced to flee Germany in 1914. She returned to Berlin in 1916 and lived there until 1933. She remained in contact with her family in Poland through the 1930s; her sister’s family was later interned in the Łódz´ ghetto. From Rahel Szalit’s personal life, we learn how some Jews responded to and at times subverted societal norms related to gender and sexuality. As with much of queer history, it is not always possible to tell the full story or to “prove” why certain events occurred, but we can surmise a great deal by reading between the lines.While in Munich, Rahel met actor Julius Szalit, who was from Tarnopol, Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Ukraine) and also knew Polish. They married in Vienna in April 1915.32 Through this marriage, Rahel acquired Julius’s Austrian citizenship and was able to return to Germany legally. But their marriage, which was reportedly an unhappy one, was cut short by his suicide in 1919.33 Given what we know about Rahel and the circles they both moved in, it would not be surprising if Julius Szalit’s suicide was linked to closeted homosexuality, though this remains unconfirmed. German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s research from this period shows that suicide was often linked to sexuality, and many homosexual men took their own lives when faced with the prospect of being trapped in a marriage to which they were not well suited.34 Suicide was further associated with “Jewish nervousness,” and suicide rates were exceptionally high among Jews in Germany.35 There is evidence that Rahel Szalit had romantic relationships with both men and women after Julius’s death, suggesting that her story is indeed a queer story.36 She maintained friendships with several women who had relationships with other women, including artists connected to the Verein der Künstlerinnen zu Berlin (Association of Women Artists in Berlin).37 In fact, it was at this organization’s November 1929 exhibition Die Frau von heute (The woman of today) that Szalit’s Die Emigrantin als Bardame won a prize.38 This notably earned Szalit an international reputation as a prize-winning painter; word of her success traveled all the way to Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the United States.39 Compared with a self-portrait from this period, the emigrant barmaid in fact bears a strong resemblance to Rahel Szalit’s own likeness, and it was often mistaken for a self-portrait (see figures 7.1 and 7.2). Other aspects of her life also support the notion that Rahel Szalit challenged boundaries related to gender and sexuality. This was particularly the case in Berlin in the late

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Figure 7.2. Rahel Szalit, Die Fechterin, Selbstbildnis (The fencer, self-portrait), 1930. In Die Dame, no. 9 (January 1930), 38. Courtesy of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

1920s, when much of Weimar culture was invested in challenging traditional norms. On some level, we can read Szalit as a New Woman type who wore short hair and participated in activities that were considered masculine. In addition to selling her art and working on commission, she gave lessons in drawing, painting, and fencing to support herself. One self-portrait titled Die Fechterin, Selbstbildnis (The fencer) showcases her high-necked white fencing uniform and épée fencing weapon (see figure 7.2). Fencing—like art—was an activity that had historically been gendered male, and fencing was also believed to coincide with homosexual desires among women.40 Szalit’s other works, too, suggest that she sought opportunities to create images of Jewish women, some of which were potentially provocative. In 1929, Szalit illustrated Thomas Mann’s story “Dina,” based on Genesis 34, which later became part of the first book of Mann’s four-part novel Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and His Brothers,

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1933–43). Yet Szalit’s illustrations accompanied the publication of “Dina” only when it was published in Die Aufklärung, a journal that was coedited by Magnus Hirschfeld and published by his Institute of Sexual Science.41 In Szalit’s rendering, the young Dina initially appears proud, desirable, and even demure as she peeks out from behind a cloak. Still, the illustrations of biblical Israelites interacting with other ancient peoples are fairly graphic and even racy: women’s breasts are visible in three of Szalit’s eight illustrations, and one depicts the abduction or “rape” of Dina. It is not surprising, however, that Szalit’s work for Die Aufklärung was not widely known or associated with the artist, as it was an outlier with respect to its sexually explicit content. Needless to say, the journal ceased publication, and Hirschfeld’s institute was destroyed when the Nazis came to power. In some ways, Rahel Szalit’s exile and fate are representative of what numerous Jewish artists and other émigrés experienced. In the year 1933 alone, approximately twenty-five thousand people headed from Germany to France, including over twenty thousand Jews, though many later moved on to other countries.42 Szalit was one of about two hundred visual artists who left Germany for France in the 1930s.43 She quickly settled in Montparnasse among the artists affiliated with the School of Paris. In France, refugees had to contend with the growing presence of both antisemitism and xenophobia, as well as poverty and isolation. Szalit had a difficult time adjusting to life in Paris, but she was able to show her work in a number of exhibitions from 1935 to 1939. Unlike some of her better-known contemporaries, Szalit was unable to escape after the outbreak of war and occupation of France. Citizenship played a critical role with respect to surviving the Holocaust in France: foreign or stateless Jews, and especially German and East European Jews, were among the first targeted.44 Szalit perished in the Holocaust along with over eighty other Jewish artists associated with the School of Paris, most of whom were foreign.45 Other notable Jewish refugees from Germany, including Walter Benjamin and painter Charlotte Salomon, were also among those unable to escape Occupied France. In 1942, Szalit was arrested as part of the Vel d’Hiv roundup of foreign Jews and was deported via the Drancy internment camp to Auschwitz. Her Paris studio was plundered, and nearly all of her original oil and watercolor paintings were lost. What survive are Rahel Szalit’s literary illustrations, drawings and short texts printed in periodicals, photographs of numerous paintings, and a few paintings that have been floating around France for decades.

Szalit’s Depictions of Jews One of only a few paintings by Rahel Szalit known to have survived the war, Die Dorfmusikanten (The town musicians, 1920) depicts a typical shtetl scene in an Expressionist style.46 The oil painting’s subject matter and bold use of green, blue, brown, and black hues parallel contemporary works by such painters as Marc Chagall and Mané-

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Katz. Chagall’s painting The Fiddler (1912), among others, depicted the Jewish folk musicians that inspired the musical version of Fiddler on the Roof. Szalit draws on these folkloric motifs, though with a greater sense of melancholy. In paintings by both Szalit and Chagall, the featured musicians have sallow, green faces. The backgrounds show cluttered clusters of single and two-story houses with slanted roofs, wooden fences, and strange inhabitants of sad, small East European towns. Yet whereas Chagall’s subjects are often lighthearted or whimsical, as shown through their airy gestures and body positions, Szalit’s must struggle to get their bearings on narrow roads lined with closely packed houses. These sharp-angled roofs of these houses are visible in multiple images of shtetl life, including some that feature women more prominently.47 Szalit’s protagonists crowd the foreground of these works, as if moving out of the frame toward the viewer. At this point we turn to Szalit’s illustration work to focus on her depictions of Jews, which range from biblical Israelites (as in Mann’s “Dina”) to scenes of contemporary Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of her illustrations were produced in Berlin for German speakers, largely as lithographs. All but two sets of her literary illustrations were completed during the inflation period of the early 1920s, when foreign publishers flocked to Germany. Artworks were considered to be safe investments, and print portfolios of graphic art became popular because they resembled a form of stable currency when the German mark became increasingly worthless in late 1922 and 1923. Szalit was especially well-known for her 1922 illustrations of two Yiddish classics, Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son and Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Fishke, the Lame, which were published as standalone print portfolios with limited accompanying text inYiddish and German, respectively. Szalit also created a well-known portfolio illustrating Heinrich Heine’s poetry cycle “Hebräische Melodien” and contributed two images to a Hebrew-language children’s book by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ketina Kol-Bo, published in Berlin for the occasion of Bialik’s fiftieth birthday.48 Whereas Szalit illustrated only two major works of German literature (Heine and Mann), she also worked with world literature in German translation. Illustrated books by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, and Tillier have all survived. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, many of her illustrations were drawings created specifically for periodicals, including both German-Jewish periodicals (Jüdische Rundschau, Israelitisches Familienblatt) and mainstream Berlin newspapers and magazines (Berliner Tageblatt, Der Querschnitt, Ulk). Of these, the lithographic illustrations of Motl and Fishke, as well as of Heinrich Heine’s Hebräische Melodien (Hebrew Melodies), offer the most significant insights into Szalit’s treatment of Jewish subjects. The Motl and Fishke illustrations suggest that Szalit used humor and sometimes irony as a strategy for envisioning the experiences of East European Jews, and that she often relied on exaggerated or grotesque features to make Jewishness legible in these contexts. In this way, Szalit engaged with the same kind of “othering” gaze present in the ethnographic techniques of much of Yiddish realism, as well as with works by Jews in and around Germany that similarly treated East European Jews as other.49 But, as

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journalist Moritz Goldstein also observed in 1924, Szalit did this from the perspective of a Jewish “insider” (not an outside observer) who was in the unique position to relay and visually translate these experiences without promoting them as idyllic.50 In a description of her connection to the Eastern European world into which she was born, Szalit wrote: “I experience all of this so deeply, that often the abject misery to which I give shape leaves me severely shaken. I suffer—suffer almost physically with them, and out of a drive for self-preservation I reach for my instinctive humor and bestow my figures with grotesque ideas that mitigate their tragedy. But it is a laughter through tears.”51 Like Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, Szalit relied on the notion of “laughter through tears” to highlight stories of Jewish hardship and affliction. Yet the images she created were not always entirely sympathetic, sometimes even inviting the opposite response. Indeed, Szalit’s complex representations provide both a window onto Eastern experiences and a critical commentary thereof. There is little sense of pure longing or nostalgia; instead, many images read as ironic visual accounts that highlight both real and fictional aspects of Eastern Jewish experiences as absurd or untenable. By entering the realm of the bizarre, Szalit’s illustrations also set Jewish difference in dialogue with avant-garde modernist movements such as Expressionism and even Dadaism. Connected to Germany mainly through their place of publication, Szalit’s sixteen Motl illustrations emphasize East European Jewish difference through grotesque portrayals of both physical characteristics and behaviors or situations. Literary scholar Sabine Koller has observed that Szalit always depicts Motl and his friend Pinye in a hyperbolic fashion.52 Minor characters, too, are needlessly exaggerated in every image. Faces and facial features are distorted, elongated, and sometimes even rendered unrecognizable as human. We can assume that Szalit selected which parts of the story to illustrate, and through her artistic choices she achieved a certain degree of authorship by augmenting or even appropriating the content of the story.53 Of the fifteen illustrations that appear in sequence, eleven portray scenes from Motl’s family life in the fictional town of Kasrilevke, and only four show the family as emigrants on the move. Some are reminiscent of photographic snapshots and capture the immediacy of particularly absurd moments. In one image, Moishe the bookbinder whacks a boy who made fun of Motl. Szalit captures him mid-whack, with either a scream or a very pained expression on the boy’s face. Several other Motl images render Jewish life in Kasrilevke as not only brutal but also ridiculous and pathetic, especially the four illustrations of the far-fetched moneymaking schemes of Motl and his brother Elyahu, which underscore the folly of desperation. The subjects of Szalit’s illustrations of Fishke, the Lame are afflicted Eastern Jews whose bodily otherness takes on radical dimensions. As illustrations of one of the best-known works by classic Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher Sforim (pen name of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh), Szalit’s Fishke portfolio was presented in 1922 for a German-speaking audience and accompanied by a plot summary in German and an introduction by art historian Julius Elias. Szalit’s illustrations provide a counterpoint

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to Abramovitsh’s realistic literary depictions of impoverished Jews. Elias called Szalit’s portfolio of illustrations “a humorously viewed and tragically perceived conception of the world of extremely proletarian East European Jewry.”54 Yet the humor in Szalit’s images is not only tragic but also mildly shocking. In Szalit’s rendering, Fishke appears animalistic and almost apish, and perhaps also childish.55 When booksellers Reb Mendele and Reb Alter encounter Fishke, they find a simpleminded “cripple” who is described by Abramovitsh as having crooked yellow teeth, a mild stammer, a lisp, a hunchback, and a bad limp.56 Szalit’s Fishke bears markers of these afflictions and also appears disheveled in his tattered garments; he represents the Jewish beggar one might encounter in any corner of Eastern Europe. Though he tears at the viewer’s heartstrings, he is also ugly and even repellent.With his new wife, a blind orphan, Fishke joins a band of marauding beggars who at one point are referred to as “Jewish Gypsies.”57 These traveling beggars possess some of the most grotesque traits: one appears naked, several quarrel, and a number have distorted or clown-like facial features (see figure 7.3). This and other scenes of chiaroscuro interiors and exteriors that play with light and shadow point to tensions between an ominous, impoverished Eastern Jewish existence and the search for light.

Figure 7.3. Rahel Szalit-Marcus, The traveling band of beggars. Illustration of Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Fishke, the Lame, 1922. Courtesy of the Klau Library, Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

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Szalit’s illustrations of Yiddish literature were exaggerated to the point that some contemporary critics understood them as sarcastic caricatures of Jews. The best example is German Marxist cultural historian and collector Eduard Fuchs, whose illustrated book, Die Juden in der Karikatur (Caricatures of the Jews, 1921), included two of Szalit’s Motl illustrations.58 By and large, Fuchs viewed self-irony as a form of self-defense against antisemitism.59 We can also read the images that Fuchs reprinted as both powerful and memorable precisely because they relied on the shock value of stereotypes. As in other Motl and Fishke illustrations, the Jewish figures in one Szalit image reproduced by Fuchs are ugly, distorted, and even frightening, and their noses bear a resemblance to those in antisemitic caricatures.60 Szalit’s illustrations remind us that actual Jewish experiences could be grisly and despicable, and that maintaining a sense of humor or ironic distance could help to contemplate this reality. On the one hand, Szalit’s works show the effects of oppression and antisemitism by depicting downtrodden Jews. But on the other hand, some works leave us simultaneously mildly alarmed and commiserative. By confronting the viewer with Eastern Jews in exaggerated forms, Szalit calls attention to the need to face grotesque realities head-on, and she does this from the perspective of an insider who had left many of them behind in Eastern Europe. For Szalit, “the East” was no longer a place to call home but rather one to revisit through a critical lens accessible to Central European audiences. The Jews portrayed in Szalit’s illustrations of Heinrich Heine’s Hebräische Melodien are less exaggerated and contrast sharply with those in her illustrations of Yiddish literature. Several of Szalit’s twelve illustrations of the three Heine poems that make up Hebrew Melodies (“Princess Sabbath,” “Jehuda ben Halevy,” and “Disputation”) could stand alone as representations of scenes from traditional Jewish life or Jewish history. Indeed, several images were reprinted in periodicals with such simple titles as “Sabbath” and “Jehuda Halevi.”61 Szalit follows Heine in portraying the Sabbath as illuminating respite from everyday life, though her works notably do not bear the same ironic tone for which Heine is known. The illustrations of “Prinzessin Sabbath” in particular offer more realistic portrayals of observant Jews listening to a cantor in synagogue, lighting the Sabbath candles, and making Havdalah. As per Jewish custom, a Jewish woman with a covered head is at the center of the first “Sabbath” image, blessing the candles she has just lit to usher in the beginning of the holiday. Here we find a Jewish woman playing a traditional role, suggesting that the classic stuff of Heine’s poems (first published in Romanzero, 1851) provided Szalit with a platform for rendering religious Jews in a believable and sympathetic way in and for German contexts. Jewish difference is visible through traditional clothing, men’s beards, and symbolism such as a Star of David adorning the synagogue’s pulpit. Such facial features as prominent noses, too, support a reading of these figures as stereotypically Jewish, though none are as extreme or grossly exaggerated as those of Szalit’s Jewish subjects in her illustrations of Yiddish literature. Rahel Szalit’s illustrations of Jewish literary works and other portrayals of Jews indicate a strong commitment to Jewish-themed subject matter and Jewish art in gen-

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eral. That many of Szalit’s works were produced in Germany and for German speakers enables us to consider her works as part of German culture; their popularity among German-Jewish audiences in the 1920s suggests we would be remiss if we did not include them in the study of German-Jewish visual culture. From the range of Szalit’s subject matter, her stylistic versatility, and her engagement with different artists’ circles in Berlin, we also begin to understand that Jewish art does not only encompass works with obvious Jewish themes. Even a painting of an emigrant cocktail waitress in a bar can be considered Jewish art. As one art editor noted in 1930, some of Szalit’s recent works at the time depicted “the Jew of the western world,” a subject that demanded a new means of expression.62 Key here is this editor’s implication that even Eastern “emigrant” Jews could be of the Western worlds in which they resided.

Conclusion By expanding our understanding of German-Jewish visual culture to include the work of artists such as Rahel Szalit-Marcus, we open up a range of cultural and political considerations relevant far beyond this field. Claiming transnational figures as German—or at least “German-enough” for German-Jewish studies—offers insight into how multilingual artists, writers, and audiences interact and engage with one another and with contemporary issues, both in the past and in the present day. It also demonstrates one way to provide a cultural home for artists whose lives and work render borders immaterial, and whose citizenship may not align neatly with their places of residence. Both ethnicity and religion are key factors here as well, as are histories of inclusion and persecution. The way we categorize artists, particularly with respect to nationality, can greatly affect their reception and future impact. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, with over eighty-four million forcibly displaced persons globally and the highest number of refugees on record (twenty-six million), including over one million in Germany, there is still much to be gained from studying the politics of cultural exclusion and belonging as they relate to antisemitism, anti-Jewish violence, xenophobia, and the Holocaust.63 Recent scholarship explores the experiences of refugees attempting to flee Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the various diasporas of German-Jewish communities that resulted from this dispersal and exile.64 And although there is no shortage of scholarship on the Nazi occupation of France and the Holocaust in France, there is significantly less emphasis placed on German-Jewish culture in 1930s France. If we follow Jewish culture beyond Germany and treat it on its own terms, and as more than a mere “afterlife” of German-Jewish culture, we stand to learn more about responses to persecution and displacement. Gender and sexuality, too, play important roles in the politics of who is remembered and whose work ultimately matters or makes history. Women artists should be included in more studies of Jewish art and visual culture. Scholars who neglect to

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include women in the canons they establish are choosing to overlook, omit, and even erase women’s histories and cultural contributions. Of course, Rahel Szalit is not the only forgotten artist who merits revisiting; there are many Jewish women artists whose work is highly relevant for German-Jewish studies but rarely discussed in these contexts.65 Studying the life and work of Szalit, for one, also offers important insights into the intersections of German-Jewish and queer histories, another area with room for additional research that has the ability to impact present-day politics. The fields of German-Jewish history and visual culture provide a vital window onto the past that can help us reshape and transform our present. Visual culture will continue to be a central component of studying the German-Jewish experience in the decades to come. Kerry Wallach is associate professor of German studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She is the author of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and numerous articles on German-Jewish literature, history, film, visual and consumer culture, and gender and sexuality. Her biography of artist Rahel Szalit-Marcus is forthcoming with Penn State University Press. She serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin and the editorial board of the book series German Jewish Cultures (Indiana University Press, supported by the Leo Baeck Institute London).

Notes This chapter contains material related to my forthcoming biography of Rahel Szalit, which has been supported by a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award, a Sharon Abramson Research Grant from the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, the AJS Women’s Caucus Cashmere Subvention Award, and by Gettysburg College. Research for this project began with visits to Berlin archives in 2008, and a brief section on Szalit appeared in my first book, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany, which was generously supported by the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship. 1. See Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, “What is Visual Culture?” in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London: SAGE Publications, 1999), 1–7. 2. On art history and nationality, see Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); and Larry Silver and Samantha Baskind, “Looking Jewish: The State of Research on Modern Jewish Art,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (2011): 631–52. 3. All translations in this chapter are mine unless noted otherwise. To date, there has been little written about Rahel Szalit-Marcus outside of encyclopedia and lexicon entries. The best source of biographical information on Szalit is Hersh Fenster, Undzere farpaynikte kinstler: Nos artistes martyrs (Paris: H. Fenster, 1951; French translation published by Hazan in 2021), 231–35. The only other article-length publication on Szalit focuses on her Motl illustrations. See Sabine Koller, “Mentshelekh un stsenes: Rahel Szalit-Marcus illustriert Sholem Aleichem,” in Leket: Jiddistik heute / Yiddish Studies Today, ed. Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012), 207–31. 4. See, for example, the online exhibition “Jewish Women Ceramicists from Germany after 1933: Searching for Traces of Forgotten Biographies and Artworks,” which is based on an exhibition

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

held at the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2013–2014: https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/ MQJCfUHgPN-sLA. There have been some notable attempts to focus on foreign artists in Germany, such as a 2008 project that focused on illustrators from Eastern Europe. Szalit, however, was not included in this study. See Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Marion Aptroot, Jüdische Illustratoren aus Osteuropa in Berlin und Paris: Eine Ausstellung des Instituts für Jüdische Studien und des Seminars für Kunstgeschichte der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf: Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2008). The work of Hélène Roussel also discusses foreign artists active in Germany prior to 1933, though Szalit is not among the artists she mentions. Hélène Roussel, “German-Speaking Artists in Parisian Exile: Their Routes to the French Capital, Activities There, and Final Flight—a Short Introduction,” in Echoes of Exile: Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945, ed. Ines Rotemund-Reynard (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 10. Other scholars treat Russian or Polish artists in Germany without focusing on Jewish artists, such as Małgorzata Stolarska-Fronia, ed., Polish Avant-Garde in Berlin (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2019). See, for example, Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin Transit: Jüdische Migranten aus Osteuropa in den 1920er Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). Scholars who do consider foreign Jewish artists’ time in Germany tend to focus on the Yiddish-speaking (or Russian-speaking) networks that flourished there in the early 1920s, of which Szalit was at least nominally a part. See Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds., Yiddish inWeimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture (London: Legenda, 2010). Parsons’ Galleries, London, Exhibition of German Jewish Artists’ Work: Sculpture—Painting—Architecture, 5–15 June 1934, exhibition catalog, Leo Baeck Institute New York, Microfilm x MfW S116. For example, the recently published Posen Library volume on interwar Jewish culture contains an extraordinarily rich and engaging section on visual culture yet includes only three women artists out of about one hundred total. (Also noteworthy is the fact that all three—Chana Orloff, Ziona Tagger, Liselotte Grschebina—eventually died in Israel.) See Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Gitelman, eds., The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 8: Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918–1939 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2020), 603–82. See especially the work of Lisa Silverman and Darcy Buerkle. Samuel Spinner, “Is There Yiddish Photography?” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (September 2015), retrieved 10 May 2022. https://ingeveb.org/articles/is-there-yiddish-photography. Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver have identified several models of Jewishness in “Jewish” art, including subject matter related to the diasporic condition or biblical themes, and a work’s engagement with social activism. Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, Jewish Art: A Modern History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 241–57. See Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art (NewYork: Prager Publishers, 1990), 16–21. Olin, Nation without Art, 6, 109. See also Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1996). Several reviews in Jewish papers erroneously identified the subject of this painting as a Russian emigrant woman. See, for example: “Aus den Gemeinden,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 8, no. 8 (April 1930): 328; “Vermischtes,” Jüdische Rundschau 35, no. 14 (18 February 1930): 96; and “Der erste Preis,” Der Orden Bne Briss: Mitteilungen der Großloge für Deutschland VIII U.O.B.B. 10, no. 3 (March 1930), 60. Paul Lerner, “Round Table Introduction: Jewish Studies Meets Cultural Studies,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 43. See, for example, Ofer Ashkenazi, Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Lisa Silverman, “Reconsidering the Margins: Jewishness as an Analytical Framework,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 103–20.

166 | KERRY WALLACH 18. See, for example, Leora Auslander, “Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015): 300–34; and Ofer Ashkenazi and Guy Miron, “Jewish Vacations in Nazi Germany: Reflections on Time and Space amid an Unlikely Respite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 523–52. 19. Rebekka Grossmann, “Image Transfer and Visual Friction: Staging Palestine in the National Socialist Spectacle,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 64 (2019): 19–45. 20. Darcy Buerkle, “Caught in the Act: Norbert Elias, Emotion and The Ancient Law,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 83, 94. 21. See Ger Trud, “Rahel Szalit: Eine jüdische Malerin,” Die jüdische Frau 2, nos. 11–12 (15 August 1926): 1; Karl Schwarz, “Die Malerin Rahel Szalit,” Jüdische Rundschau 33, no. 36 (8 May 1928), 259. 22. See Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj; and Baskind and Silver, Jewish Art, 81–88. 23. Interestingly, references to Chagall and his work largely appear in German-Jewish periodicals beginning in 1924, after Chagall had left Berlin and returned to Paris. See “Marc Chagall,” Jüdische Illustrierte Zeitung 1, no. 9 (July 18, 1924), 132–34 [in Yiddish]; Alfred Pellon, “Marc Chagall: Eine Würdigung,” C.V.-Zeitung 3, no. 32 (7 August 1924), 480; “Marc Chagall,” Das jüdische Echo 13, no. 8 (19 February 1926), 125–27; Marc Chagall, “Jugenderinnerungen eines jüdischen Künstlers,” Israelitisches Familienblatt 27, “Aus alter und neuer Zeit” supplement to no. 28 (9 July 1925), 190; and “Der Maler Marc Chagall,” Israelitisches Familienblatt 29, “Aus alter und neuer Zeit” supplement to no. 2 (13 January 1927), 526. 24. For an example of a work by Chagall that incorporates German, see “Erinnerung 1914.” Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), viii, 9–12. 25. Chagall himself explicitly rejected the label of Expressionist. See Chagall’s first autobiography, reprinted in Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 162. 26. Not surprisingly, most discussions of Chagall in German-Jewish periodicals treat him as a Jewish artist from Eastern Europe based in France, and some refer to him as Russian and French. See note 23 above. 27. See, for example, the review of Boris Aronson’s book on Marc Chagall (Berlin: Razum-Verlag, 1924) in Die Wahrheit 40, no. 24 (13 June 1924), 10; and Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Albert Langen, 1921), 310. 28. Rahel Markus’s birthplace and birthdate (usually given as “Ischgenty” and 3 July 1892) have long been contested and difficult to verify. I located her birth record among the records for Jewish communities of Kaunas Gubernia in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives for 1888. The birth record lists Telz as her birthplace; Ischgenty is likely a mistranslation of Užventis, which was considered to be her family’s town of origin. Her birthdate is listed as 23 Tammuz or 20 June on the Russian (then Julian) calendar, suggesting her actual European (Gregorian) birthdate was 2 July 1888. 29. Szalit lived in Poland for only a short period when it was still part of the Russian Empire, and, though members of her family remained in Poland, it is unclear to what extent Szalit self-identified as Polish. In one instance she referred to her origins in “my Lithuanian home” without reference to Poland. Rahel Szalit, “Ich bin eine jüdische Künstlerin,” Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes 6, no. 9 (September 1930): 2–3; here 2. 30. Roughly two hundred thousand Jews from the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania migrated to Congress Poland during this period. Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 74–75, 99. 31. Although local authorities did not permit pogroms, several waves of anti-Jewish violence nevertheless occurred in northwest Lithuania around 1900. The Markus family’s exact year of departure from Russian Lithuania is not known, but they left sometime between 1895 and 1910. 32. Marriage record courtesy of the Archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna.

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33. See the files on Julius Szalit at the Munich Stadtarchiv: Sterberegistereintrag (Standesamt Mü. IV, Registernummer C 1523/1919) and Sterbefallanzeige (Signatur: DE-1992-STANM-6455). 34. Although we know little about Julius Szalit, many suicides occurred at this time among homosexual or queer individuals whose “desires did not fit heterosexual norms and expectations.” Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017), 47. 35. On suicide in German-Jewish contexts, see Darcy Buerkle, Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 163–72. 36. See especially the letter from Rachela Szalitowa to Eleonore Kalkowska, 14 August 1934. From the private archive of Tomasz Szarota, courtesy of Anna Dz˙abagina. 37. Among Szalit’s friends were artist Julie Wolfthorn and writer Eleonore Kalkowska. See Anna Dz˙abagina, “Berlin’s Left Bank? Eleonore Kalkowska in Women’s Artistic Networks of Weimar Berlin,” in Polish Avant-Garde in Berlin, ed. Małgorzata Stolarska-Fronia (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2019), 151–70. 38. This exhibition aimed to support the careers of women artists by featuring ninety new portraits of women by women. Six artists total were awarded prizes. A number of other Jewish women artists also took part in this exhibition, including Käthe Münzer-Neumann and Julie Wolfthorn. Verein der Künstlerinnen zu Berlin, Die Frau von heute Ausstellung: Gemälde, Graphik, Plastik, November–Dezember 1929, exhibition catalog, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. 39. See “Yudishe Kinstlerin,” Unzer Express (Warsaw, 24 February 1930); “Nayes in 2–3 Shures,” Folksblat (Kaunas, 27 February 1930); David Ewen, “A Great Painter of the Jew,” B’nai B’rith Magazine 45 (1931): 267–68; and David Ewen, “Rahel Szalit Portrays Soul of Israel: Artist Who Won Coveted German Honor Is Uniquely Gifted,” American Hebrew, 19 September 1930, 472, 496. 40. Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 137. 41. Szalit’s eight illustrations of Thomas Mann’s story “Dina” appear in the first volume of Die Aufklärung, issues 4–7 (May–August 1929), on pages 76, 78, 109, 158, 159, 187, 188, and 221. 42. Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 14. 43. Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2006), 215; and Hélène Roussel, “Die emigrierten deutchen Künstler in Frankreich und der Freie Künstlerbund,” Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 2 (1983–84): 174. 44. See Renée Poznanski, Jews in France During World War II, trans. by Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001). 45. Kenneth E. Silver, “Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945,” in The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945, ed. Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan (New York: Universe Books, 1985), 53. The number of eighty artists can be corroborated using Hersh Fenster’s memorial volume and the work of Nadine Nieszawer on the École de Paris; this number includes artists who died of illness or suicide. Among the eighty who perished, roughly eight were women. See Fenster, Undzere farpaynikte kinstler; and Nadine Nieszawer, ed., Histoires des Artistes Juifs de L’École de Paris 1905–1939/Stories of Jewish Artists of the School of Paris, trans. Deborah Princ (Paris: Les Étoiles, 2020); and https://ecoledeparis.org/. 46. This painting was exhibited as part of the Montparnasse déporté exhibition at the Montparnasse Museum in Paris in 2005. A color image was reproduced in the exhibition catalog: Jean Digne and Sylvie Buisson, eds. Montparnasse déporté: Artistes d’Europe (Paris: Musée du Montparnasse, 2005), 102. 47. See, for example, the painting Jewish Neighborhood, reproduced in Ewen, “Great Painter of the Jew,” 268.

168 | KERRY WALLACH 48. Several sets of Szalit’s illustrations are now considered lost, including a German translation of Israel Zangwill’s novel The King of Schnorrers (König der Schnorrer) and aYiddish version of the tales of R. Nahman Bratslaver edited by Moshe Kleinman (Sipure maysies, 1923). 49. For recent scholarship related to this subject, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, ed., Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran, eds., Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); and Samuel J. Spinner, Jewish Primitivism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). 50. Goldstein wrote: “Zu den Seltenen, die das Jüdische einfach besitzen und die es daher von innen darzustellen vermögen, gehört Frau Szalit. Sie hat es nicht nötig, pathetisch oder idyllisch zu übertreiben und dadurch für die Juden zu werben.” Moritz Goldstein, “Rahel Szalit: Die Schöpferin unserer Bilder,” Der Schild, 1 September 1924. Moritz Goldstein Nachlass, Institut für Zeitungsforschung, Dortmund. 51. “Ich erlebe das alles so stark, daß oft das tiefste Elend, das ich gestalte, mich schwer erschüttert. Ich leide—leide fast physisch mit ihnen, und aus einem Selbsterhaltungstrich heraus greife ich oft zu meinem angeborenen Humor und beschenke meine Gestalten mit grotesken Einfällen, die ihre Tragik mildern. Aber es ist ein Lachen durch Tränen.” Szalit, “Ich bin eine jüdische Künstlerin,” 2. 52. Koller, “Mentshelekh un stsenes,” 225. 53. See Franziska Walther, “Shifting Authorship: The Illustrator’s Role in Contemporary Book Illustration; Decision-Making with Depictive Augmenting, and Appropriational Strategies; Illustration: Concept of Diffusion vs. Innovation,” in A Companion to Illustration, ed. by Alan Male (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2019), 305–29. 54. Julius Elias, “Erläuterung,” Fischke der Krumme: Sechzehn Lithographien von Rahel Szalit-Marcus (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1922), 2r. 55. These images stand in contrast to an illustration of Fishke created around the same time by Austrian-Jewish artist Uriel Birnbaum, who focused on Fishke’s cane and thus emphasized his disability over his physical features. Uriel Birnbaum, Album (Vienna: Kval Farlag, 1921). Uriel was the youngest son of Nathan Birnbaum, who is discussed at length in Nick Block’s contribution to this volume. 56. S.Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim), Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third, ed. Dan Miron and Ken Frieden, trans. Ted Gorelick and Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 55. 57. Abramovitsh, Tales of Mendele, 150. 58. Fuchs’s study of antisemitic and satirical representations of Jews concludes with a section on “Jewish self-mockery” that has ideological Marxist undertones.We see this especially when Fuchs corrects the title listed with Szalit’s image, “The Sun Rises in the West,” arguing that the sun does not rise in the west (America), but rather in the east (Soviet Russia). See Louis Kaplan, At Wit’s End:The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 92–94. 59. Kaplan, At Wit’s End, 72. 60. The Yiddish caption of this image in the Motl portfolio is “Mir forn keyn Amerika.” In the Fuchs book, the image bears the German title “Die Amerikafahrer, Die Sonne geht im Westen auf ” (The America travelers: The sun rises in the west). See also Wallach, Passing Illusions, 48–50. 61. See Walter Kauders, “Rahel Szalit,” Menorah 4, no. 2 (February 1926): 87–94; and Rachelle Szalit [sic], “Die Disputation,” Der Querschnitt 9, no. 10 (October 1929): 713. 62. Will Pless, “Jüdisches auf Kunst-Ausstellungen: Die Frau von heute,” Israelitisches Familienblatt 32, no. 13 (27 March 1930), 14. 63. Statistics taken from USA for UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency, “Refugee Statistics,” retrieved 10 May 2022 from https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/statistics/.

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64. See, for example, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009); and Marion Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2020). 65. Among those active in Germany prior to World War II who merit further study are, to name a few: Regina Mundlak, Rosy Lilienfeld, Käthe Münzer-Neumann (later: Kate Munzer), and Käthe Ephraim-Marcus.

Bibliography Abramovitsh, S. Y. (Mendele Moykher Sforim). Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third. Edited by Dan Miron and Ken Frieden. Translated by Ted Gorelick and Hillel Halkin. New York: Schocken Books, 1996. Ashkenazi, Ofer. Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ashkenazi, Ofer, and Guy Miron. “Jewish Vacations in Nazi Germany: Reflections on Time and Space amid an Unlikely Respite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 523–52. Auslander, Leora. “Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015): 300–34. Baskind, Samantha, and Larry Silver. Jewish Art: A Modern History. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Bauer, Heike. The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017. Brenner, Michael. The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Buerkle, Darcy. “Caught in the Act: Norbert Elias, Emotion and The Ancient Law.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 83–102. ———. Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Caron, Vicki. Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Dwork, Debórah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Endelman, Todd M., and Zvi Gitelman, eds. The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. Vol. 8: Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918–1939. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2020. Estraikh, Gennady, and Mikhail Krutikov, eds. Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture. London: Legenda, 2010. Evans, Jessica, and Stuart Hall, eds. Visual Culture:The Reader. London: SAGE Publications, 1999. Fuchs, Eduard. Die Juden in der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte. Munich: Albert Langen, 1921. Grossmann, Rebekka. “Image Transfer and Visual Friction: Staging Palestine in the National Socialist Spectacle.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 64 (2019): 19–45. Harshav, Benjamin. Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Heine, Heinrich. Hebräische Melodien. With twelve lithographs by Rahel Szalit-Marcus. Edited and with an introduction by Hugo Bieber. Berlin: Für die literarische Vereinigung Hesperus, 1923. Hülsen-Esch, Andrea von, and Marion Aptroot. Jüdische Illustratoren aus Osteuropa in Berlin und Paris. Düsseldorf: Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2008. Kampf, Avram. Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art. New York: Prager Publishers, 1990. Kaplan, Louis. At Wit’s End:The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke. NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2020.

170 | KERRY WALLACH Kaplan, Marion. Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Kilcher, Andreas, and Gabriella Safran, eds. Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Koller, Sabine. “Mentshelekh un stsenes: Rahel Szalit-Marcus illustriert Sholem Aleichem.” In Leket: Jiddistik heute /Yiddish Studies Today, edited by Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg, 207–31. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012. Lerner, Paul. “Round Table Introduction: Jewish Studies Meets Cultural Studies.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 41–46. Male, Alan, ed. A Companion to Illustration. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019. Nieszawer, Nadine, ed. Histoires des Artistes Juifs de L’École de Paris 1905–1939/Stories of Jewish Artists of the School of Paris. Translated by Deborah Princ. Paris: Les Étoiles, 2020. Olin, Margaret. The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Palmier, Jean-Michel. Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America. Translated by David Fernbach. New York: Verso, 2006. Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History. Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013. Poznanski, Renée. Jews in France During World War II. Translated by Nathan Bracher. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001. Roussel, Hélène. “Die emigrierten deutchen Künstler in Frankreich und der Freie Künstlerbund.” Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 2 (1983–84): 173–211. ———. “German-Speaking Artists in Parisian Exile: Their Routes to the French Capital, Activities There, and Final Flight—a Short Introduction.” In Echoes of Exile: Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945, edited by Ines Rotemund-Reynard, 1–26. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Silver, Kenneth E., and Romy Golan, eds. The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945. New York: Universe Books, 1985. Silver, Larry, and Samantha Baskind. “Looking Jewish: The State of Research on Modern Jewish Art.” Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (2011): 631–52. Silverman, Lisa. “Reconsidering the Margins: Jewishness as an Analytical Framework.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 103–20. Spinner, Samuel. “Is There Yiddish Photography?” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (September 2015). Retrieved 10 May 2022. https://ingeveb.org/articles/is-there-yiddish-photography. ———. Jewish Primitivism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin. Berlin Transit: Jüdische Migranten aus Osteuropa in den 1920er Jahren. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Stolarska-Fronia, Małgorzata, ed. Polish Avant-Garde in Berlin. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2019. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Szalit-Marcus, Rahel. Fischke der Krumme: Sechzehn Lithographien von Rahel Szalit-Marcus. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1922. ———. Menshelakh un stsenes: Zekhtsen tseykhenungen tsu Sholem Aleykhems verk ‘Motl Peysi dem hazens yingel.’ Berlin: Klal Farlag, 1922. Veidlinger, Jeffrey, ed. Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Wallach, Kerry. Passing Illusions: JewishVisibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

 CHAPTER 8

Woman, Scientist, and Jew The Forced Migration of Berta Ottenstein



Stefanie Mahrer

Doing German-Jewish Studies in Switzerland “[It is] a key challenge for scholars in Jewish history . . . to step out of the long shadow of the minority history paradigm that corresponds directly with a nationalist narrative of majority history,”1 writes Till van Rahden in an essay from 2015. In Switzerland, where I studied and have been working—with some shorter and longer interruptions—for almost two decades, Jewish history is still perceived as minority history. For historical reasons, Jewish studies has a different status there than in Germany. To date, there is no internal interest in higher-education policy to deal with Jewish-related topics in depth. This situation has far-reaching consequences for the national research agenda, for the appointment of professors, and for funding opportunities. Switzerland was neutral during World War II, and it was the only German-speaking country whose Jewish population neither perished nor was driven into exile in the Shoah. In postwar Germany, “one can . . . best understand historical memory . . . as an ongoing attempt to come to terms with a murderous past that will not go away,” van Rahden writes.2 In Switzerland, the opposite seems to be true: no one, apart from a small number of professional historians, has felt the urge to investigate the country’s history during the 1930s and 1940s, has worked through the numerous economic entanglements with Nazi Germany, or has addressed the inhumane refugee politics that cost countless Jews their lives. In the general perception, the Holocaust is not part of “our” history. This perception is reflected in school curricula as well as in research agendas across Swiss universities. Not only is the Holocaust not part of Swiss history, the history and culture of Jews was—and to some extent still is—not considered part of general history. Until today, one can graduate from a Swiss high school without having learned about the Holocaust or of Switzerland’s role during National Socialism

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(NS). Changing this was one of the main objectives of a group of professors at Basel University just before the turn of the millennium. Future teachers had to be educated. Furthermore, only through a deep understanding of Swiss-Jewish history and culture can Jewish history become part of general history. Until the fall of 1998, when Jewish studies was institutionalized as an independent field of study at Basel University, research in modern Jewish studies was almost nonexistent. The foundation of the Basel Institute was a milestone. In its early years, there was a surplus of basic research on Swiss Jewry. Heiko Haumann, professor emeritus for Eastern European history and cofounder of the Institute, summarized the initial years and paraphrased the goals that the founding board formulated in 1998: Research and teaching will be dealing with the life-world [Lebenswelt] of the Jews, their history, religion, culture, and literature in their interrelationships with the non-Jewish environment from antiquity to the present. . . . Particular attention should be paid to the history and culture of the Jews in Switzerland and in the region.3 A series of dissertations on local Jewish communities now reflect an attempt to achieve these goals. What the dissertations have in common is that, on the one hand, they represent pioneering work and, on the other hand, they seek to connect with research questions and methodological considerations from other German-speaking countries. My introduction to the field, when I began in 2001, was strongly influenced by the topics and approaches of these early years. In retrospect, it is not surprising that I undertook my doctorate in Swiss-Jewish history. I also wrote a contextualized pioneer study with a local focus.4 Over the years, Jewish studies in Switzerland has broadened its topics and methodologies through transnational collaborations and exchanges.While the field’s self-image has clearly changed, the outsider perspective has not. Jewish studies is still considered a marginal subject at the fringes of history, German studies, and theology. As a scholar in Switzerland working primarily in German-Jewish studies, I am not truly part of the established academic disciplines within Switzerland, such as history or literature. In Swiss universities, many colleagues in history and German studies departments still consider (German-)Jewish studies as minority studies. For them it is not part of the historical narrative because it is the history of the others. Jews are not considered as agents but as “objects of forces beyond their control.”5 For many, the self-perception in Jewish studies to understand Jews as agents and to write Jewish history as part of the majority narrative remains alienating. Antisemitism, expulsion, and emancipation—to name only three keywords—are not part of the construct of Swiss national history; instead, those activities are considered the history of the Jews. This notion has strongly influenced my own research: I do understand Jewish history as part of general history, and, by writing as well as teaching Swiss-Jewish history, I aim to change the prevailing narrative in Swiss historiography. Neither nations nor civilizations can be the exclusive

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and exhaustive units and categories of historiography. This brings me to the concept of entangled history, which “examines dependencies, interferences, interdependencies, and entanglements, and emphasizes as well the multidirectional character of transfers.”6 It is the notion of social interconnectedness that makes this concept so fruitful for my own research. Transnational migration, cultural transfer, and transfer of knowledge have been and are key focal points of my research. In my dissertation, I studied the history of Jewish watchmakers in Switzerland, an immigrant community of originally rural commodity dealers who entered a new industry that not only brought profound inner-societal changes (secularization, urbanization, social advancement) but that also enabled the industrialization of watchmaking in Switzerland.7 My second book (Habilitation) is a biography of Salman Schocken, a German-Jewish entrepreneur, philanthropist, publisher, and cultural Zionist who was forced to leave Germany in 1933 for Jerusalem. The study is more than the description of Schocken’s life; it is an analysis of how the cultural area of German Jewry was constituted and changed outside of Germany after 1933.8 In my current project, my team and I work on Switzerland in the transnational network of science in exile from 1933 to 1950, and we understand Switzerland and its political and academic landscape as one location within the transnational academic network(s) of German Jews after 1933. By employing digital methods to study the networks, I aim to show how new methodological approaches can help us to think and write about (German-Jewish) history differently and how we can present our research in scholarly publications as well as on the web. Part of the data and analytical filters will be made accessible on the project website. In the public interface, readers will be able to visualize the data geographically, socially, and chronologically. The website is addressed to a heterogeneous audience. It can be used by teachers to introduce students to different aspects of (forced academic) migration such as migration patterns, the relevance of age or gender in migration, or the connection between political decisions and migration, to name just a few. But it is also addressed to scholars in the field with more specific questions, such as comparing career paths, studying migration patterns in different academic fields, or tracking the numbers of emigrant scholars in different universities throughout time, and much more. Preset filters and scenarios (various sets of settings) will help readers to use the data depending on their interests and questions. It is also my goal to move Switzerland more into the focus of broader GermanJewish studies. Earlier, I argued that working as a scholar of German-Jewish studies in Switzerland leaves one at the fringes of the field. We need to ask ourselves how we want to define German-Jewish studies and what the common denominators are of our various topics and approaches. Is it shared experience, the common language or space, or a distinctive culture? I would like to argue that the definition depends on the epoch and the research questions. What makes the field so intriguing to me is its topi-

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cal and methodological openness as well as its entanglements. With forced-academicmigration.net, I would like to carry German-Jewish studies into the virtual space so that as many people as possible can access it (including those outside of our research community). In the second part of my chapter, I share a first glimpse of my project.9 I chose a case study that I will present both here in this volume as well as online. On the project website, anyone can access the data and prepared scenarios. The link included in the endnote takes the reader directly to the life and career trajectory of the German-Jewish dermatologist Berta Ottenstein.10

Berta Ottenstein: A Contextualized Biography In Germany, dermatology was established in the late nineteenth century as an independent subfield of medicine. Of the first- and second-generation researchers and practitioners in the field, a good 27 percent were Jews.11 When, in April 1933, the newly elected Nazi government passed the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), most Jewish dermatologists lost their positions.While an enormous personal tragedy for those who were dismissed, it was also a major setback for the discipline. Researchers have made clear that the mass layoff has caused lasting damage to German science.12 In this chapter, however, I will not dwell on this loss despite its importance; rather, I will focus on a single fate as a way of highlighting one of the many who were forced to leave Germany and who tried to continue their profession in academia. Biographical case studies allow us to examine the many difficulties expelled scientists experienced in their professional and personal lives. Through a close look at German-Jewish dermatologist Berta Ottenstein, we can shed light on how age, gender, family status, and professional networks have influenced academic careers in exile. Of the 569 Jewish dermatologists in Germany in 1933, at least 259 were forced into exile, about 180 survived in Germany, 57 were murdered in concentration camps, and 13 died by suicide; the fate of 60 is unknown.13 One of the exiled was the German-Jewish dermatologist Berta Ottenstein, who held PhDs in chemistry (1913) from the University of Erlangen and in medicine (1919) from the University of Nuremberg, as well as a Habilitation in dermatology (1931) from the University of Freiburg. She was the first woman in Freiburg and the first woman in dermatology to earn this highest academic qualification, which is required in many continental European universities to conduct self-contained university teaching and to obtain a professorship. After her dismissal from the University of Freiburg, she first migrated to Hungary, later to Turkey, and finally to the United States. As a dermatologist, she was very well respected and a groundbreaking researcher, but as a woman she had to overcome many obstacles; as a Jew she was expelled and discriminated against in her own country. Without her professional network, which was based on her scientific excellence as well as on her ability to build friendships in all the many places she lived, she would have not been able to continue her career in exile.

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Biography in Context: Methodological Reflections Writing a biography in context takes into account that “the autonomy of the agentic subject is an illusion”14 but understands the person as part of the social group(s) in which they were educated and of which they were part. People are, to use the phrase of Anthony La Vopa, “positioned in a dense cluster of [historical] contexts.”15 The reconstruction of a singular life allows us to reconstruct “how social, economic, cultural, political and ethnic networks form, solidify and intersect, or dissolve.” A biography is hence “neither structure nor agency, but always both.”16 As Margit Szöllösi-Janze notes, scientific biography is able to depict history in all its shades by integrating different approaches and subject areas, including historical migration research, the history of science, network analysis, and gender studies.17 My interest goes beyond the mere biographical: I aim to analyze the development of the interplay between the individual, structures, institutes, relationships, and knowledge across time and space. Historical network analysis allows scholars to study the social network of people and institutes systematically. The social relations we study are articulated in networks of people and objects that spread across space regardless of political boundaries.18 With a strong interest in the biographies of refugee scholars and scientists, my main interests lie in the agency of individual actors within transnational networks and political structures in the specific circumstances of refugee scholars. Whereas in social network analysis the individual experience is of little interest, historical network analysis can undertake biographical research because it illuminates the structural and political influences that determine, enable, or limit their actions as well as the function and influence of social contacts on their life. By comparing the life journeys of different actors in a specific network, we are able to highlight singularity, differences in action, and, hence, agency. Historical network analysis is still a rather young but steadily growing subdiscipline in the wide field of historical research. It mainly draws from tools and principles of social network analysis, which are adapted to historiographical questions and data. Established in the 1970s in the social sciences, network analysis conceptualizes individuals as embedded within webs of social structures through which influence and other resources are transferred. Software-based data gathering makes it possible to visualize the network structures of actors, their social relations, and their functions. Recently, a number of computer- and web-based environments and applications have been developed for social and historical network analysis. In my main project,19 my research group is working with nodegoat20 in order to collect and analyze all relevant data on forced academic migration. At a later stage we will publish the data, a set of filters, and analytical tools on our website. For the study of biographies, digital methods offer “‘visual analytics techniques to synthesize information and derive insight from . . . dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data’ to detect expected constellations, but also to discover novel and un-

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expected connections.”21 Florian Windhager, a pioneer in the field of data-based visualization and the study of biography, suggests a multi-perspective approach that includes geotemporal visualization to show patterns of movement and relational dimensions to display network patterns as well as cultural/academic production. The visualization of Berta Ottenstein’s biography as well as her network can be found on the project website. All data as well as a set of filters are available there.22

The Life of Berta Ottenstein Berta Ottenstein was born in 1891 in Nuremberg as the youngest of six children in a merchant family. Despite the early death of her father in 1907, the family’s wealth allowed her to attend the Königliches Realgymnasium and later the Universities of Nuremberg and Stuttgart. In 1914, Ottenstein earned her doctorate in chemistry from the University of Erlangen. She spent the summer semester of 1914 as a visiting researcher in Oxford. She returned to Nuremberg after the outbreak of World War I and commenced studying medicine at the university there. After spending two years (1916–18) at the University of Munich, she earned her second doctorate in medicine in 1919.23 Ottenstein was one of the few women in Germany who had the privilege of higher education. In Bavaria, women were allowed to enroll as university students from 1903,24 but, for girls, earning a high school diploma (Abitur)—the kind of diploma that allows young people to study at a university—at a regular Gymnasium was only possible in 1912 (Munich) and 1916 (Erlangen). Female enrollment therefore grew slowly.25 After Ottenstein earned her second degree, her career led her to a number of research institutions as well as hospitals. Between January 1919 and September 1921, she worked together with the biochemists Otto Neubauer and Siegfried Thannhauser on metabolic diseases at the clinical laboratory in Munich. From November 1920 until December 1923, Ottenstein worked as an assistant physician at the sick and psych ward (Kranken- und Irrenabteilung) at the Stuttgart public hospital. In the following years (1924–27), she was an assistant at the Thüringer Landesuniversität’s chemical laboratory, where she worked with Alexander Gutbier. The year 1927 she spent as the assistant to Carl Neuberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. There, she strengthened her theoretical and practical knowledge in the field. Ottenstein was a hardworking scientist constantly involved in pioneering research. She was also a well-liked colleague, which is reflected in her numerous positively received publications, many of them coauthored. It comes as no surprise that in 1928 she was appointed leading scientist of the newly founded physiological-chemical department at the clinic for dermatology at the university hospital in Freiburg. In a 1933 reference letter from Professor Georg Alexander Rost, her research was described as “groundbreaking” and her skills as “extraordinary.” She developed new methods mainly in the diagnosis of syphilis.26 In Freiburg, Ottenstein worked and pub-

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lished with Alfred Marchionini, whom she would later meet again in Turkey,27 as well as with Siegfried Thannhauser, who, in 1930, was appointed director of the university clinic in Freiburg, a position he would lose in 1933 because he was Jewish.Thannhauser immigrated to the United States in 1934 and restarted his career in Boston. Berta Ottenstein was also dismissed in the spring of 1933. By 1933, she was the first woman granted a Habilitation at the faculty of medicine in Freiburg and most likely the first female Dozentin (independent lecturer) in the field of dermatology. Despite being one of the first female scientists awarded this academic title in Freiburg, Ottenstein does not seem to have encountered any problems on this trajectory. She was highly respected as a scientist and well connected. Nevertheless, she received neither a tenured position nor the title of professor.28 Rigid barriers for women in academia remained. It is cynical, but perhaps the only time female scientists were treated in the same way as their male colleagues was in April 1933, in the months following the declaration of Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. According to paragraph 3 of the law, all tenured civil servants and candidates for tenured positions of “nonAryan” descent were to be fired immediately. Exceptions were made for World War I veterans, those who lost a father or a son in combat, and those who had been in civil service since 1 August 1914. Ottenstein appealed the termination of her contract. In her appeal to the minister of culture, she argued that women were not allowed to obtain a Habilitation before 1919 and could therefore not be considered for tenured positions before that date. She reasoned that the cutoff date for the exception ought to be adjusted for women. Ottenstein’s petition was denied, and she was suspended from her job on 12 April 1933.29 She left Germany almost immediately for Budapest, where she worked at the clinic for skin and venereal diseases of the Pázmány-Péter-University. Because of her extraordinary professional knowledge, Ottenstein arrived in Budapest with recommendations from Professor Rost of Freiburg and Professor Istvan Rothman of Giessen as well as by invitation from Lajos Nékám, director of the clinic. In Budapest, she had two main tasks to fulfill. Ottenstein was asked to bring the clinic up to speed on the latest biochemical research, including training its scientific personal. Second, she was tasked with organizing the ninth international congress of dermatology, which was held in Budapest in 1934. In her free time, she was allowed to continue her own research at the clinic’s laboratory. Ottenstein did not receive any financial compensation for her work in Budapest and had to live on her private savings. This was only possible because she was single and had no children. In the case of academically trained men and women, research has shown that women were less likely to continue their careers in exile. Refugees were often denied access to the legal job market. For men, who in most cases would not accept work beyond their professional expertise, it was almost impossible to join the workforce as academics and provide for their families. Women on the other hand were willing to look beyond their professional expertise and thus had access to the informal work sector, accepting jobs

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well below their qualifications.30 Many of these jobs, such as cleaners, nannies, cooks, and typists, were in fields associated with women’s work as well as with low social prestige and low wages. With women joining the workforce and securing the survival of their relatives, gender roles were switched within formerly bourgeois families.31 Nevertheless, by taking over the position of the provider, as Heide Klapdor has pointed out, women stayed well within the stereotypical role of caregivers.32 The title of Klapdor’s essay “Strategy of Survival Instead of Life Plan” grasps the problematic aspects of women’s paid work in exile. Many women, regardless of their previous professional positions and achievements, gave up their career plans to secure the survival of their families and to support their husbands’ attempts to continue their own careers.33 For the emancipation of women, flight and exile during both world wars were real backlashes. Women were forced into roles and professions from which they had just freed themselves.34 Atina Grossmann writes in her study on German women doctors in exile that many of the married female physicians worked in unskilled jobs that allowed their husbands to spend their time studying for the difficult language and medical exams required in new homelands.35 Although most academic female refugees were single, most doctors were married and had children.36 Ottenstein, single and childless, was atypical in Germany and in exile. Seventy percent of women physicians during the Weimar Republic were general practitioners, and specialists were concentrated in the fields of gynecology and obstetrics, pediatrics, dermatology, and sexually transmitted diseases. Female doctors were practitioners, often working in public clinics that served women and the poor.37 Ottenstein followed a different career path. Clinical work as a practitioner was not her focus: she primarily worked in research at various universities and laboratories. For a married woman with children, this intense geographical mobility would have been unfeasible. Her mobility in the 1920s helped to establish a strong professional network that she activated in the spring of 1933. Unlike the many Jewish women doctors who abandoned their career plans after being expelled from their jobs, Ottenstein continued as a researcher in her field. Uncertainty and demotion were the price she paid. After the two years in Budapest, she migrated to Istanbul. From 1933 to 1944, over one thousand people migrated in the context of Turkish university reforms from Germany to Turkey, among them around three hundred women.38 Coincidentally, Turkey began actively seeking foreign researchers in the same year as German academics were dismissed. Scientists, technical personnel, and research assistants from Germany migrated to Turkey in the course of Atatürk’s reformation and westernization of universities. Turkey’s leadership entrusted foreign scientists with the modernization, reformation, and rebuilding of its university system. Those scientists who found new occupations in Turkey made important contributions to scientific transfer from Germany to Turkey. The migration of German-Jewish scientists to Turkey was facilitated by Philipp Schwartz, a Zurich-based German-Jewish refugee scientist, and Albert Malche, a Swiss politician and professor of pedagogy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Turkey

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was not the first choice for expelled scientists. Many, especially in the beginning, tried to settle in the United Kingdom. Immediately after the law against Jewish civil servants was declared in Germany and the first wave of Jewish academics was obliged to leave their positions, academic help organizations were founded to “defend the principle of academic freedom.”39 Many aid organizations, often founded by exiled scientists, had two main tasks: raising funds to financially support the dismissed scientists and finding work placement at universities and research institutions outside Germany. Women were hired as secretaries, as lectors for languages and history, as nurses, and as technical assistants and heads of laboratories in the fields of chemistry, biology, and medicine.40 German men held about 80 percent of all newly established full professorships; not a single woman held one. In her article on female scientists at Turkish universities from 1933 to 1945, Regine Erichsen shows how “exiled German and Austrian women especially in the medical professions took part in the innovational shift of science and learning of the Turkish universities and the clinical practice in the institutions of public health.”41 Although foreigners were recruited to replace the seemingly “unproductive and old-fashioned” Turkish academics,42 they were also hired to rebuild universities from the ground up. The job of the immigrants included constructing the framework for future research, establishing laboratories, teaching Turkish staff and future scientists, conducting research, and, naturally, teaching students. Memoirs and letters from this time give insight into these complex tasks. The country lacked basic objects needed in laboratories, and utensils and chemicals were thus imported from Europe or manufactured by local artisans, who were taught how to produce them.43 Berta Ottenstein did not register with an academic aid organization. She was directly contacted by the head of the Istanbul clinic for dermatology and the study of syphilis, Professor Dr. Hulusi Behçet, who invited her to assume the directorship of the clinic’s laboratory. Behçet spent some time in Budapest and was friends with Lajos Nékám, Ottenstein’s superior at the University of Budapest.44 With her difficult situation in Budapest in mind, she accepted the offer from Istanbul and wrote on 14 August 1934 that she was delighted and honored to accept the position.45 After the international congress of dermatology concluded in September 1934, she packed her belongings and traveled to Istanbul, where she began her new job on 1 October. Ottenstein had to set up the laboratory from scratch. Dermatology was not yet an established field of research in Turkey; on the contrary, it had the reputation of being unscientific and underdeveloped. Only with Ottenstein’s lab were the preconditions for science-based research established. Once in Istanbul, she was also offered a place as laboratory head of the newly founded cancer research institute.46 Therefore, from 1935 to 1945, the year Berta Ottenstein left for the United States, she was director of two laboratories, both of which she constructed herself. As director, she trained local researchers, held lectures at the University of Istanbul, worked in the clinic, and continued her own research—all in rather difficult conditions. We cannot forget that the new university system was still under construction and that German scientists faced great uncertainty, requiring much improvisation.

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Ottenstein seemed to have settled in rather well. Her own research progressed steadily, which is reflected in her numerous publications from that time.47 Some of the articles were copublications with Behçet, who was highly dependent on Ottenstein’s work in the laboratory.48 Erichsen and others have shown how crucial it was for the exiled scientists in Turkey to continue to publish and to maintain contact with the global research community if they planned to continue their career elsewhere.49 Turkey was for many of the Western scientists more of a stopover than the final destination in their migration journey. Their contracts were issued for five years and had to be extended every so often. Turkey’s interest in the foreign scientists was explicit: they were recruited to reform the universities and to educate a new generation of Turkish academics in the Western standards of science. Hiring Jewish scholars was never a humanitarian act; Turkey was interested in the transfer of knowledge, and visas were issued exclusively on the basis of academic merit.50 But this situation was not unique to Turkey. Isabella Löhr has shown in her research that humanitarianism was not the main trajectory of the aid organizations: it was, in the words of the British politician and university official William Beveridge, the “defense of science and learning against attacks such as those . . . from Germany.”51 Professional standards and academic excellence—rather than altruistic considerations—were the primary reasons for supporting individual scholars and scientists. Institutions outside Germany, mainly American and British universities, were interested in extending their own reputations by bringing in renowned scholars and promising younger scientists, and they saw the expulsion of academics from Germany as a chance.52 Contracts in the United States and in the United Kingdom were also usually issued only for a limited period of time, but, there at least, refugees could feel somewhat safe. In Turkey, however, the situation was quite different. Turkey held close trade and economic relations with Germany: it imported industrial commodities and, from 1935 onward, weapons too. Turkey also exported natural resources and food to Germany. This openness toward the German government was unnerving, and many feared their visas and working permits might not be extended. Sources show, however, that people at risk were able to stay in Turkey even after German nationals were expelled following the outbreak of the war. Turkey severed diplomatic ties with Germany only in 1944 when it joined the allied forces.53 After the war, most exiled scientists left the country because hardly anyone felt at home and because many of the working permits terminated. Ottenstein did build a circle of friends and acquaintances in Istanbul, but she also did not hesitate to leave the country when the first opportunity presented itself. In a letter to her friend and flatmate Esther von Bülow, she stated that although others had been contacted about receiving Turkish nationality, she had not. When her former colleague and friend from Freiburg, Siegfried Thannhauser, invited her to Boston, she accepted without hesitation. A position at Tufts University promised more scientific opportunities for her than any Istanbul institution. Ottenstein would be in good company: about half of Turkey’s

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foreign scholars were about to leave for the United States immediately after the end of the war.54 On the evening of 31 July 1945, Ottenstein left Istanbul on a freighter as the only woman aboard. Just two hours before embarking, she received notification of her entry visa to the United States. After twenty-two days at sea, she arrived at the port of Boston and immediately traveled to New York to reunite with her sister.55 Shortly after, she started her work as a research fellow at the laboratory at Tufts University. She picked up her research from Budapest as well as a new study with Gerhard Schmidt, Thannhauser’s director of the laboratory. Conditions in Boston were much better than in Istanbul—the laboratory was well equipped, and all necessary chemicals were available. As in Budapest and in Istanbul, she used her free time for her own research, and she achieved success quickly as she prepared a number of articles for publication that she had written in Budapest and Istanbul.56 Her reputation traveled and, in 1947, she was offered an extraordinary professorship (außerordentliche Professur) in Hamburg. According to a letter to her friend Esther von Bülow, whom she affectionately called Bülowa, Ottenstein was invited to Hamburg by the dermatologist Alfred Marchionini. Marchionini was a former colleague from Freiburg who in 1938 went into exile in Turkey because his wife, the neurologist Mathilde Sotbeer, was, under Nazi laws, considered “non-Aryan.”57 In Ankara, he established the department of dermatology and was appointed its first chair in 1947. Marchionini was one of the few Germans offered a permanent position in Turkey; however, he decided to return to Germany when he accepted the post of director for dermatology in Hamburg.58 Berta Ottenstein declined the Hamburg offer. She wrote to her friend that she was flattered by it and that the thought to “again be somebody” was intriguing, but she had decided to stay in the United States because she “did not want to miss the opportunity to become a citizen and to get the medical license.”59 Furthermore, in the United States, she “became somebody” in the research community at least. Even so, she never managed to pass the medical exam. She started studying for the exam in 1946 and failed the test in 1947 and again in 1948. The first time she succeeded only in pathology, biology, and bacteriology; in 1948 she did not pass a single discipline.60 The fact that she failed the exam’s fields in which she held great expertise—dermatology, biochemistry, and toxicology—was, in her opinion, proof of the general negative tendency toward foreigners in the practical medical fields.61 Based on the statistics provided by the American Medical Association (AMA), we can confirm her suspicion. From the mid-1920s onward, physicians could not practice medicine without approval from one of the 48 state medical boards, each of which had different requirements.62 In 1947, 14,429 medical licenses were issued in total; among the 6,747 examinees,63 601 graduates were from medical schools outside the United States and Canada, and 52.9 percent of them failed. To compare, of the 6,374 graduates of approved medical schools in the United States, only 10.5 percent failed the

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exam.64 In 1948, the year Ottenstein took the exam for the second time, chances for foreigners with licenses issued outside the United States were equally low: 51.5 percent of them failed the exams as compared to 3.4 percent of students coming from US medical schools.65 The high failure rates of physicians from abroad, most of them from renowned European universities, continued from the early 1930s throughout the postwar years. From 1930 to 1947, 14,520 graduates from foreign universities (excluding Canada) were examined by boards in the United States: the overall failure rate among these physicians was 48 percent. That almost half of all European doctors who took the exam, among them professors and renowned researchers, did not pass the board test at least once cannot be attributed to a lack of knowledge or skills. In a 1949 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the organization’s official publication organ, the authors claim that the underlying problem with the foreign physicians was “the quality of the medical education the graduates had received.”66 With more than half of the graduates in question coming from long-established universities in Central Europe, this argument seems questionable. Taking the example of Ottenstein, who failed in her own fields of specialization, we can argue that neither her missing expertise nor the quality of her training caused her to fail the exam. Instead, what comes into focus are the AMA’s policies designed to protect American-trained physicians from refugees and immigrant doctors. Ottenstein hoped for some long-term financial security that would have come with the medical license for which she worked so hard. But after she failed twice, she did not try a third time—at least there are no hints that she did—and she needed once again to rely on research foundations to continue financing her work. Returning to Germany did not seem, despite everything, to be an option. She did travel to Heidelberg in 1949 to present a paper at the first German congress of dermatology but turned down a second offer from Marchionini to come to Hamburg. In 1951, at the age of sixty, she was naturalized as an American citizen and appointed ausserordentliche Professorin (adjunct professor) at the University of Freiburg. Eighteen years after she was expelled from the university, she received this honorary title as appreciation for her scientific achievement and as reparation for her unlawful dismissal. It was Marchionini, now chair for dermatology at the University of Munich, who initiated the process. Ottenstein was no doubt happy about these developments; they did not, however, secure her financial situation. Like many other immigrants, she possessed no savings and no retirement funds. When in 1952 the Gesetz zur Regelung der Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts für die im Ausland lebenden Angehörigen des öffentlichen Dienstes (Law regulating the reparation of National Socialist injustices for members of the public service living abroad) was passed, Ottenstein was able to sue for the subsequent appointment of an ordinary professorship (planmässige Professur). The law was meant for university staff (Bedienstete des Hochschulbetriebes) as well as nontenured extraordinary professors and private lecturers (Privatdozent*innen) who would likely have become full professors under different political circumstances.67 In 1955, three years after Ottenstein filed her lawsuit against the state of Baden-

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Württemberg, the court decided in her favor. In 1954, the court asked the university to comment on the matter. The dean of the medical faculty forwarded the request to the chair for dermatology, Professor Stühmer, and added in his letter that the faculty felt it had already done enough for “Ms. Ottenstein.” Alfred Stühmer agreed with the dean. His evaluation of Ottenstein’s work was scathing: after leaving the University of Freiburg, Ottenstein, according to Stühmer, had not employed any new methods, and her publications did not actually contain any real dermatological specialist work. By referring to Berta Ottenstein as “Ms.,” Stühmer violated the German protocol of using proper academic titles and thus discriminated against her as a woman. The degradation of women’s performance is a common form of misogyny in academia. He summarized that she would not have been considered for a professorship in the field. In an obvious demonstration of gender discrimination, both Stühmer and Dean Jung negated Ottenstein’s scientific work and the enormously difficult and psychologically stressful accompanying circumstances. Nevertheless, the court weighed the favorable valuations of Marchionini, who was then chairman of the German Dermatological Society, and of Professor Rost, who was honorary professor at the Free University of Berlin, higher than the devastating judgment of the University of Freiburg. For Ottenstein, the decision was not just satisfaction for the injustice that had happened to her. It also meant financial security for her retirement age. Tragically, she died of a heart attack shortly after the verdict was pronounced.68

Conclusion “Being expelled requires the strength for a fragile and yet practical draft of an existence of any kind, the draft for a life that is fleeting, but nevertheless everyday and can be mastered every day,”69 writes Klapdor in her paper on female refugees. Ottenstein temporarily suffered from the volatility of her existence and the uncertainty of her future. Nevertheless, she persisted in her career with tenacity. What distinguished her was her willingness to adapt: her ability to adjust her research to the respective context without losing her own compass. It became clear that her professional network was intrinsically important for a career-in-exile. We have clear evidence from research in the field of the history of exiled scholars that personal networks were of paramount importance for successful scientists’ emigration. The contextual biography of Ottenstein attests to show this observation. About half a million of Jews left Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Jewish academics are part of this transnational exile community. Ottenstein is one of many examples. The digital approach of the larger project will allow us to understand and map the manifold links between individual scholars, institutions, help organization and the development and migration of science and knowledge in a comparative way. The project is one example of how digital developments can be employed to address specific ques-

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tions and problems in the field of German-Jewish studies, thus opening up possibilities for new lines of research and innovative results. Stefanie Mahrer is assistant professor for modern European, Swiss, and Jewish history. Her publications include her recently published biography, Salman Schocken: Topographien eines Lebens (Neofelis, 2021), and her book-length study of Jewish watchmakers in Switzerland, Handwerk der Moderne: Jüdische Uhrmacher und Uhrenunternehmer im Neuenburger Jura, 1800–1914 (Böhlau, 2012), as well as a number of articles that deal with Swiss and German-Jewish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently an SNSF-PRIMA grantee at the Institute for History at Bern University, where she leads a group of researchers working on forced academic migration from 1933 to 1950.

Notes Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. 1. Till van Rahden, “History in the House of the Hangman: How Postwar Germany Became a Key Site for the Study of Jewish History,” in The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, ed. Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 182. 2. Ibid., 174. 3. Heiko Haumann, “Lebensweltlich orientierte Geschichtschreibung in den Jüdischen Studien: Das Basler Beispiel,” in Jüdische Studien: Reflexionen und Praxis eines wissenschaftlichen Feldes, ed. Klaus Hödl (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 105. Heiko Haumann, professor emeritus of Eastern European History at the University of Basel, was member of the board of trustees and one of the main advocates in the foundation of the institute. 4. Stefanie Mahrer, Handwerk der Moderne: Jüdische Uhrmacher und Uhrenunternehmer im Neuenburger Jura 1800–1914 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2012). 5. Van Rahden, “History in the House of the Hangman,” 183. 6. Sönke Bauck and Thomas Maier, “Entangled History,” InterAmerican Wiki: Terms—Concepts— Critical Perspectives. 7. Mahrer, Handwerk der Moderne. 8. Stefanie Mahrer, Salman Schocken: Topographien eines Lebens (Berlin: Neofelis, 2021). The research project was funded by, among others, the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship. 9. https://forced-academic-migration.net/datapublications/datapublications.p/293.m/26/ berta-ottenstein 10. The research on forced academic migration is funded by the Swiss National Research foundation with a five-year PRIMA-grant (PR00P1_179819/1). 11. See, among others, Sven Eppinger, Das Schicksal der jüdischen Dermatologen Deutschlands in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse-Verlag, 2001), 273. 12. See, among others, Michael Grüttner and Sven Kinas, “Die Vertreibung von Wissenschaftlern aus den deutschen Universitäten 1933–1945,” Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Zeitgeschichte 55, no. 1 (2007): 123–86. 13. Eppinger, Schicksal der Jüdischen Dermatologen, 278. 14. Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” in Praktische Vernunft: Zur Theorie des Handelns, ed. Pierre Bourdieu (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 75–83. 15. A. J. La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. 16. Simone Lässig, “Introduction: Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biog-

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

raphy,” in Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, ed. Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 20. Margit Szöllösi-Janze, “Lebens-Geschichte—Wissenschafts-Geschichte: Vom Nutzen der Biographie für Geschichtswissenschaft und Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 23 (2000): 17–35. Eugenia Roldán Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs, “Introduction: The Transnational in the History of Education,” in The Transnational in the History of Education, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 24. See www.forced-academic-migration.net. Nodegoat is a web-based research environment for the humanities developed by LAB1100: https://nodegoat.net. Florian Windhager et al., “A Synoptic Visualization Framework for the Multi-Perspective Study of Biography and Prosopography Data,” Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH’17), Phoenix, AZ, USA, 2 October 2017, accessed 27 October 2020 from http://vis4dh.dbvis.de/papers/2017/A percent20Synoptic percent 20Visualization percent20Framework percent20for percent20the percent20Multi-Perspective percent20Study percent20of percent20Biography percent20and percent20Prosopography perc ent20Data.pdf. https://forced-academic-migration.net/datapublications/datapublications.p/293.m/tag/Ber ta+Ottenstein. I would like to extend my gratitude to Aleksandra Petrovic´, who collected and entered all the data and helped to set up the filters. All biographical information is based on the unpublished medical dissertation of Anja Schmialek, “Professor Dr. Bertha Ottenstein (1891–1956): Erste habilitierte Dermatologin Deutschlands; Leben und Werk” (PhD diss., Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 1995). By way of comparison, the state of Baden allowed female enrollment in 1900; Prussia, however, only followed suit in 1909. Andrea Abele-Brehm, Festvortrag zum dies academicus aus Anlass des 260. Jahrestages der Gründung der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg am 4. November. 100 Jahre Akademische Frauenbildung in Bayern und Erlangen—Rückblick und Perspektiven: Erlanger Universitätsreden (Erlangen: Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2004), 7. Copies of this letter can be found in her personal file at the archive of the University of Istanbul. Here paraphrased from Arın Namal, “Deutschlandweit die erste Dozentin im Fach Dermatologie: Berta Ottenstein (Nürnberg, 1891—Concord, 1956); Ihr Wirken in der Türkei,” in Die Frau im Judentum: Jüdische Frauen in der Medizin, ed. Caris-Petra Heidel (Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse-Verlag, 2014), 12:186. Marchionini’s wife was Jewish, and because he refused to divorce her, he lost his position in Germany. For Ottenstein’s Habilitation in context, see Ute Scherb, “Ich stehe in der Sonne und fühle, wie meine Flügel wachsen”: Studentinnen und Wissenschaftlerinnen an der Freiburger Universität von 1900 bis in die Gegenwart (Königstein: Helmer, 2002), 125–34. Regine Erichsen, “Das türkische Exil als Geschichte von Frauen und ihr Beitrag zum Wissenschaftstransfer in die Türkei von 1933 bis 1945,” Berichte zurWissenschaftsgeschichte 28, no. 4 (2005): 342. Katharina Prager and Irene Messinger, eds., Doing Gender in Exile: Geschlechterverhältnisse, Konstruktionen und Netzwerke in Bewegung (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019), 8. Brigitte Bailer, “Die besondere Situation für Frauen in Flucht und Vertreibung,” Jahrbuch Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischenWiderstandes (2018): 163. See Heike Klapdor, “Überlebensstrategie statt Lebensentwurf: Frauen in der Emigration,” in Frauen und Exil: Zwischen Anpassung und Selbstbehauptung, ed. Claus-Dieter Krohn and Inge Stephan (Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik, 1993), 12–30. See Bailer, “Die besondere Situation,” 163.

186 | STEFANIE MAHRER 34. Prager and Messinger, Doing Gender, 7–8. 35. Atina Grossmann, “‘Neue Frauen’ im Exil: Deutsche Ärztinnen und die Emigration,” in Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Kirsten Heinsohn and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 133–56. 36. See ibid., 136. 37. Atina Grossmann, “German Women Doctors from Berlin to New York: Maternity and Modernity in Weimar and in Exile,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 67. 38. This number includes trailing spouses (all females) without working permits. 39. Lord Rutherford, president of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), the British aid organization for displaced scholars, upon the foundation of the council. Quoted from Norman Bentwich, The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars: The Story of Displaced Scholars and Scientists 1933– 1952 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953), 14. 40. Erichsen, “Das türkische Exil,” 340. 41. Ibid., 337. My translation. 42. I. Izzet Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews (New York: Routledge, 2015), 49. 43. Erichsen, “Das türkische Exil,” 345. 44. Namal, “Erste Dozentin,” 12:189. 45. Letter from Berta Ottenstein to Hulusi Behçet, 14 August 1934, in Archive of Human Resources, Deanery of the Faculty of Medicine, Istanbul University, file Berta Ottenstein. Copy in Namal, “Erste Dozentin,” 12:190. 46. Schmialek, “Bertha Ottenstein,” 38. 47. For a complete list of Ottenstein’s publications, see ibid., 89–98. 48. Ibid., 38. 49. See Erichsen, “Das türkische Exil.” 50. Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue, 51, 58. 51. William H. Beveridge, A Defence of Free Learning (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 130. 52. Isabella Löhr, “Fluchthilfe zur Rettung der Zunft: Die akademische Zwangsmigration in den 1930er-Jahren,” in Kultur und Beruf in Europa, ed. Isabella Löhr, Matthias Middell, and Hannes Siegrist (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 270–78; Isabella Löhr, “Solidarity and the Academic Community: The Support Networks for Refugee Scholars in the 1930s,” in “Histories of Transnational Humanitarianism: Between Solidarity and Self-Interest,” special issue of the Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 2 (2014): 231–46. 53. John M. VanderLippe, “A Cautious Balance: The Question of Turkey in World War II,” The Historian 64, no. 1 (2001): 63–80. 54. Ibid., 53. 55. Ibid., 55–56. 56. Ibid., 62–66. 57. As a side note: Marchionini succeeded as a physician of the diplomatic corps to save over ten thousand Turkish Jews in France. 58. Albrecht Scholz, “Marchionini, Alfred,” in Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte, ed. Werner E. Gerabek et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 890. 59. Letter Berta Ottenstein to Bülowa [Esther von Bülow], 12 May 1947. Copy in Schmialek, “Bertha Ottenstein,” 133. 60. Ibid., 68–69. 61. Letter from Berta Ottenstein to Bülowa [Esther von Bülow], 12 May 1947. Copy in ibid., 133. 62. Eric D. Kohler, “Relicensing Central European Refugee Physicians in the United States: 1933– 1945,” SimonWiesenthal Center Annual 6 (1989): 4. 63. Of these licenses, 6,747 were issued after examination and 7,602 by reciprocity and endorsement of other state licenses or of the certificate of the national board of medical examiners. 64. Donald G. Anderson and Anne Tipner, “Medical Licensure for 1947,” Journal of the American Medical Association 137, no. 7 (1948): 603.

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65. Donald G. Anderson and Anne Tipner, “Medical Licensure Statistics for 1948,” Journal of the American Medical Association 140, no. 3 (1949): 298. 66. Creighton Barker and Grace Mooney, “Licensing of Foreign Medical Graduates in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Association 140, no. 1 (1949): 10. 67. For more details, see Sabine Schleiermacher, “Entschädigung von Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus,” in Jüdische Ärztinnen und Ärzte im Nationalsozialismus: Entrechtung,Vertreibung, Ermordung, ed. Thomas Beddies, Susanne Doetz, and Christoph Kopke (Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 307–10. 68. Schmialek, “ Bertha Ottenstein,” 72–76. 69. Klapdor, “Überlebensstrategie,” 15. My translation.

Bibliography Abele-Brehm, Andrea. Festvortrag zum dies academicus aus Anlass des 260. Jahrestages der Gründung der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg am 4. November. 100 Jahre akademische Frauenbildung in Bayern und Erlangen—Rückblick und Perspektiven. Erlanger Universitätsreden 64. Erlangen: Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2004. Anderson, Donald G., and Anne Tipner. “Medical Licensure for 1947.” Journal of the American Medical Association 137, no. 7 (1948): 603. ———. “Medical Licensure Statistics for 1948.” Journal of the American Medical Association 140, no. 3 (1949): 293–325. Bahar, I. Izzet. Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews. New York: Routledge, 2015. Bailer, Brigitte. “Die besondere Situation für Frauen in Flucht und Vertreibung.” Jahrbuch Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischenWiderstandes (2018): 159–72. Barker, Creighton, and Grace Mooney. “Licensing of Foreign Medical Graduates in the United States.” Journal of the American Medical Association 140, no. 1 (1949): 10–12. Bauck, Sönke, and Thomas Maier. 2015. “Entangled History.” InterAmerican Wiki: Terms—Concepts— Critical Perspectives. Retrieved 27 October 2020 from www.unibielefeld.de/cias/wiki/e_Entan gled_History.html. Bentwich, Norman. The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars: The Story of Displaced Scholars and Scientists 1933–1952. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953. Beveridge, William H. A Defence of Free Learning. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Die biographische Illusion.” In PraktischeVernunft: Zur Theorie des Handelns, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, 75–83. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Eppinger, Sven. Das Schicksal der jüdischen Dermatologen Deutschlands in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse-Verlag, 2001. Erichsen, Regine. “Das türkische Exil als Geschichte von Frauen und ihr Beitrag zum Wissenschaftstransfer in die Türkei von 1933 bis 1945.” Berichte zurWissenschaftsgeschichte 28, no. 4 (2005): 337–53. Grossmann, Atina. “German Women Doctors from Berlin to New York: Maternity and Modernity in Weimar and in Exile.” Feminist Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 65–88. ———. “‘Neue Frauen’ im Exil. Deutsche Ärztinnen und die Emigration.” In Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Kirsten Heinsohn and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, 133–56. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. Grüttner, Michael, and Sven Kinas. “Die Vertreibung von Wissenschaftlern aus den deutschen Universitäten 1933–1945.” Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Zeitgeschichte 55, no. 1 (2007): 123–86. Haumann, Heiko. “Lebensweltlich orientierte Geschichtschreibung in den Jüdischen Studien: Das Basler Beispiel.” In Jüdische Studien: Reflexionen und Praxis eines wissenschaftlichen Feldes, edited by Klaus Hödl, 105–22. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003. Klapdor, Heike. “Überlebensstrategie statt Lebensentwurf: Frauen in der Emigration.” In Frauen und Exil: Zwischen Anpassung und Selbstbehauptung, edited by Claus-Dieter Krohn and Inge Stephan, 12–30. Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik, 1993.

188 | STEFANIE MAHRER Kohler, Eric D. “Relicensing Central European Refugee Physicians in the United States: 1933–1945.” SimonWiesenthal Center Annual 6 (1989): 3–32. Lässig, Simone. “Introduction: Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biography.” In Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, edited by Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig, 1–26. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Löhr, Isabella. “Fluchthilfe zur Rettung der Zunft: Die akademische Zwangsmigration in den 1930erJahren.” In Kultur und Beruf in Europa, edited by Isabella Löhr, Matthias Middell, and Hannes Siegrist, 270–78. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012. ———. “Solidarity and the Academic Community: The Support Networks for Refugee Scholars in the 1930s.” In “Histories of Transnational Humanitarianism: Between Solidarity and SelfInterest,” special issue of the Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 2 (2014): 231–46. Mahrer, Stefanie. Handwerk der Moderne: Jüdische Uhrmacher und Uhrenunternehmer im Neuenburger Jura 1800–1914. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2012. ———. Salman Schocken: Topographien eines Lebens. Berlin: Neofelis, 2021. Namal, Arın. “Deutschlandweit die erste Dozentin im Fach Dermatologie: Berta Ottenstein (Nürnberg, 1891—Concord, 1956); Ihr Wirken in der Türkei.” In Die Frau im Judentum: Jüdische Frauen in der Medizin, edited by Caris-Petra Heidel, 181–201. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse-Verlag, 2014. Prager, Katharina, and Irene Messinger, eds. Doing Gender in Exile: Geschlechterverhältnisse, Konstruktionen und Netzwerke in Bewegung. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019. Roldán Vera, Eugenia, and Eckhardt Fuchs. “Introduction: The Transnational in the History of Education.” In The Transnational in the History of Education, edited by Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, 1–47. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019. Scherb, Ute. “Ich stehe in der Sonne und fühle, wie meine Flügel wachsen”: Studentinnen undWissenschaftlerinnen an der Freiburger Universität von 1900 bis in die Gegenwart. Königstein: Helmer, 2002. Schleiermacher, Sabine. “Entschädigung von Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus.” In Jüdische Ärztinnen und Ärzte im Nationalsozialismus: Entrechtung,Vertreibung, Ermordung, edited by Thomas Beddies, Susanne Doetz, and Christoph Kopke, 290–318. Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014. Schmialek, Anja. “Professor Dr. Bertha Ottenstein (1891–1956): Erste habilitierte Dermatologin Deutschlands; Leben und Werk.” PhD diss., Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 1995. Scholz, Albrecht. “Marchionini, Alfred.” In Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte, edited by Werner E. Gerabek et al., 890. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. Szöllösi-Janze, Margit. “Lebens-Geschichte—Wissenschafts-Geschichte: Vom Nutzen der Biographie Für Geschichtswissenschaft und Wissenschaftsgeschichte.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 23 (2000): 17–35. van Rahden, Till. “History in the House of the Hangman: How Postwar Germany Became a Key Site for the Study of Jewish History.” In The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, edited by Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska, 171–92. Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. VanderLippe, John M. “A Cautious Balance: The Question of Turkey in World War II.” The Historian 64, no. 1 (2001): 63–80. Vopa, A. J. L. Fichte:The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Windhager, Florian et al. “A Synoptic Visualization Framework for the Multi-Perspective Study of Biography and Prosopography Data.” Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH’17), Phoenix, AZ, USA, 2 October 2017. Retrieved 27 October 2020 from http://vis4dh.dbvis.de/papers/2017/A percent20Synoptic percent 20Visualization percent20Framework percent20for percent20the percent20Multi-Perspective per cent20Study percent20of percent20Biography percent20and percent20Prosopography percent 20Data.pdf.

 CHAPTER 9

A Global Network and Diaspora of German-Jewish Historians and Archives Reappraising the Enduring Legacy of German Jewry

 Jason Lustig

One commonly voiced complaint about modern Jewish studies is that it has been dominated by a Germanocentric tendency that overemphasizes the role of German Jews, however defined, in the development of modern Jewish life at the consequent expense of other groups.1 Simon Dubnow famously decried Heinrich Graetz’s eleven-volume history of the Jews, which ignored or otherwise denigrated Russian Jewry and left that realm to be considered by Graetz’s translator Simon Pinchas Rabinovitch.2 More recently, leading scholars including Todd Endelman, David Ruderman, and Gershon Hundert have challenged the German paradigm by recentering attention on early modern Italy, England, and especially Eastern Europe.3 As Hundert has argued forcefully, German Jewry has always been much smaller than the Eastern European communities.4 Given the demographic reality that German Jewry never constituted more than 4 percent of the world’s total Jewish population, why should German Jews garner so much attention? Despite these valid critiques, it is not universally true that demography is destiny: German-Jewish history need not be fully abandoned in favor of other areas that have had a larger Jewish population. Indeed, this proposition parallels the larger logic of why Jewish history matters: just because a group may be small in number does not mean it has not been important or worthy of scholarly attention. In that respect, the continuing questions of German Jewry and its place within modern Jewish history represent

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a broad set of issues about the nature of the field of Jewish studies, its history, and how we understand it today. In the shadow of the critique of modern Jewish scholarship’s Germanocentrism, this chapter considers one way German-Jewish history still matters through the case study of a global network of archives and archivists who helped shape the various fields of Jewish studies both within Germany and then in various countries after the Holocaust. The fate of archives and records in the Holocaust also has meant that GermanJewish history became the crucible through which have passed so many of the sources of Jewish history that remain the focus of scholarly attention. Altogether, this archival perspective allows us to reappraise the enduring legacy of German Jewry, as it offers one arena where Germany does actually stand at the center of a major cultural shift in Jewish life. Moreover, this history offers a compelling explanation for the persistence of Jewish studies’ Germanocentrism: because the leading archivists of Jewish history after the Holocaust were themselves mostly of German origin, their influence on what was collected shaped Jewish studies for more than a generation. Consequently, the history of this network of Jewish archivists highlights power relations between the curation and cultivation of archival sources, and the endurance of a Germanocentric perspective within Jewish studies.

Considering How and Why German-Jewish Studies Matters: An Archival Perspective My own work on German-Jewish archives emerged from a broad survey of archives in Jewish culture, leading toward a birds-eye view of the history of twentieth-century Jewish archiving.5 I was certainly aware of some of the most useful archives from the perspective of present-day research, which I had consulted personally. But when embarking on a study of modern Jewish archives from a global perspective, the question necessarily presented itself: which archives were the ones I should examine most closely in order to examine the most substantive issues in modern Jewish culture? To answer this question, I undertook a whirlwind tour of Jewish historical archives in Berlin, Paris, New York, Cincinnati, Jerusalem, Heidelberg, and Cambridge, with the support of a number of research grants, including from the Leo Baeck Institute,YIVO, and the Center for European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My aim was to try and gain as clearly as possible a sense of the history of Jewish archives through direct research, how various repositories related to each other, and which would allow me to consider the biggest questions about modern Jewish culture at large. Twentiethcentury scholars like the Breslau historian Markus Brann and Israeli archivist Alex Bein insisted that Jews had lacked the “leisure” to preserve their past before their own professional intervention.6 What I discovered, in contrast, was a vast dynamism of archival and recordkeeping practices throughout all of Jewish history. This diversity directly reflected the varied situations and sites where Jews lived throughout the world.

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Especially in the final years of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, Jews created all sorts of archival traditions. Among them—and I offer here only a circumscribed list that, by its nature, leaves out myriad examples—one finds various historical societies scattered across Europe and the United States, not to mention the transfer of the Cairo Genizah to Cambridge and other Western institutions of higher learning, which transformed an existing documentary cache into an “archive” for scholarly use.7 Moving eastward, perhaps the most well-known Jewish archival activities have been folk collecting traditions that can be traced from Simon Dubnow’s 1892 call to gather historical materials, which had ramifications across the twentieth century, most notably in the case of YIVO but also far beyond that one instance. Under this umbrella, one can place a series of efforts at documenting anti-Jewish violence and other atrocities from Hayim Nahman Bialik’s fact-finding mission in Kishinev (which originated as a project to collect materials for Dubnow) to Elias Tcherikower’s Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv (renamed the Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv when he brought it to Berlin in 1923), which documented the pogroms perpetrated by Simon Petljura in Ukraine following World War I, and then the “ghetto archives” of World War II.8 The wide proliferation of archives represents an entire field that deserves investigation, and it reflects a wide-ranging turn to archives in Jewish culture, a parallel process to the “turn to history” in modern Judaism, as Jews increasingly looked to archives as anchors of memory and sources of history. Among the vast field of archives in modern Jewish culture, I quickly realized that the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the central archive of the German Jews opened in 1905 under Eugen Täubler’s leadership, was one origin point for a widespread network of Jewish archives and archivists both within Germany as well as beyond it. When one looks closely at twentieth-century Jewish archives, so many have ties to the Gesamtarchiv, to its leading figures, and to its broader environment. And in surprising ways, Berlin figured centrally in Eastern European and American Jewish collecting activities too, with figures like Elias Tcherikower, Jacob Rader Marcus, and Ben-Zion Dinaburg (later: Dinur) all finding formative experiences in the German capital and its scholarly environs. Moreover, the Gesamtarchiv offered Jewish archivists around the world a compelling institutional paradigm, both in conversation and in competition with the Eastern European folk collecting tradition: it represented a vision of professionalized, institutionalized archiving on a monumental scale. The research on German-Jewish archives, consequently, fits into the field of German-Jewish studies inasmuch as it represents a continuation of the study of intellectual developments like Wissenschaft des Judentums, as well as institutions like the B’nai B’rith and Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund, which sponsored the group. However, it also expands the field by leading us to look for networks beyond Germany itself, and also past the Holocaust. It showcases one place where German-Jewish history offers a center point for Jewish cultural developments, both because of its position as a point of origin for many other examples, and also because the German-Jewish archival tradition—and the network of archivists themselves—actually reified the centrality of

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the German-Jewish experience by giving it pride of place within their own collecting priorities. In some respects, I was initially surprised by the German-centric nature of the major Jewish archives of the twentieth century. Indeed, the prevailing view has long had its focus on Eastern European collecting and archival practices. Nevertheless, a trio of interconnected archives emerged—the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, formed in 1903 in Berlin, together with the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem (ha-arkhion ha-kelali le-toldot yisra’el, since 1969 the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People), both of which opened to the public in 1947—not to mention a number of archives and projects on the periphery of this network. To some extent, the ties between them are to be expected, because the professional archives and archivists all collaborated and worked together in their overarching project to document and preserve the Jewish past. But it is remarkable how closely connected these archives and their leading figures in fact were. This history showcases an important intellectual and institutional network with Germany at its center, rather than a case where a Germanocentric conception is superimposed on an assumption that Germany was the center of modern Jewish life. What is more, it actually indicates the manner in which an institutional and professional network curated Jewish history and thus created and reinforced the Germanocentrism of modern Jewish studies through the kinds of sources that were collected, curated, and made available for study.That is, when one considers the field of major institutionalized Jewish archives that operated across the arc of the twentieth century, they were actually dominated, though not necessarily exclusively, by Jews who had ties to Germany. This was of course the case in Germany itself, but it was also the case in Israel, where German-born figures like Alex Bein, who served as Israel’s state archivist from 1956 to 1970, would dominate the archival field through the 1980s, not to mention in the United States, where we can also find an extension of this network. By examining the contours of this network of archives and archivists, we might reappraise the enduring legacy of German Jewry, reassess the position of German Jewry within modern Jewish history and historiography, and identify ways in which German-Jewish history matters. This development of German-Jewish archives and their afterlives opens up the possibility of thinking about German-Jewish history from an archival perspective. GermanJewish history certainly matters for its own sake, as does the history of any Jewish community on a local or national scale. It holds significance for understanding Jewish life within its particular context, its origins and course of history, and its ultimate fate or disposition. But what about on a larger scale? Much of the debate surrounding the Germanocentric model, and the criticism thereof, hovers contentiously on the point of which Jewish history might stand at the center of the multitude of Jewish experiences in modern times. In this context, the question of Germany’s place in modern Jewish life is bound together with a wider search for the paradigms of modernization, including industrialization, nationalism, mass politics, and more, as scholars have debated whether England, France, or Germany represented a prototypical path through modernity. Both

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within Jewish history and also outside of it, the question of what bound these experiences together or separated them—for instance, a German Sonderweg—was based on a series of assumptions of the very idea of a modern pathway. Just the same, Jewish scholars have debated what is the paradigmatic pathway of Jews through the crucible of modern times, both as individuals and as communities. This is problematic on a number of levels, inasmuch as there is no “single” pathway of modernity. But German Jews, certainly, saw themselves at the center of this trajectory from the Haskalah to the Holocaust. This self-conception is clear, from how figures like Graetz in the nineteenth century placed German Jews at the center of his story of Enlightenment (in contrast with the “backward” Eastern European Jews), all the way to the founders of the Leo Baeck Institute in the 1950s who envisioned the telling of the story of German Jewry in a planned so-called Gesamtgeschichte, which, in its initial conception, would have traced this history from Moses Mendelssohn to the Holocaust.9 To them, German Jewry represented the overarching trajectory of modernity, from the emergence of enlightenment to the ultimate demise of its promises. In some respects, we might say that German-Jewish history holds significance because we cannot possibly conceive of modern Jewish history without it. This is not because Germany was the place where modern Jewish history in Europe began—itself a debatable proposition—but in fact the inverse: Germany is where, in some respects, Jewish modernity ended. While avoiding a teleological reading of the Holocaust, I would suggest that the Nazi genocide means that the history of German Jewry and the varied experiences of Jews in German-speaking lands hold signal importance. Moreover, the varied afterlives of Germany’s Jewish history—the German-Jewish diaspora, the reality of continued Jewish life in Germany, and the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union and the state of Israel—call forth critical questions about the contemporary history of Jewish life in Europe at large. In a similar vein, we cannot consider the history of Jewish scholarship without Germany. Again, this is not because Germany was the sole starting point of modern Jewish studies. Indeed, we have broadened our understanding of modern Jewish studies beyond Wissenschaft des Judentums in both chronological and spatial terms, whether we consider the scholars of Hokhmat Yisrael in Eastern Europe, scholars in Italy, and elsewhere or extend our study of Jewish history beyond formal historical writing and look to historical consciousness as a broad pattern in Jewish cultures.10 But, again, the Holocaust brings a specific focus on German Jews and their historical and cultural context: if we look at the history of modern Jewish scholarship through its material aspect, so many of the sources available to study today are what survived the horrors of the Holocaust. And in fact, the paradoxical situation is that it is in many instances what the Nazis had stolen or plundered that actually has survived. In this regard, even the history of Eastern European Jews has been filtered through the crucible of Nazi Germany, the Allied occupation of Western Germany, and thus the story of the Jews in Germany, both before the Holocaust and also in its aftermath, when Jews of German origin played an important role in rebuilding the archival edifices for the study of Jewish history. Such a

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materialist reading of modern Jewish studies invites a broader archival perspective on the place of German-Jewish history in modern Jewish life at large, as the history of archives directs our attention toward an arena where German Jews played a critical part.

Jewish Archives and Archivists as a Global Network with a German Epicenter In 1903, Ezechiel Zivier, the Jewish archivist for the duchy of Pleß (present-day Pszczyna in Poland), proposed the formation of an “Allgemeines Archiv der deutschen Juden.” When it opened two years later, in 1905, it was not the first Jewish archive. One can speak, of course, of many communal repositories of records including metrical books, administrative records, charters and privilegia, and so on, as well as business and family archives, not to mention practices like Genizah, of which the Cairo Genizah is only the most famous. In the late nineteenth century, emergent Jewish historical societies began gathering collections of files, for instance in countries like England, the United States, France, and more, and a number of communities with storied histories, for instance in Worms and Vienna, also began gathering and preserving materials on their past. Nevertheless, the Gesamtarchiv was the first Jewish archive of modern times to try to operate on the contemporary professional standards as they were developing in the 1890s and 1900s with the formation of archival associations and manuals that laid out principles like provenance and respect des fonds.11 Indeed, the archive’s opening was delayed so Eugen Täubler could train at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv in Berlin– Dahlem, and Taübler’s assistant Georg Herlitz later reflected that on his first day he was given a copy of the so-called “Dutch manual,” the standard archival manual of the time, and told to read it cover to cover.12 Together, Täubler and Herlitz managed the archive until they were both drafted into the German army in 1915; after World War I, Herlitz joined the Zionist Organization and created the Zionistisches Zentralarchiv, the central Zionist archives in Berlin. Now, with both Täubler and Herlitz moving on, Jacob Jacobson took over as the archive’s leader until he was deported to Theresienstadt in May 1943. In the course of the twentieth century, the Gesamtarchiv proved a frequent point of reference for Jewish groups who wanted to create archives of their own. In 1905, Sigmund Husserl, director of the Vienna Jewish community’s archives, pointed to Zivier’s plan when he suggested they form an “Allgemeines Archiv der österreichisch-jüdische Kultus-Gemeinden,” or General Archive of the Austrian Jewish Religious Communities.13 In the 1920s, Täubler spoke of creating a network of “Gesamt-archives,” one for each country of Jewish settlement.14 In the United States, Isidore Meyer, librarian of the American Jewish Historical Society, wrote in 1941 and again in 1943 about creating a “‘Gesamt-Archiv’ [sic] of every phase of American Jewish history” too.15 The Berlin Gesamtarchiv also served as the starting point for the creation of a central archive in Jerusalem, what would become the Jewish Historical General Archives, both during

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initial discussions in the 1930s and then two decades later when the group specifically argued that the JHGA continued the Gesamtarchiv’s project.16 When in 1964 Georg Herlitz reflected on his mentor Täubler, he spoke of Täubler’s “truly gigantic plan” for an archival basis for the study of the Jews, and Herlitz suggested that “now is the time to put Täubler’s plan into practice,” clearly referring to the JHGA as a successor to Täubler’s archival vision.17 And in the 1980s and 1990s, Jews in both eastern and western Germany looked to the Gesamtarchiv as a model that they wanted to emulate and even reconstruct, with the formation of the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg in 1987 and the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin in 1995. Berlin also proved a locale where disparate strands of the development of modern Jewish archives came together, sometimes curiously. Elias Tcherikower, for instance, formed his “Redactions-Committee” on the Petljura Pogroms in Kiev in 1919, with the aim to document and publicize the anti-Jewish attacks. In 1923, however, he fled to Berlin with the materials, where he specifically reframed them as an archive, as the Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv or Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv.18 Two years later, in October 1925, Tcherikower led YIVO’s historical section in the formation of its first archival collections; meeting in Simon Dubnow’s Berlin apartment, they planned to catalog files held by the preeminent Eastern European historian.19 Around this same time, Jacob Rader Marcus, who would later form the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College, was pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin.While in Berlin from 1923 to 1926, he was in close contact with almost all these major archival figures. He studied Latin with Täubler and Jacobson and was a frequent guest in their homes; he also took classes at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he was even in the same classes at the university as Alex Bein, who would later play a major role in the formation of archives in Israel/Palestine.20 The curious intersection of figures like Tcherikower, Dubnow, Marcus, and Bein speaks to ways in which the wider world of German-Jewish archives stands at the center of a global network. This was especially the case in Israel/Palestine, where Täubler’s assistant Georg Herlitz and Alex Bein, his own longtime associate and successor at the Zionist Archives, shaped the archival landscape for decades. A student of Friedrich Meinecke, Bein had hoped to be a historian but took a job in 1927 at the Reichsarchiv, the Prussian military archive in Potsdam, which he held until he was sacked in April 1933 under the Nazi ordinances on public servants. That September, Bein and his family fled to Palestine, and Herlitz followed less than a month later with the files of the Zionist Archives, which he reopened in Jerusalem in 1935 with Bein as his assistant. In 1939, Herlitz convened a meeting at the Zionist Archives about forming a central archive of Jewish history in Jerusalem, which would become the Jewish Historical General Archives.21 The project was taken up shortly thereafter by Josef Meisl, the former librarian of the Berlin Jewish community who had worked down the hall from the Gesamtarchiv. The German-Jewish scholar Moritz Stern, a former Gesamtarchiv board member, had shipped his extensive personal collection of historical materials to

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his son Josef in Tel Aviv in preparation for his own planned immigration, but he passed away in February 1939 before making the voyage; now, Meisl took the files as the core of his new archive.22 Under the aegis of the Palestine Historical and Ethnographic Society (since 1951 the Historical Society of Israel), the group’s archival committee was top-heavy with German Jews or those with ties to German-Jewish archives, including Herlitz, Bein, Meisl, and Ben-Zion Dinaburg, who had studied with Täubler in Berlin prior to World War I.23 They dispatched Bein on numerous expeditions across Europe to gather historical materials in what they termed the “kibbutz galuyot of the past,” where he was joined by Daniel Cohen and Daniel Carpi, among others. Carpi himself was not a German Jew (he was from Italy), but this merely reflected the Israelis’ strategy of sending people who had a personal connection with the regions where they were seeking to collect materials. Of them, Cohen was the most significant: from Hamburg, he played a major role in the restitution struggles in Germany, and he succeeded Meisl as head of the Jewish Historical General Archives, which he would direct from 1957 to 1986. Nearly all of the German-Jewish archivists who played leading roles in the development of Jewish archives in Israel/Palestine from the 1930s to the 1990s arrived as part of the so-called “Fifth Aliyah” of German Jews, including Bein, Herlitz, and Meisl, as well as younger figures like Daniel Cohen who immigrated with their families. And if the Fifth Aliyah has often been depicted as a process of an influx of capital to Mandate Palestine, in archival terms we can understand it as a transfer of cultural capital too.24 This is true both in terms of figures who came with direct archival training or experience and also in the form of historical materials that they brought with them, like the records held by Herlitz or Stern, those acquired later (such as the Herzl papers, which Bein brought to the Zionist Archives in 1937), or communal files brought to Jerusalem in the 1950s as part of the “ingathering of the exiles of the past.”25 The development of Jewish archives in Israel/Palestine, then, can be understood in a Bourdieuan sense as the cultivation of cultural capital and its reproduction over time, both in terms of historical materials and human capital.26 Bein and Herlitz, for instance, trained a generation of archivists, many of them of German origin, beginning with a 1952 course that they headed.27 And after the passage of Israel’s 1955 archives law, which Bein penned almost single-handedly, he became both the director of the Zionist Archives and also Israel’s inaugural state archivist, positions he would hold jointly until 1970, when he was succeeded by Paul Alsberg as state archivist and Michael Heymann at the Zionist Archives, both of whom were of German origin and held their positions until 1990.28 The Gesamtarchiv’s wider archival circle also extended far beyond Israel/Palestine to other major centers of the German-Jewish diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom, not to mention for Jews who returned to postwar Germany itself. In 1947, Jacob Rader Marcus formed the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and he served as its director from then until shortly before his passing in 1995 at the age of ninety-nine. Marcus was not himself of German origin; he was born in 1896 outside Pittsburgh, and his parents were Eastern European Jews.

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Nevertheless, as mentioned, Marcus was deeply influenced by the German cultural and intellectual milieu. As for his archive itself, Marcus’ staffing choices also indicate the surprising connections of a global archival network. In a curious turn of events, Eugen Täubler and Selma Stern-Täubler fled Germany in 1940 to Cincinnati, where Täubler found a position through the initiative of HUC’s president Julian Morgenstern who brought a number of major German-Jewish scholars to the United States.29 There, Täubler taught at HUC and Marcus hired Stern, herself a towering historian of German Jewry, as his archivist, where she worked until she retired in 1956 to Basel. Täubler himself proposed the formation of a German-Jewish “memorial library,” initially at Columbia or Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and after his 1953 passing the notion transformed eventually into the Leo Baeck Institute, which was established in 1954–55.30 As for Jacob Jacobson, who had directed the Gesamtarchiv from 1921 until its dissolution in 1943 and his own deportation to Theresienstadt, he moved to Britain after the war’s conclusion, where he was reunited with his wife and son. Although Eugen Täubler suggested that Jacobson should reconstitute the Gesamtarchiv there, he was never able to undertake such a project, as the materials made their way to Jerusalem or remained in eastern Germany. Nevertheless, he remained an important player in the effort to catalogue the files of the former Hamburg Jewish communities during the negotiations between Hamburg and the Israelis, which concluded in 1959.31 Another major figure was Bernhard Brilling, who both collaborated with Jacobson and then from 1927 to 1939 worked at the Jewish community archives in Breslau alongside Aron Heppner, another major contributor to the Gesamtarchiv. Brilling himself fled to Palestine in 1939 after Kristallnacht, but he found limited work as an archivist there and ended up returning to Germany in 1956 where he hoped to create a new archive of German Jewry. The Israelis opposed his plans, and he ended up creating a much smaller collection of microfilms at the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum in Münster.32 The dispersion of German-Jewish archivists closely parallels, as one might expect, the geographical contours of the Leo Baeck Institute with its three founding branches in Jerusalem, London, and NewYork, as these locations were the centers of the GermanJewish diaspora. However, the archival network illustrates a different means of trying to deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust and had a broader impact on the development of Jewish historical studies at large. When the LBI was formed in the 1950s, founding figures including Herman Muller and Siegfried Moses spoke of compiling a comprehensive history of the German Jews, what they termed a “Gesamtgeschichte,” and they formed their main archival collection in New York in part with the goal of supporting the eventual production of such a history reflective of the legacy of German Jewry in retrospect.33 Somewhat distinctively, the global archival network sought to continue the legacy of German Jews in institutional terms by creating repositories that carried forth the specific collection of the Gesamtarchiv as well as its broader mission. For instance, the

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1956 inaugural issue of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book presented a curious pair of essays, one after the other, respectively by Daniel Cohen, of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, and Bernhard Brilling, who was about to resettle in West Germany and try to create an archive of Jewish history there.34 Each made a case that they were continuing the work of the Gesamtarchiv: as Cohen argued, the JHGA in Jerusalem was employing a large set of German-Jewish scholars and archivists (which was the case), and Brilling proposed that the German government should support the creation of an archive of the German Jews to continue the archival tradition in Germany. What is more, the struggle over the fate of the Gesamtarchiv’s former files as well as those of other archives meant that the process of archive making after the Holocaust was not just about the past but about the future; in contrast, the LBI’s founding mission was distinctively retrospective in its attempt to study the legacy of German Jewry after its destruction.35 Altogether, the global network of German-Jewish archivists and their associates helped to build the future of the field of Jewish studies after the Holocaust, not just for the study of German Jewry but for the entire discipline.

Reappraising the Enduring Legacy of German Jewry In sum, what is particularly “German” about this archival network? Clearly, the Gesamtarchiv was an archive of German-Jewish history, and many of these archivists were German Jews or closely tied to that cultural environment. But the Zionist Archives was never exclusively an archive of German Zionism; clearly the American Jewish Archives was formed as an archive of Jewish history in the Americas, and the Jewish Historical General Archives envisioned itself as an archive of Jewish history on a global scale. Nevertheless, they were all products of this German-Jewish cultural milieu and its afterlife, and as a result this network might help us reappraise the legacy of German Jewry in new ways. Within the realm of the history of Jewish archives, it highlights an important Jewish archival tradition alongside the better-known Eastern European tradition of Simon Dubnow and YIVO’s zamlers.36 Scholars have connected Eastern European archiving and collecting practices with the tragedies of twentieth-century Jewish life from the Kishinev pogrom, the destruction in the aftermath of World War I, the ghetto archives of the Holocaust years, and the broader work of YIVO.37 The German archival network represented another stream for Jewish archiving in the twentieth century, one of professionalization and institutionalization. In this respect, this network of archivists and their archives is incredibly important in terms of the development of Jewish scholarship in the era following the Holocaust. In particular, the effort of creating archives—alongside other institutions of higher learning like libraries and learned societies—was seen as part of rebuilding the German-Jewish collective self in the aftermath of the destruction of European Jewry. A second way to consider the network of archivists is the impact that it has had on the shaping of the field of Jewish studies at large. Here we may draw on Hans-Jörg Rhein-

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berger’s conceptual framework of “epistemic things,” the idea that the objects scholars study do not exist in nature on their own but are created in scholarly settings like laboratories.38 Although Rheinberger wrote most directly about the natural sciences, the notion maps onto the history of archives, as archival institutions and practices “create” historical documents that can be studied. In this respect, we might speak broadly about how archives create historical fields, and not the other way around. The Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden offers a prime example of how one decided what was “in” or “out,” given that it collected exclusively within the borders of Wilhelmine Germany, even in the aftermath of World War I when many of the border regions were now part of Poland. This process helped to construct and define German-Jewish history as a field in particular ways, in contrast with the Leo Baeck Institute’s clearly different definition, which was distinctly less Prussian and less nationalist; one might say that the Gesamtarchiv was kleindeutsch, whereas the LBI’s approach was großdeutsch with a focus on the broader German-speaking regions rather than on the political boundaries of Germany itself. Building on this, we may suggest that the involvement of German-Jewish archivists in the ongoing development of Jewish archival activities in the postwar era had a similar impact. They helped to shape the field of Jewish studies through what was being collected and catalogued at a moment when Jewish studies was about to grow exponentially in the 1960s and 1970s. Some might say that this is mostly coincidental, inasmuch as the archives of German-Jewish communities were what was primarily available through the postwar restitution processes. Certainly, the Israelis did not seek German archives exclusively, but the regime of restitution for looted property meant that these files constituted low-hanging fruit for the growth of their collections. Moreover, for archivists like Alex Bein and his younger contemporaries like Daniel Cohen, it was very personal. They wanted the files of German Jewry because they came from these places, which consequently cemented the files of the German-Jewish communities as an easily accessible resource. Altogether, the question of what kinds of archival materials are available to research has shaped the scholarship itself. This is powerfully demonstrated in the cases of both German-Jewish history in the shadow of the Holocaust and Russian Jewish history in the context of the Cold War. As Selma Stern reflected in her introduction to her seminal book The Court Jew (1950), she had gathered much of her archival material just prior to when the German state archives were closed to Jews in 1935, without which it would have been impossible to write that book.39 As for the history of Eastern European Jewry, Michael Stanislawski reflected in Nicholas I and the Jews (1983) that the fact that Russian archives remained closed to Western scholars meant that there were certain limitations to what could be produced.40 In contradistinction, the relative ease with which archival materials on German Jewry would have been accessible, especially in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s when travel to libraries and archives abroad was not always feasible, helped reinforce work on German Jewry. All of this suggests that the work of German-Jewish archivists helped cement an enduring legacy of German Jewry. Some scholars like David Sorkin have reflected on

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an émigré synthesis of German-Jewish history, an approach and understanding to the broad set of questions about how we understand German-Jewish culture through the lens of the émigré scholars who were part of the LBI.41 However, in another sense I would argue that the émigré archivists and scholars helped to cement the Germanocentric model. Indeed, a great many scholars, especially people like Gershon Hundert and others who study Eastern Europe in particular (and also some in the field of Sephardi studies) have aimed to decenter German-Jewish history, which they argue has been overemphasized within the broader study of Jewish history and culture and particularly in terms of attempts to understand trajectories of modernization in Jewish life.42 There is certainly a great deal of truth to this, and there is much value to be drawn from the expansion of the field in many directions. If one looks at published source readers, like Reinharz and Mendes-Flohr’s near-canonical (and highly problematic) source reader The Jew in the Modern World, it has a tremendous focus on German Jewry that is perhaps misplaced when we consider the number of German Jews in contrast with Eastern Europe. And even as that book has been expanded in later editions, adding material relating to Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry, the core materials on Emancipation and related religious and social change are still drawn from German-language sources. In some respects, the Germanocentric model of thinking about Jewish history was already in place prior to the 1950s—inasmuch as so many of the leading Jewish scholars were themselves German, or placed Germany at the center of the study of modern Jewish thought, the Haskalah, and so on. Certainly, figures like Heinrich Graetz helped shape this preexisting pro-German bias. But the development of the archives, many of which were in the hands of former German Jews for decades, highlights pathways through which the Germanocentric model was able to endure in profound ways that are sometimes overlooked. This legacy, however, is in the process of changing. First, one might say that since the 1980s the German-Jewish archival cohort is no longer “in power.” With the fall of the Soviet Union and the availability of new resources, we can trace out, understandably, a shift in scholarship, on the basis of new materials that are available for study.43 This is not to indicate a purely materialist understanding of historiography. Nevertheless, the material basis of research—the archives—plays an important role in what kinds of history can be written. Consequently, we can understand how these twentieth-century archivists served to solidify a vision of German-Jewish history long past its due date, due to the archival collections they curated and cultivated, and also how this is continuing to change as the archival landscape of Jewish history also continues to shift and change. At the same time, I think it highlights why German-Jewish history matters. We can see the impact of a cohort of scholars and historians beyond their weight, which maps onto the broader story of the Jews: we have a relatively small people, and yet we study them. We don’t ignore the Jews at large, clearly, just because there is another more prominent or populous group of people to study. In fact, looking closely at a small group allows us to draw large lessons. For the history of German Jews and these archivists in particular, we can see the importance of diaspora and dispersion not as a

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history of flight and scattering, but as a profoundly productive process. The history of the German Jews and their archives following the destruction of German Jewry was not merely about the afterlife of a culture but about what it would mean to build something new and vital in the places where they found themselves. In sum, this history sheds light on the issue that we should not throw out GermanJewish history because German Jews were a relatively small portion of twentiethcentury European Jews. Instead, we need to temper our understanding of modern Jewish historiography by looking at how this group of people has shaped the field of Jewish studies and how these files, still readily accessible and the core of the collections of some of these archives, continue to give form to a field. In the end, I would argue that this is one more way to think about the enduring legacy of German Jewry in a global context—that the archivists shaped the archival materials that are available and thus had a significant impact on what we study and what we teach. Jason Lustig is an independent scholar. His first book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford University Press, 2022), traces the twentieth-century struggle over who might “own” Jewish history, especially after the Nazi looting of Jewish archives. He is also the host and creator of the Jewish History Matters Podcast (www.JewishHistory.fm). He received his PhD in history from UCLA and has also been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Fellow at the Leo Baeck Insitute, New York.

Notes This chapter contains material related to my recently published book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Research for this project has been generously supported by the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, the Institute for European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the Elka Klein Memorial Grant, an AJS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Harry Starr fellowship in Judaica at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as additional research fellowships from the Leo Baeck Institute, the American Jewish Archives, and YIVO. 1. Two notable instances of such an approach include G. D. Cohen, “German Jewry as Mirror of Modernity: Introduction to the Twentieth Volume,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 20, no. 1 (1975): ix–xxxi; Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–6. Notably, the 2010 edition (which added a chapter on Middle Eastern Jewish life), still retained the language, verbatim, that reflected on “the inordinate emphasis on German and Central European experience,” justified because “Germany provides the most intense and voluble expression of our subject” (4–5). 2. Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischenVolkes (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925), 1:xxv. Also see Jeffrey Blutinger, “Writing for the Masses: Heinrich Graetz, the Popularization of Jewish History, and the Reception of National Judaism” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2003). 3. Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); David Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

202 | JASON LUSTIG 4. Gershon Hundert, “Recent Studies Related to the Jews in Poland from the Earliest Times to the Partition Period,” Polish Review 18, no. 4 (1973): 84–99; Gershon David Hundert, “Polish Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 10, no. 3 (1990): 259–70; Gershon Hundert, “Re(de)Fining Modernity in Jewish History,” in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 133–45. 5. See Jason Lustig, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). 6. Markus Brann, “Heinrich Graetz,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 3rd ser., 25 (1917): 321–46. Alex Bein, “The Archives in Israel as a Basis for Research,” 12 Mar. 1957, HZA B. 1/7, 241, and Bein, “Matsav ha-arkhiyonim ha-yehudiim ba-tefutsot u-ba-’arets,” 27 July 1961, CZA P64/163a, P64/164. 7. On Jewish historical societies, see Alexander Marx, “Societies for the Promotion of the Study of Jewish History,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 20 (1911): 1–10; Josef Meisl, “Ha-V.a’adah Ha-Historit Le-Toldot Ha-Yehudim Be-Germanyah,” Zion 19, nos. 3–4 (1954): 171–72; Georges Weill, “‘Sciences, judaïsme, patrie’: La fondation de la Société des études juives (1879–1884),” in Les revues scientifiques d’études juives: Passé et avenir, ed. Simon C. Mimouni and Judith Oszowy-Schlanger (Paris: Peeters, 2002), 37–60; Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Deux revues et une science: La Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums et La Revue des Études Juives,” in ibid., 137–64; Elisabeth Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,” American Archivist 63, no. 1 (2000): 126–51. 8. Efim Melamed, “‘Immortalizing the Crime in History . . .’: The Activities of the Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv (Kiev–Berlin–Paris, 1920–1940),” in The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917–1937, ed. Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova, and Peter Wagstaff (Boston: Brill, 2012), 373–86; Zosa Szajkowski, “Di geshikhte fun dem itstikn bukh,” in Di ukrainer pogromen in yor 1919, by Elias Tcherikower (New York:YIVO, 1965), 333–49; Laura Jockusch, “Dokumentation als Reaktion auf Verfolgung im osteuropäischen Judentum: Von Kischinjow zum Holocaust,” in Jüdisches Archivwesen: Beiträge zum Kolloquium aus Anlass des 100. Jahrestags der Gründung des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden, ed. Frank M. Bischoff and Peter Honigmann (Marburg: Druckhaus Marburg, 2007), 243–68. 9. Notably, the multivolume history of German Jewry published in the 1990s extended the origin of the history toward the early modern period by beginning in the 1600s. See Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). On the origins of this project, see Siegfried Moses, “Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): xi–xviii; Max Kreutzberger, “Bedeutung und Aufgabe deutsch-jüdischer Geschichtsschreibung in unserer Zeit,” in In Zwei Welten: Siegfried Moses zum fünfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag (Tel Aviv: Verlag Bitaon, 1962), 627–42, and also LBI AR 230 19/15, 42/36. 10. E.g., David N. Myers, “Peter Beer in Prague: Probing the Boundaries of Modern Jewish Historiography,” in Fuzzy Boundaries: Festschrift für Antonio Loprieno, ed. H. Amstutz et al. (Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2015), 705–14; Julia Philips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 349–84. 11. Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” Archivaria 16 (1983): 26–34; Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” American Archivist 66, no. 2 (September 2003): 249–70. 12. Georg Herlitz, Mein Weg nach Jerusalem: Erinnerungen eines zionistischen Beamten (Jerusalem: Verlag Rubin Mass, 1964), 82. 13. “Archiv der oesterreichisch-jüd. Kultus-Gemeinden,” Antrag des Präsidiums betreffend die Gründung eines “Zentral-Archivs der oester-jüd. Kultus-Gemeinden,” CAHJP AW/1706; cf.

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

“Aus anderen Distrikten unseres Ordens,” Bericht der Grossloge, May 1905, 47–50, which describes the proposal to create an Austrian archive, and Ezechiel Zivier, “Ein allgemeines Archiv der Juden Deutschlands,” Bericht der Grossloge für Deutschland, March 1903, his initial proposal. Eugen Täubler, “Das Forschungs-Institut für die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Organisation und Arbeitsplan,” in Aufsätze zur Problematik jüdischer Geschichtsschreibung (Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins zur Gründung und Erhaltung einer Akademie für Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1920; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1977), 1:32–43. Isidore S. Meyer, “Memorandum on the Preservation of the American Jewish War Records,” 6 June 1941, AJHS I-1, 125/1; Isidore S. Meyer, “The American Jewish Historical Society,” Journal of Jewish Bibliography 4, nos. 1–2 (1943): 6–24. “Zikhron devarim mi-yeshiva muk.deshet le-ba’ayot ha-historyah ha-’ivrit,” 27 Apr. 1937, CZA P64/148/1/1; Daniel Cohen, “Jewish Records from Germany in the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): 331–45. Georg Herlitz, “Three Jewish Historians: Isaak Markus Jost, Heinrich Graetz, Eugen Täubler; A Comparative Study,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964): 69–90. Szajkowski, “Di geshikhte fun dem itstikn bukh”; Elias Tcherikower, Antisemitizm un pogromen in ukraine, 1917–1918 (Berlin: Mizrakh–yidishn historishn arkhiv, 1923); Elias Tcherikower, ed., In der tekufa fun revolutsiye: Memoarn, material, dokumentn (Berlin: Yidisher literarisher ferlag, 1924). Also see:YIVO RG80/665, RG80/693. “Di 1-te grindungs-zitsung fun der historisher sektsie ba dem yidishn visnshaftlikhn institute,” 31 Oct. 1925,YIVO RG82/2238. See Marcus’s diary, AJA MS-210 14/4; also compare Marcus to Julian Morgenstern, 7 Apr. 1924, AJA MS-210 7/10, with Bein’s description of the same classes, “Hier kannst Du nicht jeden Grüßen”: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996), 156. “Prot.ok.ol me-yeshivat ha-v.a’adah ha-yozemet le-yassed arkhiyon yehudi merkazi be-yerushalayim,” 14 Apr. 1939, CZA L33/1201. Josef Meisl to Benzion Dinaburg, 22 Apr. 1939, Josef Meisl, “Tazkir ‘al arkhiyono shel ha-his.toriyon d”r moshe sht.ern z”l,” 1939, CAHJP P28/6/33; Joseph Stern, Moritz Stern, Bibliographie seiner Schriften und Aufsätze (Jerusalem: n.p., 1939). Ben-Zion Dinur, Bi-Yeme Milhamah u-Mahapekhah: Zikhronot u-Reshumot Mi-Derekh Hayim, 1884– 1931 (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1960); Ben-Zion Dinur, “Eugen Täubler: Ha-Ish, Ha-Moreh, veHa-H.oker,” Zion 19, nos. 1–2 (1954): 75–83. See, e.g., Robert Jütte, Die Emigration der deutschsprachigen “Wissenschaft des Judentums”: Die Auswanderung Jüdischer Historiker nach Palästina, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991); Doron Niederland, “The Emigration of Jewish Academics and Professionals from Germany in the First Yeras of Nazi Rule,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988): 285–300; Miriam Getter, “Ha-’aliyah Mi-Germania ba-Shanim 1933–1939: Qlita Hevratit-Kalkalit Mul Qlita HevratitTarbutit,” Cathedra 12 (1979): 125–47. Michael Heymann, “‘Arkhiyon Herzl,” Arkhiyon: Mik.ra’ot le-arkhiyona’ut u-le-te’ud 11–12 (1999): 17–41. David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). “K.urs le-hakhsharat ‘arkhiona’im mada’iim,” 13 Oct. 1952, CZA A198/13. See in particular ISA G-22-5398. Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion, ed. Michael A. Meyer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 345–61. Eugen Täubler to Leo Baeck, 11 Sept. 1946, Universitätsbibliothek Basel NL 76 E1 #89. Eugen Täubler to Jewish Theological Seminary, 2 Jun. 1948, Universitätsbibliothek Basel NL 76 E1 #353.

204 | JASON LUSTIG 32. See Jason Lustig, “Bernhard Brilling and the Reconstruction of Jewish Archives in Postwar Germany,” in Rebuilding Jewish Life in Postwar Germany, ed. Jay Geller and Michael Meng (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 48–64. 33. Herman Muller to Eugen Täubler, 16 Feb. 1950, Universitätsbibliothek Basel NL 120 E/32; Moses, “Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany”; Max Kreutzberger, “The Library and Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York,” Jewish Book Annual 29 (1971): 47–54. 34. Cohen, “Jewish Records from Germany”; Bernhard Brilling, “Jewish Records in German Archives—Results of a Scientific Journey, 1955–1956,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): 346–59. 35. Cf. Jason Lustig, “Who Are to Be the Successors of European Jewry? The Restitution of German Jewish Communal and Cultural Property,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 3 (1 July 2017): 519–45. 36. Cf. comments in Marek Web, “‘The YIVO Archives: 55 Years of Collecting’: Presented at Session on Jewish Archives at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists” (1 October 1980),YIVO Office Collection, which indicated that they saw this zamlers project as coming to its end. 37. Laura Jockusch, “Khurbn Forshung: Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949,” Simon Dubnow Institute Year Book 6 (2007): 441–73; Laura Jockusch, “Chroniclers of Catastrophe: History Writing as a Jewish Response to Persecution before and after the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emerging Challenges, Polemics & Achievements, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 135–66; Fruma Mohrer and Marek Web, “Introduction,” in Guide to theYIVO Archives, ed. Fruma Mohrer and Marek Web (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), xi–xxv; Cecile Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 38. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “A Reply to David Bloor: ‘Toward a Sociology of Epistemic Things,’” Perspectives on Science 13, no. 3 (September 2005): 406–10. 39. Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1950), xv–xvi. 40. See, e.g., Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983), xiii. 41. David Sorkin, “The Émigré Synthesis: German-Jewish History in Modern Times,” Central European History 34, no. 4 (December 2001): 531–59. 42. Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Paula E. Hyman, “Recent Trends in European Jewish Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (June 2005): 345–56; Adam Sutcliffe, “An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Review),” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 182–84. 43. See, e.g., Benyamin Lukin, “The Creation of a Documentary Collection on the History of Russian Jewry at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People,” in Judaica in the Slavic Realm, Slavica in the Judaic Realm, ed. Zachary Baker (New York: Hayworth, 2003), 17–36.

Bibliography Bein, Alex. “Hier kannst Du nicht jeden Grüßen”: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996. Blutinger, Jeffrey. “Writing for the Masses: Heinrich Graetz, the Popularization of Jewish History, and the Reception of National Judaism.” PhD diss., UCLA, 2003.

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Brann, Markus. “Heinrich Graetz.” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 3rd ser., 25 (1917): 321–46. Brilling, Bernhard. “Jewish Records in German Archives—Results of a Scientific Journey, 1955– 1956.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): 346–59. Cohen, Daniel. “Jewish Records from Germany in the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): 331–45. Cohen, G. D. “German Jewry as Mirror of Modernity: Introduction to the Twentieth Volume.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 20, no. 1 (1975): ix–xxxi. Cohen, Julia Philips, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 349–84. Dinur, Ben-Zion. “Eugen Täubler: Ha-Ish, Ha-Moreh, ve-Ha-H . oker.” Zion 19, nos. 1–2 (1954): 75–83. ———. Bi-Yeme Milhamah u-Mahapekhah: Zikhronot u-Reshumot Mi-Derekh Hayim, 1884–1931. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1960. Dubnow, Simon. Weltgeschichte des jüdischenVolkes. 10 vols. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925. Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Geller, Lawrence D. “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910.” Archivaria 16 (1983): 26–34. Getter, Miriam. “Ha-’aliyah Mi-Germania Ba-Shanim 1933–1939: Qlita Hevratit-Kalkalit Mul Qlita Hevratit-Tarbutit.” Cathedra 12 (1979): 125–47. Herlitz, Georg. Mein Weg nach Jerusalem: Erinnerungen eines zionistischen Beamten. Jerusalem: Verlag Rubin Mass, 1964. ———. “Three Jewish Historians: Isaak Markus Jost, Heinrich Graetz, Eugen Täubler; A Comparative Study.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964): 69–90. Heymann, Michael. “Arkhiyon Herzl.” Arkhiyon: Mik.ra’ot le-arkhiyona’ut u-le-te’ud 11–12 (1999): 17–41. Horsman, Peter, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen. “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual.” American Archivist 66, no. 2 (September 2003): 249–70. Hundert, Gershon. “Recent Studies Related to the Jews in Poland from the Earliest Times to the Partition Period.” Polish Review 18, no. 4 (1973): 84–99. ———. “Polish Jewish History.” Modern Judaism 10, no. 3 (1990): 259–70. ———. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ———. “Re(de)Fining Modernity in Jewish History.” In Rethinking European Jewish History, edited by Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman, 133–45. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009. Hyman, Paula E. “Recent Trends in European Jewish Historiography.” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (June 2005): 345–56. Jockusch, Laura. “Dokumentation als Reaktion auf Verfolgung im osteuropäischen Judentum: Von Kischinjow zum Holocaust.” In Jüdisches Archivwesen: Beiträge zum Kolloquium aus Anlass des 100. Jahrestags der Gründung des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden, edited by Frank M. Bischoff and Peter Honigmann, 243–68. Marburg: Druckhaus Marburg, 2007. ———. “Khurbn Forshung: Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949.” Simon Dubnow Institute Year Book 6 (2007): 441–73. ———. “Chroniclers of Catastrophe: History Writing as a Jewish Response to Persecution before and after the Holocaust.” In Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emerging Challenges, Polemics & Achievements, edited by David Bankier and Dan Michman, 135–66. Jerusalem:Yad Vashem, 2008. Jütte, Robert. Die Emigration der deutschsprachigen “Wissenschaft des Judentums”: Die Auswanderung Jüdischer Historiker nach Palästina, 1933–1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991.

206 | JASON LUSTIG Kaplan, Elisabeth. “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity.” American Archivist 63, no. 1 (2000): 126–51. Kreutzberger, Max. “Bedeutung und Aufgabe deutsch-jüdischer Geschichtsschreibung in unserer Zeit.” In In Zwei Welten: Siegfried Moses zum fünfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag, 627–42. Tel Aviv: Verlag Bitaon, 1962. ———. “The Library and Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.” Jewish Book Annual 29 (1971): 47–54. Kuznitz, Cecile. YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lukin, Benyamin. “The Creation of a Documentary Collection on the History of Russian Jewry at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.” In Judaica in the Slavic Realm, Slavica in the Judaic Realm, edited by Zachary Baker, 17–36. New York: Hayworth, 2003. Lustig, Jason. “Who Are to Be the Successors of European Jewry? The Restitution of German Jewish Communal and Cultural Property.” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 3 (1 July 2017): 519–45. ———. “Bernhard Brilling and the Reconstruction of Jewish Archives in Postwar Germany.” In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Postwar Germany, edited by Jay Geller and Michael Meng, 48–64. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. ———. A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Marx, Alexander. “Societies for the Promotion of the Study of Jewish History.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 20 (1911): 1–10. Meisl, Josef. “Ha-V.a’adah Ha-Historit Le-Toldot Ha-Yehudim Be-Germanyah.” Zion 19, nos. 3–4 (1954): 171–72. Melamed, Efim. “‘Immortalizing the Crime in History . . .’: The Activities of the Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv (Kiev–Berlin–Paris, 1920–1940).” In The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917–1937, edited by Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova, and Peter Wagstaff, 373–86. Boston: Brill, 2012. Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz, eds. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Meyer, Isidore S. “The American Jewish Historical Society.” Journal of Jewish Bibliography 4, nos. 1–2 (1943): 6–24. Meyer, Michael A., ed. German-Jewish History in Modern Times. 4 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———. “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College.” In Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion, edited by Michael A. Meyer, 345–61. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Mohrer, Fruma, and Marek Web. “Introduction.” In Guide to the YIVO Archives, edited by Fruma Mohrer and Marek Web, xi–xxv. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Moses, Siegfried. “Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): xi–xviii. Myers, David N. “Peter Beer in Prague: Probing the Boundaries of Modern Jewish Historiography.” In Fuzzy Boundaries: Festschrift für Antonio Loprieno, edited by H. Amstutz, A. Dorn, M. Müller, M. Ronsdorf, and S. Uljas, 705–14. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2015. Niederland, Doron. “The Emigration of Jewish Academics and Professionals from Germany in the First Years of Nazi Rule.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988): 285–300. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “A Reply to David Bloor: ‘Toward a Sociology of Epistemic Things.’” Perspectives on Science 13, no. 3 (September 2005): 406–10. ———. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

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Ruderman, David. Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Schwarzfuchs, Simon. “Deux revues et une science: La Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums et la Revue des Études Juives.” In Les revues scientifiques d’études juives: Passé et avenir, edited by Simon C. Mimouni and Judith Oszowy-Schlanger, 137–64. Paris: Peeters, 2002. Sorkin, David. “The Émigré Synthesis: German-Jewish History in Modern Times.” Central European History 34, no. 4 (December 2001): 531–59. Stanislawski, Michael. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825– 1855. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983. Stern, Joseph. Moritz Stern, Bibliographie seiner Schriften und Aufsätze. Jerusalem: n.p., 1939. Stern, Selma. The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1950. Sutcliffe, Adam. “An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Review).” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 182–84. Swartz, David. Culture and Power:The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Szajkowski, Zosa. “Di geshikhte fun dem itstikn bukh.” In Di ukrainer pogromen in yor 1919, by Elias Tcherikower, 333–49. New York:YIVO, 1965. Täubler, Eugen. “Das Forschungs-Institut für die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Organisation und Arbeitsplan.” In Aufsätze zur Problematik jüdischer Geschichtsschreibung, 1:32–43. Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins zur Gründung und Erhaltung einer Akademie für Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1920. Reprint, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1977. Tcherikower, Elias. Antisemitizm un pogromen in ukraine, 1917–1918. Berlin: Mizrakh–yidishn historishn arkhiv, 1923. ———. Di ukrainer pogromen in yor 1919. New York:YIVO, 1965. Tcherikower, Elias, ed. In der tekufa fun revolutsiye: Memoarn, material, dokumentn. Berlin: Yidisher literarisher ferlag, 1924. Web, Marek. “‘The YIVO Archives: 55 Years of Collecting’: Presented at Session on Jewish Archives at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists,” 1 October 1980.YIVO Office Collection. Weill, Georges. “‘Sciences, judaïsme, patrie’: La fondation de la Société des études juives (1879– 1884).” In Les revues scientifiques d’études juives: Passé et avenir, edited by Simon C. Mimouni and Judith Oszowy-Schlanger, 37–60. Paris: Peeters, 2002. Zivier, Ezechiel. “Ein allgemeines Archiv der Juden Deutschlands.” Bericht der Grossloge für Deutschland, March 1903.

 Part IV

After 1945 Memory, Coming to Terms with the Past, Place, and Displacement

 CHAPTER 10

Jewish Mourning in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Tending Individual Graves in Occupied Germany, 1945–49



Stefanie Fischer

“Wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften / da liegt man nicht eng” (“We dig a grave in the breezes / there one lies unconfined.”) Paul Celan, “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) In his poem “Death Fugue,” Paul Celan, whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, lyrically describes the elusive final resting place of the victims of this genocide as “a grave in the breezes / there one lies unconfined.”1 These condensed words try to grasp all that could be said to remain of those Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers and whose bodies were cremated in the Nazi death camps, whose ashes were dispersed over open fields in Eastern Europe or whose remains were thrown into mass graves dug somewhere in Eastern Europe. The murder of Europe’s Jewry went hand in hand with the desecration of the dead body. The cremation of the dead body stands in complete opposition to Jewish tradition. Those murdered in the Holocaust were denied a Jewish burial, which includes the interment of the body in an individual grave.2 Paul Celan was acutely sensitive to this humiliation: the murdered Jews’ resting places were now merely “in the breezes” or in mass graves scattered through Europe’s blood-soaked soil. The Nazi genocide also deprived surviving family members of the opportunity to mourn the dead according to Jewish law, which requires them to wash and guard the dead body before its burial and to recite Kaddish as a ritual of mourning that “bespeaks the hope that there is a future for the deceased, and it gives new faith to the mourners, even as its recitation at the moment of interment evokes new tears.”3 The mourners were also denied the opportunity to sit shiva after a proper funeral. Surviving family members of Holocaust victims had no grave to visit, no place to tend. Even decades

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after the war’s end, family members would often not know where and when their loved ones had died at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators. At a time when so many Jews lacked a proper resting place other than one dug “in the breezes,” the graves of those who had been buried in Jewish cemeteries before the war became an important consolation for the bereaved. These graves offered a focal point for surviving family members where they could express grief for their losses. This becomes particularly evident when we look at how German-Jewish refugees cared for the dead who had been buried according to Jewish ritual law before Nazism dehumanized Jewish life and death. Although quite a few German Jews were able to escape Europe before the Nazis put the deportation trains into motion after 1940/41 and thus managed to survive, it was at a cost. Scattered around the globe, they had left belongings, friends, and close family members behind, some of whom were killed during the Holocaust. Others subsequently died in their communities during the war (including those who died a natural death, as well as those who died by suicide during the Nazi years).The losses of those who had been able to leave also included the places that were “left behind,” such as the graves of loved ones who had passed away peacefully long before the Nazis came to power. So far, the historiography of German Jews after 1945 has failed to recognize how emotions surrounding death and how the dead, whose bones remained in postwar Germany, shaped Jewish history in the postwar years. The more general scholarship on German Jews has predominantly looked at the institutional and structural dilemmas the Jewish community faced after the war’s end.4 Despite Michael Brenner’s observation that burial and the care of cemeteries were among the primary tasks of rabbis in postwar Germany,5 scholarship on German Jews has so far avoided questions revolving around the care for the dead. Over the centuries, however, Jewish history has continually been shaped by persecution and migration, separating mourners from the burial sites of their loved ones. While numerous studies have been conducted on a whole range of aspects surrounding Jewish gravesites in premodern times, we know very little about the status of the dead for Holocaust survivors. The vast literature on Jewish cemeteries in postwar Europe does not explore the social and emotional significance these places had for German-Jewish refugees and their families, nor does it look at the cultural and emotional patterns surrounding the graves. A substantial amount of the existing research on Jewish burial grounds concentrates purely on documenting the gravestones or on describing the Jewish communities that once used the cemeteries.6 The sites, however, deserve more attention than this. Gravesites offer an emotional refuge for the bereaved mourning the dead. Mourning the dead is important to overcome the traumatic experience, which harms the bereaved person’s sense of belonging, of losing a loved one. In general, caring for the dead helps the bereaved to cope with their loss.7 Care for the dead is an expression of respect, but it is also an expression of being human and of being cultivated and civilized. Further, care for the dead is a human gesture that separates mankind from animals, because “we generally do not toss the dead over the wall for the beasts to devour . . . we

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care for the dead because humans have always cared for our dead.”8 This is particularly true in times of crisis when our common beliefs are assailed by expulsion, mass death, and genocide. After the Nazis had crudely violated Jewish mourning practices through the mistreatment of the dead in Nazi concentration camps, care for the dead acquired a new meaning of survival and of being human. Consequently, gravesites allow us to study how Jews mourned the dead after experiencing dehumanization and genocide. By revealing the presence of the dead in the lives of the survivors, we come to understand more about religious practice and group belonging after the Holocaust as well as about those who survived the Holocaust. Such an approach helps us see how Jewish rites and mourning practices became a symbol of both cultural belonging and Jewishness for the living in a time of mass death. Many Jews who experienced the loss of a close person during the Nazi years were deprived of the opportunity to mourn according to Jewish law. This can be particularly traumatic for Jewish mourners because Jewish tradition integrates the community into the mourning process. It does this so that the family members left behind feel that they are not alone, that they remain connected to the places to which they have belonged. Such religious rites as giving Liebesgaben (Gemilut Chassadim; acts of lovingkindness) or saying Kaddish help people experience belonging, continuity, and comfort in extreme times. Above all, the graves of those Jews who were buried individually and according to Jewish tradition represented a Jewish space in a nonJewish world, a place where one could go, a place that could be taken care of. It seems that these places helped German-Jewish refugees to express their Jewishness and, after everything that had happened, their continued sense of belonging to German culture. Thus, by looking at the role of the dead in the lives of émigré German Jews, we come to understand how émigré German Jews stayed connected with those forbears who were buried in German soil, and we learn more about long-term cultural patterns as well as private and “everyday” forms of mourning. The importance of Jewish burial grounds in the lives of émigré German Jews is demonstrated in letters written by refugee German Jews to rabbis in Germany in the years immediately after the war—between 1945 and 1949.9 During this time, many refugee German Jews wrote to the rabbis of their former synagogue communities, attempting to reconnect and asking about the condition of their relatives’ graves after the destruction of European Jewry. These previously unexamined sources help us understand what Jewish rites and symbols of mourning practices meant to those who fled Nazi Germany and whether they gained new meaning in the shadow of the Holocaust. Studying these letters, we come to understand how German Jews expressed their grief for relatives who were buried in Germany’s Jewish graveyards. Such an undertaking reveals the emotional dilemmas of those German Jews who escaped Nazism but who also had to leave behind family members, including those buried in individual graves. In particular, I argue that individual Jewish gravesites in Germany, most of which existed before the Holocaust, offered sites toward which surviving Jews could direct their feelings of loss, but also of connectedness to the world in which they grew up.

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In a broader sense, this research reveals the status the dead held among GermanJewish families abroad, in emotional as well as physical terms. One question I ask is about the obligations the living felt they owed to the dead whose bones remained in the blood-soaked soil of Europe. Or, to put it another way: what was the “exchange and interaction between the living and the dead” after the genocide?10 How did Jewish mourning culture change, and how did the living adjust their practices accordingly? By answering these questions, I demonstrate that the study of the care for the dead brings to light how emotions, including grief, shaped the history of Jews after the Holocaust. My research also takes its inspiration from cultural history and from the history of human remains that deals with “the absence of the bodies” as a result of the Holocaust. Within the growing field of the history of human remains, Jean-Marc Dreyfus has convincingly pointed to the emotional dimensions that evolve around the question of what to do with the human remains of people murdered during genocide. According to Dreyfus, the transfer of ashes from the sites of mass killing to congregational cemeteries in the immediate postwar years “was one of substitution.” As he goes on to say, “These ashes were the remains, the only remains, of the dead. They represented the bodies that had not been buried.”11 While the absence of a body after a genocide is a major concern for surviving family members, cultural historian Margarete Feinstein has pointed us to the importance of religious rites, including mourning rites, in rebuilding lives after genocide. By exploring the mourning practices of East European Jewish displaced persons (DPs), Feinstein has given us penetrating insights into the construction of Jewish identity and the roles of religious rites among this group of Jewish survivors.12 One may wonder if Feinstein’s findings apply to German Jews whose religious practices differed widely from those of Eastern European Jews. The pre-Holocaust German-Jewish community has often been described as a highly secularized group that had completely emancipated itself from traditional Jewish rites. However, if we take the findings of cultural historian Thomas Laqueur into account, we come to understand that secularism did not result in disenchantment with the dead. According to Laqueur, The dead body matters everywhere and across time, as well as in particular times and particular places. It matters in disparate religious and ideological circumstances; it matters even in the absence of any particular belief about a soul or about how long it might linger around its former body or about what might become of it after death; it matters across all sorts of beliefs about an afterlife or a God. It matters in the absence of such beliefs. It matters because the living need the dead far more than the dead need the living. It matters because the dead make social worlds.13 Taking Laqueur’s findings into consideration, and according to my sources, religious rites, including mourning rituals, mattered deeply to German Jews who mourned the dead after the Holocaust. Thus, by studying how German-Jewish refugees were mourning and caring for the dead, we come to understand the values attached to death

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after the Holocaust, and that these were and are subject to constant change in different places, times, and cultural settings.14

The Survival of Jewish Cemeteries under Nazism Unlike synagogues, a large number of cemeteries survived the Nazi destruction of Jewish life and culture. This was because cemeteries could not be set on fire, and also because they were usually (with the exception of some urban centers such as Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna) located on the outskirts of rural or urban settlements. In many instances, Jewish cemeteries constitute the last physical proof that Jews ever lived in a place.15 It is of course important to note that severe damage was inflicted on these cemeteries by Nazi rioters and then by Allied air raids, but this damage was far less extensive than that to other Jewish property. Moreover, a large number of Jewish cemeteries survived the Nazi genocide because of an unresolved conflict between local municipalities and the Deutscher Gemeindetag (German Municipality) about a new nationwide burial ground act (Reichsfriedhofsgesetz) that would reduce the rights of religious communities, both Jewish and Christian, to maintain cemeteries for their congregations.16 In 1942, the Reich Security Main Office instructed the Reich Association of Jews in Germany to hand over their remaining cemeteries to the relevant municipalities. However, this both caused a dispute about the appropriate price and left unresolved questions of property ownership between the municipalities and the Reich Security Main Office. This conflict could not be resolved before the end of the war, with the result that hundreds of Jewish cemeteries avoided desecration and destruction.17 After the war, thousands of Jewish cemeteries could be found, albeit depleted and abandoned, spread all across Europe. In Germany, the Central Council of Jews counted more than sixteen hundred Jewish burial sites across the country, many of them centuries old. After war’s end, the Jewish cemeteries first came under the administration of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) in the American Zone, the Jewish Trust Corporation for Germany (JTC) in the British Zone, and the French branch of the JTC in the French Zone. Only after the Court of Restitution Appeals settled an agreement between the Jewish communities in Germany and the JRSO in 1954 did the Jewish cemeteries come once more under the administration of war-ravaged local Jewish communities who lacked both the financial means and the personnel to protect and restore the sites.18 The graves of German Jews who had died before the Holocaust were thus left untended. In an attempt to rectify the open question of financing and care of the Jewish cemeteries, the Central Council of Jews in Germany set up a Commission for Cemetery Affairs (Kommission für Friedhofsangelegenheiten) under the leadership of Ernst Gottfried Lowenthal, who before the war functioned as coeditor of the Centralverein’s newspaper and worked for the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland under the leadership of Leo Baeck. Lowenthal’s task was to negotiate with the Adenauer administration about how to preserve the burial sites in West Germany.

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The wording of a decree regulating the care and preservation of closed Jewish cemeteries (Erlass zur Übernahme der Kosten zur Instandsetzung und Erhaltung der geschlossenen Friedhöfe, September 1956) based on the war memorial law (Kriegsgräbergesetz) was finally settled in 1956/57.19 This required the West German government to finance the upkeep of the Jewish cemeteries—including maintaining the surrounding walls, renovating pathways, and mowing the grass. However, the provisions excluded the preservation of gravestones or individual gravesites. The task of maintaining these places was left to surviving family members or to the district rabbinate.20

Tending the Graves: Caring for the Dead In his novel Und sagte kein einziges Wort (And Never Said a Word, 1953), German author Heinrich Böll writes about how many people felt closer to the dead than to the living after war’s end. Even though the war experience of his characters differs widely from that of Jewish survivors, they share the experience of being surrounded by more dead than living family members. Böll’s protagonist Fred Bogner describes how, “even as a child, I used to like going to cemeteries, indulging a passion that was not considered suitable for a young person. But all those names, those flower beds, every single letter, the smell—it all tells me that I too will die: the only truth I have never doubted. And sometimes, in those endless rows I slowly wander past, I find names of people I knew.”21 Unlike Fred Bogner, German-Jewish refugees could not wander past endless rows of graves displaying the names of people they knew, nor could they care for those who had perished in the Holocaust. This wave of genocide turned the usual patterns of death and mourning upside down. German-Jewish refugees eventually found themselves alone in a world where most of the people they felt close to had perished in the Holocaust. However, they could care for those buried in Jewish cemeteries in their former hometowns. Letters from German-Jewish refugees to the rabbis of their former hometowns demonstrate that the preservation of gravesites mattered deeply to those who had escaped the Nazi genocide. Beginning around May 1945, numerous German-Jewish refugees composed letters to the rabbis of their former communities asking for information on the condition of their relatives’ graves. They wanted to know whether these remained intact after the destruction of Jewish life and culture in Europe or whether they had been destroyed during the Allied air raids on German cities during the war. On 7 May 1947, for example, Dr. Otto Weise sent a letter from Cologne to the administration of the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main requesting detailed information on the condition of Adolf and Rosalia Schiff’s graves in Frankfurt’s Jewish cemetery on Eckenheimer Landstrasse. He wanted to know if the graves were still there or whether they had been vandalized during the war. He inquired, in particular, into how much the maintenance of the graves and the gardening around them would cost. At the close of his letter, he asked if he could get some information about the graves of members of the Merzbach

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family, whose bones rested in Frankfurt’s Jewish cemetery. All of those named had passed away between 1930 and 1932 and had been buried according to Jewish rites long before Nazi policy violated Jewish mourning practices. A representative of the Jewish community of Frankfurt replied on 13 June 1947, explaining that the Schiffs’ tombstone survived but that the bronze plaque had been destroyed. The letter also included a financial quotation of one hundred marks for gardening, fixing the grave border, and filling joints and cracks. The letter further explained that the cost for upkeep of the graves would be forty marks for one year. The document further states that the administration could not provide a quotation for renewing the bronze plaque because the stonemason did not have the appropriate material available.22 Other correspondents took a different approach. Rather than asking their rabbi to maintain their parents’ resting place, some also took the opportunity to thank the rabbi for giving Liebesgaben to their parents, who had died after they, the children, had fled from Nazism. (It is important to note here that the burial of the dead by rabbis in Jewish cemeteries was not prohibited during the Nazi years.) The burial of dead people and subsequent care for them is—according to Jewish law—the highest form of Gemilut Chassadim because the dead cannot reciprocate. Liebesgaben for a dead person include the preparation of the body for the funeral and reciting Kaddish at the dead person’s burial site. Liebesgaben are considered mitzvot, which are directed not only toward the living but also the dead. Preliminary archival research suggests that this type of inquiry was often made when relatives had passed away without the support of their children but before the Nazis had been able to deport them to the death camps in Eastern Europe. In these cases, of course, children had still been unable to be with their dying parents or arrange a traditional Jewish burial ceremony. A rabbi’s Liebesgabe offered some comfort and relief from the burden of conscience carried by those who had left parents behind while they themselves went to safety abroad. The fact that these refugees could no longer visit the graves on a regular basis was made more bearable by the knowledge that a respected person (e.g., a rabbi) was physically going to a place where they could not go. Knowing that a rabbi recited Kaddish at their parents’ graves was a way of paying their own respects to dead relatives at a time when, for most refugees, traveling to Europe was both financially and emotionally out of reach. For many German Jews, it took decades to recover financially from fleeing Nazism. Others promised never to set foot on German soil again after surviving Nazism (although many then did so at a later point in their lives).23 As these letters indicate, in the shadow of mass death, individual graves became important reference points for mourners, where the relatives of the deceased could direct their feelings of loss and grief. The dead who rested peacefully in individual graves in cemeteries in Germany, and who had mostly died of natural causes, connected them to their ancestry but also to their places of disrupted belonging. It also seems that, across what had been Nazi-occupied Europe, individual graves became visible testaments to a time in which the living as well as the dead had been respected as Jews, a time when

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the dead had been buried according to Jewish ritual law in a non-Jewish world. In this non-Jewish world, Jewish graveyards had usually been protected and respected (although they have always been targets of antisemitic attacks). Of course, some synagogues or remnants thereof also stood for a time in which Jewish life and death had been respected, though these places of worship did not provoke as many inquiries from refugee German Jews as the burial sites of their loved ones did in the late 1940s. Very often it was the female members of a family who wrote to thank a rabbi for giving Liebesgaben, such as the saying of Kaddish for a dead relative. On 4 April 1946, Alice Vogel-Bergen sent a letter to rabbi Dr. Neuhaus from the Frankfurt Jewish community expressing her gratitude to him for giving Liebesgaben to her dying parents in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.24 (As the files usually only contain the letters to the rabbis and seldom include the replies, we do not know whether the rabbis were able to manage all that was asked of them.) It remains an open question whether women reached out to rabbis to express their gratitude for giving Liebesgaben because they felt more connected to their parents than men did. It is also possible, however, that my data sample has produced biased results.25 Further study in archives that were not accessible in 2020–21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic may show that men expressed their gratitude equally to rabbis for giving Liebesgaben to their dying parents while they themselves were safe abroad. Some correspondents even asked the local rabbi to send a picture of their relatives’ grave so that they could be assured it was unharmed.26 Here, in many cases, the letters yield evidence that the rabbi in question did indeed instruct someone to locate the grave in the cemetery, take a photograph, and print it (at a time when a defeated Germany was experiencing severe paper shortages). He would then send a short letter to the relatives, giving detailed information about the condition of the grave and enclosing the photograph. This was the case when Joseph Schneider inquired into the status of the graves of his relatives Caroline and Erna Schneider at the Eckenheimer Landstrasse cemetery. Joseph Schneider asked whether the gravestones were unharmed and whether the cemetery’s gardener could begin upkeep of the graves in October 1946.27 Fritz Stein, the representative of the Jewish community of Frankfurt, replied in January 1947 confirming that the graves had been cleaned and taken care of, noting that the costs for this service would be “a total of 140 Marks.” Fritz Stein also included a blackand-white photograph of each grave (see figure 10.1).28 Even though Joseph Schneider willingly agreed to pay for the work done, Fritz Stein asked instead for a nonmonetary payment, namely the sending of CARE packages that would benefit the local community.29 (In this specific case, the correspondents went on to complain that, although they had sent two packages of castoff clothing and canned food, they had not been sent a receipt or confirmation that the graves were being tended.) Although archival sources rarely offer evidence of payment for this kind of task, we know relatives would usually pay for the cost of maintenance and gardening around graves. Often a representative of the Jewish congregation would explicitly urge relatives not to send cash, asking instead for remuneration in kind with parcels of clothing

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Figure 10.1. Caroline and Erna Schneider’s burial site at the Jewish cemetery at Eckenheimer Landstrasse Cemetery in Frankfurt am Main. Jüdische Gemeinde Frankfurt am Main K.d.ö.R., Archivunterlagen. Photograph originally taken by Carl Weiss Fotografische Werkstätte Frankfurt/Main, Courtesy of Central Archives for the History of Jews in Germany, Heidelberg, Collection B1/13 A. 240.

and groceries to support the local Jewish community. In this way, German Jews caring for the dead from abroad also cared for living Jews in Germany. In one such case, a representative of the Jewish community, Max Meyer, explained that supplies were needed because the Joint Distribution Committee was not providing enough support for his congregation.30 (Max Meyer was one of the founding members of Frankfurt’s postwar Jewish community. After his liberation from Theresienstadt, he established a center for the provision of care and assistance for Jewish camp survivors.) An exiled member of the Frankfurt Jewish community, Walter Cohn, who had found refuge in Surrey in the South of England, visited Frankfurt am Main in July 1948.While there he asked Max Meyer to help him locate the grave of his mother-in-law, Cilly Stein, who had passed away at the age of forty-nine on 13 February 1942 in Frankfurt. (Perhaps, as a Cohn, he did not visit the graveyard in person due to the halakhic prohibition against this.) Cohn asked Max Meyer to erect a simple monument (einfachen Grabstein) at the grave. Meyer begged Cohn not to pay in cash for this service but to send food packages instead. Seven months later, in February 1949, Walter Cohn wrote a letter to the Jewish community of Frankfurt inquiring about the status of his request,

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emphasizing that this matter was of particular concern (uns die Sache sehr am Herzen liegt).31 On 10 April 1949, Walter Cohn sent another pressing letter to Meyer reminding him that the monument at the grave was not yet there and to confirm that he had asked Olga Eckstein and her husband in New York, as well as Ferdinand and Lucy Jacob in Melbourne, to send food packages to the members of the Frankfurt Jewish community. Cohn was waiting for Meyer to confirm whether he had received the food packages. A handwritten note on the bottom of the letter reads that the packages arrived in Frankfurt six months later: “14/10 two CARE packages received.”32 Even if it remains unclear whether and, if so, when Max Meyer took care of Walter Cohn’s request, this letter nonetheless demonstrates the presence of the dead in the life of émigré German Jews. It also exemplifies how the graves continued to matter to those who fled Nazism. Further, it reveals that the struggling Frankfurt Jewish community found it difficult to keep up with the sheer number of such requests. An undated report from around 1947 written by Leo Löwenfels, a member of the committee for the reconstruction of the Frankfurt Jewish community’s administration, buildings, and cemeteries, suggests that a growing interest in maintaining individual graves was generating revenue for the war-torn Jewish community. This revenue was urgently needed to rebuild Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust. Löwenfels therefore proposed placing advertisements in American and British Jewish newspapers announcing that Jewish groups in Germany were again able to tend local graves. He suggested asking relatives to donate or bequeath money to the various Jewish communities so that this service could be kept up.33 Löwenfels also highlighted the poor state of administration of Jewish cemeteries after the war. In his report, he complained that the level of bookkeeping was amateur and in no way met the necessary standards.34 Increasing interest in Jewish cemeteries led to the creation of additional gardening and administrative jobs to manage the numerous requests. In another letter, from March 1947, Löwenfels explains that the administration of the Jewish cemetery needs “three to four gardeners.” He continues: “The gardeners Gomb and Priester cannot keep up with all the necessary work on the cemetery. Since 1945 a number of graves have to be tended, and new requests [from relatives] come in every day. The paths on both cemeteries have to be taken care of, sedum planted, hedges and trees to be trimmed.” Löwenfels clarifies that even though the municipality of Frankfurt had sent seven former Nazis (“ehemal. Pgs”) to clean up the cemetery from war damage, official guidelines meant that they could not be employed to maintain individual graves.35 The Jewish community’s administration therefore had to employ additional personnel to look after these. In most cases, the rabbis’ letters giving details about the condition of the graves and the pictures of the graves brought comfort to surviving family members who were living abroad. At both a literal and a metaphorical level, they reassured the exiles that their parents’ bones and graves had survived the Holocaust and that, on a continent with almost no Jewish life left in it, a rabbi was taking care of fellow Jews in their former hometown and was showing respect to both the living and the dead. The dead

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buried in individual graves had taken on an emotional life among émigré German Jews. The bodies left behind generated emotions that came to light in the letters sent to the rabbis of the exiles’ former congregations. The majority of requests came from German Jews who had found refuge in the United States. Some came from the United Kingdom; some from Switzerland; but only one or two were sent from Mandate Palestine, which became Israel after 1948. It may be that there was a strong connection between living in a safe environment and feeling able to care for those who had been left behind.36

Individual Care Some refugees did not approach the rabbi of their former local Jewish community. Instead, they chose to organize the upkeep of a grave themselves. Erica Lehrer, anthropologist and granddaughter of a Holocaust refugee from Vienna, remembers that her grandmother “paid for the upkeep of a Jewish gravesite in Vienna’s Central Graveyard for decades after the war.”37 When her grandmother passed away, her family found piles of invoices from a flower shop across the street from the Jewish cemetery in Vienna where her husband was buried. Wondering about her grandmother’s motivation, Erica Lehrer said that it occurred to me that this gesture was also a way for my former Viennese Jewish grandmother to perform a kind of belonging, however tenuous, to a home place, as well as [a] kind of cultural competence in a social setting in which she had been deeply embedded and then abruptly expelled— she never quite found her full feet in American culture, but in the letters and payments to the flower shop across the street from the cemetery, she could continue [to] be a proper Viennese lady who knew what to do and how to do it.38 This finding is important because it demonstrates that there was a spectrum of mourning practices that could include involving non-Jewish store owners in the care of a grave, as well as nonreligious, cultural customs, such as decorating the grave with flowers. Even though we do not know if Erica Lehrer’s grandmother also instructed someone in Vienna to place rocks on her husband’s tombstone as an expression of Jewishness, the fact remains that it mattered deeply to her to be able to practice mourning rituals and to care for her late husband who rested peacefully in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery. These mourning practices could express the cultural belonging shared by the exiled and those who had been left behind. It would seem that their cultural setting continued to matter to refugee Jews after they had been violently separated from the graves of their loved ones. Tending graves reconnected the expelled family member with a space they had once called home, and the left-behind grave remained their space that they could “visit” over and over again.39 In the shadow of the Holocaust, this was of vital

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importance. Individual graves connected survivors to the lives they had left behind, and also to their lost communities. Graves displaying the names of loved ones became manifestations of the emotional and social bonds that had been violently ruptured by the Nazis. As Erica Lehrer’s recollection makes clear, there is more to this phenomenon than connecting with the dead through religious practice. According to Lehrer, caring for the dead helped to express belonging to a cultural setting from which émigré German Jews were “uprooted” through Nazism. In their places of refuge, like the United States and elsewhere, cultural patterns and practices surrounding death differed widely from those of the culture in which they had grown up. In the culture they were born into they had learned how to behave and what to do, in this case how to honor and care for the resting place of a beloved person. To put it in the words of the cultural historians Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington “the practices of death are embedded within a complex web of values, attitudes, and sensibilities that are specific to a group of people in a particular time and allow individuals to know, almost unconsciously, what to do and what not to do where the dead are concerned.”40 This feeling of cultural belonging and rootedness was violently smashed by the experience of expulsion and forced migration. Or, in the words of novelist and historian Marina Warner: “The dead establish community and cultural memory, and forms of disposal offer a vision of society that’s both a testimony and a self-portrait.”41

Conclusion We can conclude that these letters from relatives show the desire for an ongoing relationship between those who had been persecuted and the dead they had left behind. The graves linked German-Jewish refugees to their lost homes and to what had gone before in their ruptured lives. By reaching out to local rabbis and inquiring into the condition of the graves of their deceased relatives, the survivors were able to reconnect with the dead—not only in a material sense but in a metaphysical way that was deeply comforting. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the graves in German soil represented far more than fixtures in a burial site: they offered an existential space linking the living and the dead, history and presence. As my handful of examples show, in postwar Europe “the dead were very much alive in the minds of the living.”42 These findings also support the research of the cultural historian Thomas Laqueur, who has explored the “work of the dead” throughout the history of mankind. According to Laqueur, “death in culture takes time because it takes time for the rent in the social fabric to be rewoven and for the dead to do their work in creating, recreating, representing, or disrupting the social order of which they had been a part.”43 If we apply his findings to our study, we come to understand that the dead who had been laid to rest in individual graves helped the living to mourn according to Jewish tradition and to rebuild their (emotional) lives after all that had happened. We can see that Jewish

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mourning rites and practices (such as reciting Kaddish) became crucial to those who survived Nazism and that German Jews felt the need to compensate for the fact that those killed by the Nazis did not have individual graves. I therefore suggest that reconsidering the presence of these “ghosts” is central to the study of German-Jewish history after the Holocaust. Gravestones, which had traditionally played little role in Jewish mourning practice, started to matter all of a sudden, acquiring a metaphysical significance. This is also expressed in a letter from Paul Celan to the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, dated 12 November 1959. He explained that when he composed the poem “Death Fugue” for his mother who was murdered in a concentration camp in the winter of 1942/43, he wrote: “You also know—or; rather, you used to know—what I was trying to say in ‘Todesfuge.’ You know—no, you used to know— so now I must remind you—that for me ‘Todesfuge’ is not least this: an epitaph and a grave. . . . My mother too has only this grave.”44 Preliminary archival research suggests that by the mid-1950s the dead no longer preoccupied the living in the same way. The number of letters from family members asking rabbis to see to the maintenance of graves or to give Liebesgaben steadily decreased. Though the bones of their dead relatives remained in German soil, German Jews abroad did not retain the same connection to their former communities: they had found new ways to remember and honor the dead. While the cemetery was still the place where the dead lay, they became bound to the living through mourning practices that were centered elsewhere. The left-behind burial places, though, continue to matter to their families abroad, as pictures of left-behind burial grounds in Jewish homes in the United States and elsewhere demonstrate. The Berman family, for example, has placed a framed photograph of a burial site in Treuchtlingen, Germany, on a table in the living room of their family home in Hollywood, Florida, alongside other family photographs (see figure 10.2). The burial site bears the name of David Bermann (the line above the “n” indicates a pair of letters), the grandfather of Theo Berman from Ellingen (Bavaria), who escaped Nazism in the 1930s and started a new life in Central Florida in the 1940s. In recent years, growing numbers of studies have emerged that focus on the Jewish absence in postwar Europe. However, as my study indicates, we should start looking instead at the Jewish presence—including the presence of the dead.The sheer number of studies focusing on Jewish cemeteries, which are often composed by non-Jewish amateur historians in Germany, reveal the ongoing interest in the dead, the dead who were put to rest peacefully, and whose presence constantly reminds non-Jewish Germans of the Jewish communities that once resided at these places. But the continuing interest of Jewish families in graves located in Germany also reveals the emotional and moral dilemmas of survivors mourning the dead after the Holocaust. As Majer Szankower, administrator of the Neuer Jüdischer Friedhof in Frankfurt am Main explained in August 2018, the interest in the dead buried in Jewish cemeteries in Germany remains at a high level even today. However, the requests he receives from Jews with a German background differ widely from the requests I have looked at here.

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Figure 10.2. Framed photograph of David Bermann’s gravesite at the Jewish Cemetery Treuchtlingen, August 2009. © Daphna Berman, Washington, DC.

Today, most inquiries are made as part of investigations in genealogical matters and are not requests for care for the dead. In other words, inquiries have shifted from matters related to the care for the dead to those related to care of the self. Of course, these are tightly connected with one another. Looking at the presence of the dead in the lives

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of émigré German Jews in the immediate aftermath of the war helps us understand not only the moral dilemmas of survivors but also how Jewish mourning practices were adapted to their needs. Cemeteries became an important liminal space that connected the dead with the survivors who were scattered all around the globe. The study of the care of the dead therefore helps us to understand the continuation of Jewish life in Germany and abroad after the Holocaust. Stefanie Fischer is a research associate at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main and the Center for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University Berlin. Her research interests include Jewish history, the history of trust and economics, and Holocaust history. In 2012, she earned a PhD from the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University Berlin. Her book on economic trust and antisemitic violence was awarded the Fraenkel Prize for an outstanding work of contemporary history from the Wiener Library in London (2012) and also received the Irma-Rosenberg Prize (2014).

Notes This chapter is part of a larger project on Jewish mourning practices after the Holocaust at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. I gratefully acknowledge financial and institutional assistance from the Selma Stern Center Berlin-Brandenburg, the Center for Research on Antisemitism, TU Berlin, the Fritz-Bauer-Institute at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, the Federal Ministry for Research and Education, and the Association for Jewish Studies. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, which I received for my research in 2017–18. 1. Paul Celan, “The Death Fugue” (Todesfuge, 1948), trans. Michael Hamburger. Retrieved 1 February 2021 from https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/death-fugue/. 2. Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000), 1. 3. Ibid., 63. 4. Michael Brenner, Nach dem Holocaust: Juden in Deutschland 1945–1950 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995); Jay H. Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrea Sinn, Jüdische Politik und Presse in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Tobias Freimüller, Frankfurt und die Juden: Neuanfänge und Fremdheitserfahrungen 1945–1990 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020). 5. Brenner, Nach dem Holocaust. 6. See for example Nathanja Hüttenmeister, Der jüdische Friedhof Ansbach: Eine Dokumentation (Ansbach: Bezirk Mittelfranken, 2008). 7. Robert A. Neimeyer, Holly G. Prigerson, and Betty Davies, “Mourning and Meaning,” American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 2 (2002): 235–51, doi:10.1177/000276402236676. 8. Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5. 9. This chapter relies on sources from the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main as well as of the Central Council of Jews in Germany that was founded in West Germany in 1950. These sources can be found in the collection of the Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main, stored in the Central Archive for the History of the Jews in Germany (Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland) in Heidelberg, collection: B.1/13. Further research into

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

the history of Jewish cemeteries in East Germany will allow us to draw a more nuanced picture of Jewish mourning practices after the Holocaust. Alon Confino, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann, “Introduction,” in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss:The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Alon Confino, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 13. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, “Introduction: Corpses and Mass Violence: An Inventory of the Unthinkable,” in Human Remains and Mass Violence: Methodological Approaches, ed. Élisabeth Gessat-Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 1–12. Margarete M. Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Laqueur, Work of the Dead. Monica Black uses a similar approach; see Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. See also Jonathan Webber, “A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory,” in Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland, ed. Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 238–63. Andreas Wirsching, “Jüdische Friedhöfe in Deutschland 1933–1957,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002): 19. Ibid., 21–22. Ibid., 31ff. Ibid., 3ff.; see also Peter Honigmann, “Vorwort,” Sammlung Friedhofsdokumentation, retrieved 17 January 2018 from http://zentralarchiv.uni-hd.de/FRIEDHOF/ALLGEM/vorwort.htm. Ibid. Heinrich Böll, And Never Said aWord (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1978), 108 (originally published as Und sagte kein einziges Wort. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1953). Many thanks to Jeremiah Riemer for helping me locate the English translation of this source. The Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main to Dr. Otto Weise, Frankfurt am Main, 13 June 1947, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13, A243. Stefanie Fischer, “Mit gemischten Gefühlen: Besuche von Holocaust-Überlebenden in ihren ehemaligen Heimatgemeinden,” Einsicht 19. Bulletin des Fritz Bauer Institut 10 (2018): 78–85. Alice Vogel-Bergen, New York, NY, to Rabbi Dr. Neuhaus, the Jewish community Frankfurt am Main, 4 April 1946, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13, A261. Due to the pandemic, access to sources from other archives was not possible. For example: Ludwig E. Rosenberg, Lincoln, NE to Dr. Neuhaus, the Jewish community Frankfurt am Main, 20 April 1946, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13, A260. Joseph Schneider an die Friedhofsgärtnerei der Israelitischen Gemeinde Frankfurt am Main, 3 October 1946, Chicago, IL, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B1./13, A240. [Jewish community Frankfurt am Main], [Fritz] Stei[n] to Joseph Schneider, Subject: Burial Site Caroline and Erna Schneider, 6 January 1947, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13, A240, Bl. 2-A-23/24. Joseph Schneider to Fritz Stein from the Jewish community Frankfurt am Main, Chicago, IL, 5 July 1947, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13, A240. Max Meyer, Jewish Community Frankfurt am Main to Fred Mainzer, 6 June 1947, Frankfurt am Main, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13 A729.

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31. Ibid. 32. Walter Cohn to Max Meyer, Jewish Community Frankfurt am Main, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13, A726. 33. Leo Löwenfels, Report for the Jewish community Frankfurt am Main [undated, approx. 1946– 48], Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13 578. 34. Ibid. 35. Leo Löwenfels to the executive board of the Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, 23 March 1947, Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Call Number: B.1/13 578. 36. This is a notion that I hope to investigate further when archives reopen following the pandemic. 37. Erica Lehrer’s unpublished comment as discussant on the panel “The Sacred on the Move: Mobility and Liminality in the Making of Jewish Objects and Spaces” at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in Washington, DC in December 2017. 38. Ibid. 39. See also Avriel Bar-Levav, “Jewish Attitudes towards Death: A Society between Time, Space and Texts,” in Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities, ed. Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnardt, and Avriel Bar-Levav (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 8–9. 40. Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 204–6; as cited in Black, Death in Berlin, 2. 41. Marina Warner, “Back from the Underworld,” London Review of Books 39, no. 16 (2017): 19–23, retrieved 21 October 2020 from https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/marina-warner/backfrom-the-underworld. 42. Confino, Betts, and Schumann, “Introduction,” 18. 43. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 10. 44. Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and Bertrand Badiou, Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan; With the Correspondences between Paul Celan and Max Frisch and between Ingeborg Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (London; New York: Seagull Books, 2010), 195 [originally published Lass uns die Worte finden: Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan Briefwechsel, ed. and commentaries in the German by Bertrand Badiou, Hans Holler, Andrea Stoll, Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008)]. Many thanks to Tobias Boes for helping me locate the English translation of this source.

Bibliography Bachmann, Ingeborg, Paul Celan, and Bertrand Badiou. Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan;With the Correspondences between Paul Celan and Max Frisch and between Ingeborg Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. New York: Seagull Books, 2010 [originally published as Lass uns die Worte finden: Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008)]. Bar-Levav, Avriel. “Jewish Attitudes towards Death: A Society between Time, Space and Texts.” In Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities, edited by Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnardt, and Avriel Bar-Levav, 3–16. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Black, Monica. Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Böll, Heinrich. And Never Said a Word. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1978 [originally published as Und sagte kein einziges Wort (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1953)]. Brenner, Michael. Nach dem Holocaust: Juden in Deutschland 1945–1950. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995. Central Archive for the History of the Jews in Germany (Zentralarchiv für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland) in Heidelberg, collection: B.1/13.

228 | STEFANIE FISCHER Confino, Alon, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann, eds. 2008. Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Dreyfus, Jean-Marc. “Introduction: Corpses and Mass Violence; An Inventory of the Unthinkable.” In Human Remains and Mass Violence: Methodological Approaches, edited by Élisabeth Gessat-Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, 1–12. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Feinstein, Margarete M. Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fischer, Stefanie. “Mit gemischten Gefühlen: Besuche von Holocaust-Überlebenden in ihren ehemaligen Heimatgemeinden.” Einsicht 19. Bulletin des Fritz Bauer Institut 10 (2018): 78–85. Freimüller,Tobias. Frankfurt und die Juden: Neuanfänge und Fremdheitserfahrungen 1945–1990. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020. Geller, Jay H. Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Honigmann, Peter. “Vorwort.” Sammlung Friedhofsdokumentation. Retrieved 17 January 2018 from http://zentralarchiv.uni-hd.de/FRIEDHOF/ALLGEM/vorwort.htm. Hüttenmeister, Nathanja. Der jüdische Friedhof Ansbach: Eine Dokumentation. Ansbach: Bezirk Mittelfranken, 2008. Lamm, Maurice. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000. Laqueur, Thomas W. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Lehrer, Erica T., and Michael Meng, eds. Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Neimeyer, Robert A., Holly G. Prigerson, and Betty Davies. “Mourning and Meaning.” American Behavioral Scientist 46 (2002): 235–51. Sinn, Andrea. Jüdische Politik und Presse in der frühen Bundesrepublik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Warner, Marina. “Back from the Underworld.” London Review of Books 39, no. 16 (2017): 19–23. Retrieved 21 October 2020 from https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/marina-warner/back-fromthe-underworld. Webber, Jonathan. “A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory.” In Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland, edited by Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng, 238–63. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Wirsching, Andreas. “Jüdische Friedhöfe in Deutschland 1933–1957.” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002): 1–40.

 CHAPTER 11

German-Jewish Fiction on the Holocaust The Ethics of Narrative Causality in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Disfigured Narration



Corey L. Twitchell

Narrative Theory and German-Jewish Fiction on the Holocaust German-Jewish imaginative fiction depicting events and experiences related to the Holocaust can be viewed as a corpus of texts that articulates and endeavors to respond to formidable, sometimes seemingly unresolvable questions about the history of the Nazi Judeocide. It further attempts to meet the many epistemological, ontological, and hermeneutic challenges that genocidal violence presents in the endeavor to conceptualize, portray, understand, and hopefully one day prevent it—all within the framework of the German language and in metaliterary conversation with the larger history of GermanJewish literature. When we think about the ethical dimensions of writing on the Holocaust, from our vantage point in the early twenty-first century, we might wonder how post-Holocaust German-Jewish authors, particularly in the decades immediately following World War II, navigated the potentially ethically thorny deployment of fictional discourse in their search for a discursivity capable of narrating Jewish suffering and the National Socialist pursuit of the destruction of Jewish lives and (German-)Jewish culture. One enduring question about Holocaust representation asks how narrative in the form of imaginative fiction, rather than ostensibly more strictly documentary narrative modes such as eyewitness testimony, can be appropriate and ethically responsible to the memory of Holocaust victims, as fiction typically invites the reader to identify with the protagonist and entails a certain amount of enjoyment in the act of reading.

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Rather than perhaps seeking to obstruct the pleasures of mimetic representation, post-Holocaust German-Jewish writers, including Edgar Hilsenrath, whom I discuss at some length in the second part of this chapter, frequently made use of literary forms rooted in German literary history, such as the Bildungsroman, fairy tales, the picaresque, and the Kafkaesque. By reshaping narrative features rooted in German-language literature of the past, including pre-World War II German- and Austrian-Jewish literature and culture, these writers confronted the representational challenges of the Shoah head-on, not only in the shape of the specific subject matter that they portrayed but also in the fabric of complex, often densely woven narrative strategies that they constructed for the purpose of framing and reflecting on this subject matter for a largely non-Jewish German-speaking audience. While narrative complexity is certainly not an uncommon literary trait in general, it comes as no surprise that German-Jewish Holocaust survivors and writers grappling with representing traumatic experiences, using the vehicle of the German language—the medium of the Nazi perpetrator—made use of sophisticated narrative structures for telling their stories, inextricably linked to historical violence and the human capacity for comprehending the past. Narratology, also known as narrative theory, provides a diverse set of critical tools that assist us in identifying and analyzing the discursive intricacies of German-Jewish fiction on the Holocaust.1 In the analytical framework that I bring to this body of work, I endeavor to contribute to the wider academic conversation taking place at the confluence of German studies and Holocaust studies, which has, in my view, produced some of the most dynamic scholarship on post-1945 German-Jewish history and literature.2 Widening the scope further to include the in-depth analysis of narrative structures, we find that narratology offers pathways for examining the foundational elements of narrative itself, including narrative address and audience, causality, character, narrator, perspective, plot, reflexivity, temporality, etc. The toolkit that narrative theory provides enables us to unpack a text’s narrativity—the particular narrative ecology that thrives in the interplay between a text’s thematic content and its formal structure. Narrativity is not just the accumulation of a process, as in the creation of a text composed of characters, which is, particularly in fictional discourse, framed by a narrator, but also a staging of this process, meaning that texts often point us in the right direction, showing us how to read and interpret them by providing clues or signals. These signposts take the shape of the narrative strategies that authors incorporate into their works. In my approach to German-Jewish writing after and on the Holocaust, I am particularly interested in texts that feature autodiegetic narrators, i.e., character-narrators, who tell the story we receive while also playing the role of protagonist in the diegesis, or storyworld.3 For example, a memorable iteration of autodiegetic narration can be found in Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau” (The Burrow).4 In his final story, published posthumously in 1931, a sentient mole-like creature functions both as paranoid first-person narrator and anxious main character, caught up in an endless process of bolstering the structural integrity of the eponymous burrow’s fortifications in defense against an unidentifiable adversary. As a pre-Holocaust German-language Jewish author who gained

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massive (international) recognition during the interwar and postwar periods, due in large part to his modernist idiom of alienation, not to mention his narratively knotty literary output, Kafka has been a source of inspiration for countless writers, including those seeking inventive narrative means for representing the Holocaust. As such, he provides a felicitous point of departure for the analysis of the narrative complexities of post-Holocaust German-Jewish fiction. Narrative theory allows us to identify the distinct but also sometimes overlapping levels that constitute the discrete structure of a particular narrative, such as the interplay between the character-narrator’s consciousness and the cramped space of the burrow in “Der Bau.” Narrators can inhabit or have access to multiple diegetic levels. Autodiegetic narrators typically exist on the extradiegetic level, which is “positioned” above or outside the diegesis. From this perspective, they act in and supervise the portrayal of the storyworld, while simultaneously addressing the audience, sometimes referred to as the “narratee” and often understood as some incarnation of the reader. Within this framework, autodiegetic narrators filter our access to the diegesis. From their vantage point on the extradiegetic level, serving as the conduit between the fictional world of the diegesis and the real-life world of the author and reader, narrators propel the process of causality, or the chain of narrative cause and effect. I am captivated first and foremost by narrators whose manipulation of causality signals larger questions regarding a text’s narrativity and its position with respect to narrative ethics. A work of Holocaust fiction that employs an unreliable autodiegetic narrator is likely working to call attention in a self-reflexive manner to the logic that said narrator employs to tell the story. The specific constellation of author, narrator, character, and audience present in a particular narrative serves as a locus both for portraying and in turn commenting on this portrayal of the Holocaust. A greater and more nuanced understanding of narrative causality would prove significant to German-Jewish studies moving forward, as causality is a core procedure in the apparatus of all narratives.5 Narrative causality emerges from the process of reading. We typically rely on the narrator to relate a story, and in turn we ascribe a logical sequence to the chain of events that the narrator depicts. Humans eagerly establish these meaningful connections from one narrative cluster to the next, hence the “durability or long-lastingness of narrative as an instrument of mind.”6 Since narratives cannot reasonably supply the reader with every single detail of a given story, and because the cognitive processes that we access when reading gloss over any lacunae in what is depicted, we tend to be especially tenacious in our “imputing [of] causal relations,”7 which is to say, in our search for cohesion in the texts we consume. Any gaps in the information that the narrator presents are often filled in by the larger process of imbrication that takes place in the operations of narrative, fueled by the interaction between the reader and the written text. But we would be wise to take time to question these gaps, especially when the information that a narrator communicates seems contradictory, exaggerated, or glaringly incomplete. For example, a character-narrator who commits criminal acts in the storyworld might go to some lengths in the process of narration to hamper the reader’s cognizance of the full scope of these acts (think:

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Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita). As Emma Kafalenos argues in her scholarship on narrative causality: “Missing information matters because we interpret and reinterpret events, from moment to moment, on the basis of the information that is available to us at that moment.”8 The reader interprets events in a text and negotiates gaps retrospectively by way of “configurations.”9 Kafalenos explains that when we read, we construct these configurations, which entails mentally stringing together the pieces of information that we perceive in the text, adding each new piece that we encounter to what we have already read. We assume that narrated events are related to one another in some way, and as such we are constantly attempting to extract meaning from the sequence of events that forms narrative.10 At any one point in a text, we seek to understand what we have read thus far, because “to comprehend events as a configuration is to grasp a number of events as a single complex of relationships.”11 We therefore rely upon the process of configuration as a cornerstone for interpreting what we read. The cognitive process of reading a text involves a continuous renegotiation of causality, which is further complicated if the storyteller engages in any sort of narratorial unreliability. As such, analyzing causality motivates us to be attuned to narrative voice. It is helpful to conceptualize voice in narration in both acoustic and visual terms. We “hear” the voice of the narrator who vocalizes the thoughts and words uttered by the story’s characters while also typically addressing the audience in the form of a monologue, which may at times mimic a dialogue with an imagined interlocutor. Further, we “see” the story through the lens or viewpoint that the narrator fabricates. Understood aurally and optically, narrative voice commands our attention and imparts a sensory-rich experience. Due to their authoritative presence, narrators might, at first glance, seem to communicate to us in a straightforward manner, without the use of subterfuge, effectively telling and showing us everything we need to know. But narrators also have the capacity to manipulate the configurations that we assemble in our endeavor to make sense of the storyworld. While the confrontation with an unreliable narrator who seeks to throw a monkey wrench into the mechanics of narrative causality may make for an unsettling involvement with the text, this sort of slippage can be an important tool for a writer who wishes to problematize how we perceive fictional narratives about the Holocaust. For an example of an author who strategically distorts narrative causality for the purpose of drawing attention to the power dynamic between the narrator’s presentation and the reader’s consumption of a narrative, let us look no further than Holocaust survivor and German-Jewish writer Edgar Hilsenrath.

Edgar Hilsenrath’s Disfigured Narration In a New York Times obituary dated 3 January 2019, Sam Roberts remarked that Edgar Hilsenrath “unsentimentally stoked the embers of the Holocaust with brutally satirical autobiographical novels” by “un-self-consciously challeng[ing] more conventional

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and deferential post-World War II accounts about the victims of Nazi atrocities.”12 The scholarship on Hilsenrath to date has theorized his “unvarnished” approach to writing about the Holocaust, using concepts such as “carnivalesque,” “grotesque,” “picaresque,” and “transgressive.”13 Each of these terms accurately denotes crucial aspects of Hilsenrath’s fiction. In my work on the author, I identify and investigate a single, overarching concept that weaves together all Hilsenrath’s works, one that unifies and advances the aforementioned theoretical language: disfigurement. In his Holocaust fiction, Hilsenrath employs “disfigurement” as a narrative strategy, for the purpose of portraying the overlapping deleterious physical and psychological effects that historical violence exerts not only on victims but also on those who perpetrate it. Hilsenrath’s aim is certainly not to exculpate those responsible for and complicit in orchestrating violence; rather, he seeks to comprehend perpetrators and the effects of their motivations and actions more fully. Both thematically and on the level of narrative structure, Hilsenrath “disfigures” his characters and the stories his narrators tell as a way of investigating complex ethical questions raised in the postwar period related to Nazi aggressors and the victims of National Socialism. In Hilsenrath’s works, both Jewish victims and Nazi perpetrators are rendered disfigured, transformed by violence, despite being on opposite ends of the victim-perpetrator spectrum. In other words, by developing this poetics of deformation,14 Hilsenrath rewrites commonly held assumptions about good and evil regarding the Holocaust and other instances of genocidal violence. Throughout his oeuvre, Hilsenrath’s characters and narrators make justifications for deeds that, when analyzed closely, do not sync up with the apparent reasons given for these actions. Hilsenrath’s novels thus experiment with narrative causality as a method for exploring how perpetrators conceptualize violence and its impact on the victims whose lives it touches. In Hilsenrath’s narrative universe, the character-narrators and non-narrating characters display or claim a wide array of disfigurements and conditions, including exaggeratedly adipose or emaciated bodies, amputated limbs, bulging eyes, gargantuan genitalia, head wounds, hunchbacks, and scarification, all of which are characteristic or symptomatic of the trauma that they inflict or is inflicted upon them. In this way, Hilsenrath creates characters whose physical disfigurements mirror their damaged and impaired mental states, as well as their distortion of narrative causality. Their injured, misshapen physicality is thus an embodiment of his overarching poetics of deformation. This disfigured writing, which has defied easy categorization throughout the history of the reception of his work, sutures together the physical and psychological impact of violence, laying bare the disjunction that genocide leaves in its wake. By disfiguring key characters throughout his body of literature, Hilsenrath complicates the categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander—the triad of identities that have often dominated post-Holocaust discussions regarding German wartime aggression and postwar guilt. Beginning with his first novel Nacht (Night) in 1964 and continuing throughout his literary career, Hilsenrath created, I argue, a vanguard approach to Holocaust rep-

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resentation that unsettles a static understanding of categories of identification. His writing anticipated conversations about genocidal violence and its representation in fictional discourse that we are still having today. In my current work, I tease out how Hilsenrath’s narrators and characters, often analyzed in dichotomous terms of “victims” and “perpetrators,” are not only victims and perpetrators but also disfigured subjects whose identities are more complex than a binary framework can recognize and therefore require more thorough scholarly investigation. Hilsenrath’s narrative universe is populated by characters whose disfigured, often fluctuating, fractious forms signal to us through their exaggerated physicality that, rather than inhabiting fixed identities that would allow us to label them as either/or (victim or perpetrator), they possess qualities belonging to both categories. In other words, the author presents us with victims who sometimes also perpetrate, as well as perpetrators who also are or have been victimized (or at least claim to be). As such, a crucial, and to a large degree unconventional, aspect of Hilsenrath’s fiction is his unabashed exploration in narrative of the consciousness not only of Holocaust victims but also of perpetrators. The first-person narrators in his works, which include perpetrators and other morally compromised figures, address the reader directly, as a way of contextualizing and justifying their often ethically murky actions. Hilsenrath’s narratives unsettle what we as readers have generally come to expect from Holocaust literature, i.e., stories of hope and personal redemption, provoking us to rethink the mechanics according to which historical violence operates and the effects it has on the people who, on the one hand, experience and, on the other hand, commit this violence. In his second and arguably best-known novel, Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the Barber),15 a dark caricature of relationships between perpetrators and their victims both during and after the Holocaust, Hilsenrath constructs an autodiegetic narrator named Max Schulz who, as a member of the SS and a guard at a concentration camp, kills innumerable people and evades detection and judicial prosecution following the end of World War II. He does so by stealing the identity of one of his victims, a Jewish childhood friend named Itzig Finkelstein.16 Schulz, in the guise of Finkelstein, masquerades as a Holocaust survivor and immigrates to Israel. Perhaps even more insidious than the acts of perpetration and subsequent identity theft (within the text’s fictional discourse) is the perpetrator’s blatant ethical disregard for his victims and their experiences. As a key aspect of his unreliable narration, Max attempts to create a causal link between his own childhood trauma in the form of physical and sexual abuse, which resulted in a fractured skull that never fully healed, and his subsequent decision to become a National Socialist and then a ruthless murderer. Schulz attempts to convince the reader that he was in fact a victim, for the purpose of constructing a post-perpetrator identity that allows him to admit his crimes while simultaneously avoiding taking responsibility for them. Hilsenrath’s novel thus questions our ability to categorize individuals according to a neatly drawn victim-perpetrator dichotomy. Erin McGlothlin explains Max Schulz’s

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heinous, albeit narratively intricate deed: “By murdering Itzig and assuming his identity and living out the life that he brutally robbed of Itzig, Max commits a particularly vituperative act of identity theft, a brutal expropriation of the life of one individual that functions as a synecdoche for both his massacre of multiple victims and the Nazis’ project of destroying and effacing from memory millions of European Jews.”17 In narrating his many crimes, Max demonstrates over the course of the novel a tendency toward flight, both physically and psychologically. He flees the permanence of, and the culpability involved with, self-identification as a perpetrator by cycling back and forth between identities and subject positions, a tactic that assists him in claiming at various points in the novel status as both Holocaust perpetrator and Holocaust survivor. In constructing a character-narrator who bifurcates his personality for the purpose of avoiding what would be for him the trap of a fixed identity as perpetrator with the concomitant guilt and responsibility, Hilsenrath appears to evoke, in satirical form, a pattern of behavior common in postwar Germany among Nazi perpetrators (and among many other Germans with varying degrees of complicity vis-à-vis the Nazi past) that Gesine Schwan terms “destructive splitting.”18 Schwan argues that the failure to come clean regarding the exact nature of one’s guilt and one’s participation in the crimes of National Socialism often led to a psychological state that was marked (and harmed) by the strain of contradiction, by the split between the acknowledgment of what one knew to be true and what one was willing to admit.19 One significant distinction between Schwan’s real-life subjects and Hilsenrath’s narrator is that Max willingly narrates his past and refers to the crimes he committed. He does not, however, explicitly accept responsibility for them. Max strives to force open an interstice between the categories of victim and perpetrator, not because he endeavors to challenge critically the assumption of a strictly dichotomous relationship between the two in order to uncover the lies maintained by the society around him, but for the purpose of deferring rhetorically the repercussions of accepting responsibility for his crimes. If Schulz were to admit direct culpability for the full scope of the role he played in the “Final Solution,” he could be prosecuted and potentially executed.20 Max attempts to create this interstitial space by establishing a bifurcated identity as both victim and perpetrator within the larger context of a practice of disfigured narration, ostensibly linked to the abuse he suffered as a child. His elaborate strategy for evading detection and responsibility in the post-Holocaust period by living in the pilfered guise of one of his victims operates as a narrative iteration of the self that perpetrated war crimes during the Holocaust. And while Max’s manipulation of narration and performance of multiple identities are certainly not tantamount to the original crime of murder, his self-contradicting narratorial habit of switching between opposing subject positions for the purpose of evading guilt reinforces for the reader his status as mass murderer and war criminal, thus reaffirming his identity as perpetrator. We observe this practice of dual identification as both perpetrator and victim as Max recounts a particularly monstrous scene of trauma and victimization. Hilsenrath strategically inflects Max’s autodiegetic voice as a mouthpiece for gut-wrenching imag-

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ery that commingles the representation of genocidal violence with that of other forms of brutality. In narrating his childhood at the beginning of Der Nazi und der Friseur, Max describes patterns of physical and sexual abuse that he suffered at the hands of his stepfather, a man named Slavitzki. Max’s mother, Minna Schulz, moves with her son into Slavitzki’s basement apartment-cum-dilapidated barbershop. One night, when Minna spurns her partner’s sexual advances, he violently attacks her infant son: Can you imagine the extent of such a crime? I, Max Schulz, just seven weeks old, future mass-murderer, at the time, however, innocent lay like an angel in my new cradle, the washbasin, the same washbasin into which Slavitzki habitually peed, but which was now dry because my mother had wiped it off. There I lay wrapped in warm diapers, covered up and tucked in, sleeping peacefully, dreaming of my friends the angels. Dreaming and smiling I was suddenly wrenched from my sleep, and thrown into the air . . . wanted to shout to the angels perhaps, but couldn’t shout, my eyes flew open in horror, out of sheer terror I wet my diapers, nearly choked on a bad swallow, threw up my mother’s milk on to Slavitzki’s hand, stretched out my tiny hands and legs to defend my innocence, saw Slavitzki’s mighty instrument without knowing what it was, began mumbling prayers even though I had not yet learned to pray, wanted to die, longed to be back into the dark but secure womb of my mother . . . then all of a sudden landed on my stomach on top of the barber’s chair, the one in front of the washbasin.21 In this markedly disturbing episode, Max invites his audience to imagine the magnitude of a crime that arguably most, if not all, readers would find unimaginable: the anal rape of a male infant perpetrated by a paternal figure. Anticipating that his interlocutor will find the topic anathema and taboo, Hilsenrath’s narrator supplies this scene, I contend, for the purpose of disarming the reader, performing “an impudent candor” that “characterizes his narration.”22 Max follows up his call for the reader to imagine this scene—and thus empathize with him—by providing a detailed depiction of his physical and emotional reaction to what Slavitzki does to him. Max depicts this scene of sexual abuse with an intensity of detail and level of sophistication to which no baby has access. Humans cannot remember and therefore cannot narrate their own experience as infants; nevertheless, Max depicts this incident of trauma as if he has direct, unhampered access to the memory. He thus claims to be capable of accomplishing the impossible—yet another signal of unreliable narration. Max provides us at this moment with a crucial autobiographical detail but fails to furnish the means to integrate this scene of sexual abuse and its exaggerated character into our comprehension, either with respect to the events related or with respect to his role as narrator. As readers, we rely upon the narrator to provide information necessary for filling in epistemological gaps. His reference to his subsequent adult identity as mass murderer stands in stark contrast to this scene of childhood abuse. Indeed, he offers

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no framework for his method of telling; he makes no mention of the fact that his narration—to be plausible—would have to arise entirely out of imagination. While we might imagine that Max bases this detailed representation on the memory of abusive incidents that took place at a later point in life when he was old enough to be a conscious subject and therefore physically and psychologically capable of having memory of said incidents, Max offers us no information to corroborate a hypothesis such as this. It’s not the emotional content of the depiction of the primal scene of sexual abuse that provides cause for doubt but rather the veneer of verisimilitude to which Max as narrator ostensibly clings. Instead of providing an interpretive framework for his audience or an explanation that his adult self is strategically contriving impossible childhood memories through the act of telling, Max feigns recognition of his unreliability, interjecting: “I know what you’re saying, ‘Max Schulz is going off his rocker! A nightmare! Nothing but a nightmare!’”23 But in admitting that he realizes that he appears psychologically untenable, he sidesteps the need for explanation by introducing into his monologue a moment of “dialogue” with the reader. Reacting to his audience’s likely disbelief, he sums up his terrifying depiction with a series of rhetorical questions: “But why do you insist on that? Is it not true that God invented innocence in order to have it trampled in the mud . . . here on earth? And is it not true that the weak and defenseless are always trodden upon by the strong, clubbed to the ground, raped, despised, buggered?”24 He concludes this series of questions with, “And if it is so . . . why is it that you maintain that Max Schulz is going off his rocker?”25 In this passage, Max aggressively counters accusations of unreliability by underscoring his status as victim, aligning himself with anonymous others who have also been unable to defend themselves in the face of violence. But it is crucial to note here that Hilsenrath’s narrator demands that we acknowledge the veracity of the abuse he suffered as a child with his assertion that it is not unique in human history. This acknowledgment, in turn, also entails absolving him of the charge of insanity—or at least narratorial mendacity. When we look closely, however, we realize that this rhetorical turn is a further ploy in Max’s deception. As readers, we don’t necessarily question that the abuse occurred—simply Max’s method for depicting it. Max’s rhetorical gesture of constructing a kind of artificial “conversation” between himself as narrator and the narratee mimics dialogic exchange between discrete subjectivities. However, in playing both conversational partners, Max calculatingly conceals his monologic shaping of the narration under the guise of shared dialogue, a rhetorical strategy that I designate monologic dialogue.26 Max’s self-positioning as child victim is muddled by his simultaneous self-identification as mass murderer. In relating his reaction to Slavitzki’s violence, he declares: “I, Max Schulz, future mass-murderer, at the time, however innocent, let out a scream which would strike to any marrow.”27 Here, Max once again refers to himself as mass murderer, this time adding the adjective “future,” thus implying that his victimized child-self grew up to become a future-self that committed murder on a mass scale. These references to his future criminal activity remind us that his autobiographical

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account constitutes not only a memoir of childhood victimization but also one of perpetration. In his study of Nazi memoirs, Alan Rosen analyzes the complex ethical dimension with which readers of these notorious autobiographical texts contend. Rosen argues that as readers, aware of the memoirist’s criminal past, we automatically approach such a text “with some hesitation . . . unsure whether the destruction of which the authors are capable might find its way into the narratives they compose,” and are “apprehensive lest these criminals convince [us] they are less evil than universally assumed.”28 As a result of this hesitation, the dynamics of identification between the reader and the autobiographical text’s narrating-I are complicated. The relationship between reader and Nazi memoir, according to Rosen’s argument, is one marked by antipathy rather than empathy.29 As readers of Der Nazi und der Friseur, we experience a tension analogous to the one that Rosen describes. Max’s deployment of autobiographical conventions invites us, particularly in view of these early scenes depicting the abuse that he suffered as a child, to empathize with him as victim and survivor of sexual abuse. On the other hand, Max’s unreliability, his willful manipulation of the narration, coupled with his self-identification as a future perpetrator, provide us reason enough to begin cultivating doubt and recognizing an impulse against empathy and toward antipathy—which is also a form of identification, albeit a negative one. As the reader encounters contradictory narrative cues, some that invite empathy while others antipathy, the dynamics of identification take on a dialectical dimension. Central to Rosen’s investigation of Nazi autobiographical texts is his incorporation of one penned by Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss while in prison. In Höss’s text, Rosen identifies a particularly insidious rhetorical strategy whereby Höss’s narrating-I manipulates the narration of an event in order to cast himself as victim and downplay his actual, historical role as perpetrator: “This pattern of reversal, in which victimizer becomes victim, surfaces regularly in Höss’s memoir, most notably—and, for the reader, excruciatingly—when Höss, as commander of Auschwitz, bemoans the terrible scenes he is compelled to witness.”30 Rosen’s analysis provides insight for my discussion of Hilsenrath’s novel, for I assert that Max’s narratorial manipulation involves a rhetorical strategy similar to Höss’s. While the reader of Höss’s memoir approaches the text with prior knowledge regarding the nature of his crimes and thus knows beforehand that he is a Holocaust perpetrator (despite his slippery attempts to claim the contrary), Max introduces in the depiction of his childhood, even before he relates the crimes he commits later in life as an adult, a similar “pattern of reversal,” according to which he switches back and forth between what are often understood—for good reason—as diametrically opposed subject positions. In one moment he refers to himself as a future perpetrator, and in the next he goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate his victimization, perpetrated by his insidious stepfather and tacitly supported by his ethically reprehensible mother. Keeping Rosen’s “pattern of reversal” in mind, let us imagine Max’s practice of self-identification that we have seen thus far as a mechanism positioned on an axis that can be rotated and then reversed at a moment’s notice or from

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one sentence to the next, allowing him to navigate the narrative without the need to explain the true nature of his intentions in constructing this autobiographical account. And having established this pattern or mechanism at the beginning of the novel within the greater context of narratorial unreliability, Max is able throughout the rest of the text to sidestep the logical expectation on the part of the reader that his narrating-I represents a fixed identity. Following his narration of the episode of abuse, Hilsenrath’s disfigured narrator makes frequent reference to his “Dachschaden.” While this German word literally means “roof damage,” it also has a colloquial meaning analogous to the English expression “to have a hole in the head” or “to have a screw loose.” Hilsenrath establishes Schulz’s “roof damage,” i.e., his head injury, as a trope that reminds the reader of the physical and psychic damage that he incurred because of systematic sexual abuse perpetrated by his stepfather.31 Like a Homeric epithet, Max employs the image of the loose screw within the larger context of his complex methodology of self-narration. I argue that we must read Max’s construction of and elaboration on the trope of the “loose screw” within this larger context of his manipulative and unreliable narratorial practice. Let’s return to McGlothlin’s analysis of Max’s narration. Borrowing and expanding upon Andreas Graf’s terminology, she illustrates that Max’s manipulation of narrative voice and his “markedly self-conscious unreliability” are features of a “pathological narration.”32 Taking Graf and McGothlin’s taxonomy of pathology as a point of departure, I propose the further expansion of the biomedical metaphor to discuss Max’s narration as disfigured. Because of his unreliability and his penchant for describing grotesque, exaggerated human bodies that perform acts of unspeakable violence, it comes as no surprise that his narrative practice—though not necessarily his consciousness per se—lends itself to being understood in terms of medicine or hygiene, as the product of a seemingly neurologically impaired brain. The term “disfigured” denotes both Max’s portrayal of his subjectivity as wounded or impaired on account of his brutalization and rape as a young child and his narration, since he manipulates narrative voice to present a split subjectivity, often claiming to be two people at once: Max Schulz and Itzig Finkelstein. Whether or not Max as the narrating figure or the “I” that shapes the text that we read actually suffers from a medical condition or illness is less critical to my analysis than the fact that he wants the reader to draw a connection between the extreme nature of the childhood trauma he suffered and the “loose screw” that he illustrates as a permanent part of his psychological makeup. Whenever he deploys the trope of Dachschaden, Schulz forces us to consider the psychic link between this original injury and the later context in which it appears, whether it be when he depicts his experiences in school or when he is enraptured by one of Hitler’s speeches and becomes an enthusiastic National Socialist.33 Max seems to “suppress” certain crucial data, even while relating a scene or an event that otherwise appears rich in detail. We now return to Kafalenos’s concept of configuration, introduced at the beginning of this chapter. Max tells us that he was physically and sexually abused as a child, suffering permanent damage as a result. Later, as young man, he became an ardent supporter of the Nazi regime and even joined the ranks of

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the SS. All the while, this loose screw was rattling around in his head. The “configuration” that Max thus invites us to draw is a causal connection between his victimization and his later perpetration. But if we consider the sequence of information more closely, we see how Max strategically leaves critical gaps in the information that he presents. The “loose screw” does not account for the murders he commits, nor does it explain his transformation from enthusiastic acolyte of the National Socialist regime into Holocaust perpetrator. Indeed, he does not explain how he passed the rigorous standards for admission into the notorious SS, and he even informs us that he will not explain how it all happened: My former German teacher Siegfried von Salzstange said to me once: “Max Schulz. Everybody who can fart can get into the brown SA. But not in the SS!” Because the SS, that was the union of the “Black Puritans,” the elite of the new Germany. For mice like Max Schulz, who did not look like supermen, but like inferior mortals . . . yes, that’s what they looked like, really no joking . . . who looked as though they would not be able to understand the ethics of genocide . . . never understand it . . . for them admission to the SS was anything but easy. What did I say? Not easy? That’s right. That’s what I said. However, I have to add here that good connections often play a decisive role in life.34 Here, the ellipses in the original text ironically speak louder than words. Max inserts into his narration his hesitation—his pauses to consider carefully how he wishes to proceed. Hilsenrath gestures toward what his narrator leaves out, hinting to us that there is more to the story than is being revealed. We are supposed to be satisfied with the explanation that his former teacher had the right connections and that Max somehow passed “through the mill of racial and background investigation by the black corps.”35 It is important to note here that Max endeavors a few pages later to downplay his role in the SS, even asserting that the SS victimized and used him much like his stepfather had once done: “The SS would not let me go. They needed me just as Slavitzki always needed me. They needed my hands. And they needed my ass too as something that could be stuck out for the blow that one day would come when the bandwagon lost its momentum, the bandwagon which we all wanted to jump on and make history.”36 Max casts himself in the role of the victim of history and of the machinations of his superiors rather than accepting his portion of the responsibility and admitting to his complicity and to his willing involvement in this history. For having a disfigurement in the form of his loose screw does not extenuate the fact that he consciously chose to participate in the SS, and it also does not nullify his subsequent role in the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” The autodiegetic narrator’s loose screw does not explain his motivations for willingly participating in murdering thousands of Jewish victims as a member of an Einsatzgruppe, nor does it elucidate his thought process when he serves as a guard in a Nazi

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concentration camp. Something is missing from his account. Hilsenrath’s narrator implicitly explains, and perhaps attempts to justify, his transformation into murderer and perpetrator by relying on the amorphous, unspecific concept of Dachschaden, instead of engaging in an explicit investigation of what he was thinking and experiencing when said transformation took place. The loose screw (ostensibly) results from something that happened to him as a passive, helpless victim, but it cannot account for the decisions that he actively makes as an independent, autonomous subject, however much he attempts to convince the reader of its applicability. Max’s disfigurement in the form of the loose screw, a euphemism that he repeatedly employs to evoke and simultaneously downplay both his physical and mental damage, is therefore a red herring rather than a reliable factor for interpreting his behavior in the diegetic world. It does, however, assist us in further developing an understanding of his behavior as narrator and his disfigured narration. McGlothlin argues that Max transgresses both in the diegesis and as a narrator on the extradiegetic level for the purpose of evading criminal prosecution and deferring responsibility for his crimes as mass murderer and Holocaust perpetrator.37 I view the trope of the loose screw within the context of Hilsenrath’s narratorial practice, because Max’s subtle manipulation of a story regarding unspeakable sexual abuse perpetrated against him as a child—the implied reason for why he later became a murderer—is nothing if not transgressive. Max’s disfigured narration allows him to perform the role of mentally unstable criminal in the diegesis and psychologically disturbed narrator in the extradiegesis—even if the narrating-I is, as I suspect, not actually “crazy” but is in fact extremely clever and conscious of the rhetorical strategies he deploys for evading guilt and responsibility. By constructing a text in which a Nazi can don the identity of his murder victim, Hilsenrath bitterly satirizes postwar German memory culture, laying bare contradictions and problems, such as the “destructive splitting” that Schwan describes. We are reminded that the case of Max Schulz, while an extreme, exaggerated one, is rooted in historical reality. Similar to the real-life Nazi perpetrators who provide the historical basis for Hilsenrath’s Holocaust perpetrator, Max Schulz evades punishment and escapes detection, enjoying an outward appearance in the postwar period that engages publicly with an anonymous, collective past without being forced to come clean regarding the true nature of his complicity, i.e., the murders he committed, in the shaping of said past.

Reverberations To return to my discussion of narrative perspective at the beginning of this chapter, Der Nazi und der Friseur produces a distinctly grotesque visual and raucous aural encounter with the text that encourages a visceral response from the reader. Max’s disfigurement in the form of the loose screw, or broken shingle (Dachschaden), evokes the sight of

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something jagged and sharp, as well as the sound of something scraping or clattering. If we consider Hilsenrath’s novel specifically in terms of sound, i.e., the metaphorical audibility engendered by narrative features such as the voice of the narrator and the speech acts of the characters, this novel reverberates with a jarring sense of cacophony. The author constructs a textual disharmony that melds aggravating sounds, a stream of highly unpleasant events, and overlapping narrative levels into a mad symphony of subject positions inhabited by a narrating-I that prefers disjuncture, flight, and incoherence over the singularity of a stable, integrated, recognizable identity. In doing so, Hilsenrath gestures not only toward the profound sense of rupture often associated with the Holocaust but also to the asymmetrical history of Jews in German and Austrian society. Der Nazi und der Friseur serves as a reminder of the harsh reality that German-Jewish efforts to engage in a sustained, mutually beneficial dialogue with non-Jewish Germans were frequently stymied. Given his personal experience of rupture in the form of internment in a ghetto and multiple geographic displacements during and after the Holocaust, not to mention the “negative symbiosis”38 that overshadowed his publishing and reception history in the postwar German context, Hilsenrath can hardly be faulted for the skepticism that permeates his literary output. Hilsenrath’s subversion of certain conventions of Holocaust literature, including his resistance to perpetuating calcified conceptions of the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator,” resulted in a body of work that has often perplexed and even unnerved some readers—arguably a reason why Hilsenrath’s novels have remained largely understudied and undertheorized for years, especially in comparison to other (nonJewish) German authors such as Günter Grass, whose deployment of the figure of the unreliable narrator has received considerable praise for the sharp criticism of postwar German society that it crystalizes. The tide of reception, however, seems to be turning in Hilsenrath’s favor, with critics and scholars approaching his work anew, using fresh perspectives and analytical tools. Moreover, Hilsenrath’s disfigured character-narrators are being increasingly understood as literary antecedents to the fictional Holocaust perpetrators that appear, for example, in recent novels by Martin Amis and Jonathan Littell.39 To my mind, Hilsenrath’s highly sophisticated narratives can function as indispensable instruments for arriving at a more exhaustive examination of the cultural, social, and historical entanglements of victimization and perpetration. Corey L. Twitchell is assistant professor of German and director of the German program at Southern Utah University. In addition to instructing all German courses at SUU, he teaches courses on film and the history and representation of the Holocaust. His primary research focus is post-Holocaust German-Jewish literature and culture. He has written on Jurek Becker, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Ruth Klüger, and Fred Wander. He is currently working on a book project that explores rhetorical strategies related to disfigurement in the fiction of Edgar Hilsenrath. His research employs analytical tools and insights from German studies and Holocaust studies, as well as narrative theory.

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Notes This chapter proceeds from my current book project, which examines Edgar Hilsenrath and the narrative strategies of his Holocaust fiction. I am grateful for the energizing support that I received from the Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin in the form of the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Award to help bring this project to fruition. 1. Particularly worthwhile systematic introductions to narrative theory include H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). 2. My approach is indebted to the trailblazing work of scholars who have brought German-Jewish studies and Holocaust studies together into an ongoing, productive dialogue; for examples, see Katja Garloff, Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005); Kirstin Gwyer, Encrypting the Past: The German-Jewish Holocaust Novel of the First Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Leslie Morris and Zack Zipes, eds., Unlikely History:The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Erin McGlothlin and Jennifer M. Kapczynski, eds., Persistent Legacy:The Holocaust and German Studies (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016). 3. For further explanation of the term “autodiegetic,” see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 245. In addition to Der Nazi und der Friseur, examples of postwar German-Jewish texts that feature autodiegetic narrators include, but are not limited to, Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s novels Paradies der falschen Vögel (Paradise of the fake birds, 1953) and Tynset (1965); Jakov Lind’s novella Eine Seele aus Holz (A Soul of Wood, 1962); and Fred Wander’s novel Der siebente Brunnen (The Seventh Well, 1971). For more on autodiegetic narration, specifically in the context of Holocaust fiction that depicts the consciousness of the perpetrator, see Erin McGlothlin, “Empathetic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response,” Narrative 24, no. 3 (October 2016): 251–76. 4. Franz Kafka, “Der Bau,” Erzählungen (Farnkfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996), 465–507. 5. Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 11–12. 6. David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 228. 7. Ibid., 236. 8. Emma Kafalenos, “Not (Yet) Knowing: Epistemological Effects of Deferred and Suppressed Information in Narrative,” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 35. 9. Ibid., 38–41. 10. Ibid., 39. 11. Ibid. Kafalenos further explains the process by which we mentally organize and digest information that we receive while reading: “We understand events, I shall argue, by viewing them as elements in chronological and causal chains of events. First, we organize the events we know about in a chronological sequence, and then we look for possible causal relations among the chronologically ordered events. We consider whether there is an event or events in the sequence we have constructed that could have caused subsequent events or been caused by prior events. When information that an event has occurred is deferred or suppressed, the event is missing from the chronological sequence that perceivers construct. If the missing event is crucial, the causal relations that seem to obtain among the known events are different from the causal relations one would be able to perceive if information about the missing event were available.” 12. Sam Roberts, “Edgar Hilsenrath, 92, Writer of Unvarnished Holocaust Novels, Dies,” New York Times, 3 January 2019, 12. 13. See Dietrich Dopheide, Das Groteske und der schwarze Humor in den Romanen Edgar Hilsenraths (Berlin: Weißensee, 2000); Andreas Graf, “Mörderisches Ich: Zur Pathologie der Erzählperspektive

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

in Edgar Hilsenraths Der Nazi und der Friseur,” in Das Unerzählbare erzählen, ed. Thomas Kraft (Munich: Piper, 1996), 135–49; Robert Lawson, “Carnivalism in Postwar Austrian- and GermanJewish Literature—Edgar Hilsenrath, Irene Dische, and Doron Rabinovici,” Seminar 43, no. 1 (February 2007): 37–48; Bernhard Malkmus, The German Picaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter (New York: Continuum, 2011); Erin McGlothlin, “Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse,” The German Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 220–39. In my exploration of disfigurement in Hilsenrath’s fiction, I build upon Anne Fuchs’s analysis of deformed bodies in her book chapter “Bad Boys and Evil Witches: Gender and Abjection in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur”; see Anne Fuchs, A Space of Anxiety: Dislocation and Abjection in Modern German-Jewish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 163–77. Hilsenrath originally penned the novel in German, but due to the vicissitudes of the publishing industry and the many geographic displacements that he experienced during his lifetime, the novel appeared first in 1971 in English translation, while the German original was not published until six years later in 1977. The name “Itzig” has a fraught history in German-Jewish culture. “Itzig” is the last name of a prominent German-Jewish family, whose patriarch Daniel Itzig (1723–99) gained considerable wealth and political influence by serving two Prussian kings as a “court Jew.” While the name has positive associations in German-Jewish history, especially given the role that the Itzig family played in working to improve the lives and social status of fellow Jews in the Prussian realm, “Itzig” has also been woven into the German language as an antisemitic slur. The name Itzig signifies a Fremdkörper, a foreign body, more specifically a German Jew who cannot be fully integrated into German language or culture and therefore perpetually remains, from a non-Jewish German perspective, the outsider. As such, in German literature and popular culture, especially in the nineteenth century, “Itzig” is frequently cast as a villain, usually a stereotypical Jewish character who parasitically feeds off virtuous, unsuspecting non-Jews through manipulation and usury. A famous example of this trope appears in the figure of the avaricious, deceitful Jewish moneylender Veitel Itzig, the primary antagonist in Gustav Freytag’s immensely popular 1855 novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit). The logic of this discriminatory representation is that a Fremdkörper like Veitel Itzig is always Jewish and never fully “German,” conveniently serving as a foil to the scrupulous, upstanding non-Jewish German protagonist. For more on Hilsenrath’s specific use of the name “Itzig” in Der Nazi und der Friseur, see McGlothlin, “Narrative Transgression,” 220–39. Erin McGlothlin, “Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, ed. Jenni Adams (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 165. Gesine Schwan, “The ‘Healing’ Value of Truth-Telling: Chances and Social Conditions in a Secularized World,” Social Research 65, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 728. Ibid., 727–28. With the considerable lengths to which he goes to escape prosecution for his crimes, Hilsenrath’s autodiegetic narrator Max Schulz intimates at first glance infamous high-profile Nazis, such as Adolf Eichmann, who evaded arrest, even if only temporarily, in the aftermath of World War II by fleeing Europe and living under an assumed identity. But as a lower-ranking Nazi-era criminal, Max perhaps more accurately resembles the likes of Bruno Dey, whom a Hamburg court found guilty in 2020 of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard in the Stutthof concentration camp. The difference here is that Hilsenrath’s narrator is never officially brought to justice (although in a sardonic twist, he claims to suffer pangs of guilt in the final years of his life). Throughout this chapter, I cite the English translation of Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel in the body of the text while supplying the corresponding German original in the notes; Edgar Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber (1971; repr., Berlin: Barber Press, 2013), 22 (“Können Sie sich das Ausmaß des Verbrechens vorstellen? Ich, Max Schulz, gerade sieben Wochen alt, zukünftiger Massenmör-

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

der, zur Zeit aber unschuldig, lag wie ein Engel in meiner neuen Wiege, dem Waschbecken, in das Slavitzki aus Gewohnheit pinkelte, das jedoch ganz trocken war, denn meine Mutter hatte es ausgewischt, lag eingehüllt in warme Windeln . . . und dem Deckchen, schlief friedlich, träumte von meinen Kollegen, den Engeln, träumte und lächelte . . . wurde plötzlich aus dem Schlaf gerissen, hochgerissen . . . wollte die Engel um Hilfe rufen, konnte aber nicht schreien, riß entsetzt die Augen auf, pisste vor Angst in die Windeln, verschluckte mich, bekam Erstrickungsanfälle, kotzte Muttermilch auf Slavitzkis Hand, streckte Händchen und Beinchen aus, wollte meine Unschuld verteidigen, sah das gewaltige Glied Slavitzkis, dachte, es wäre ein reisiger Bandwurm, murmelte Stoßgebete, obwohl ich das Beten noch gar nicht gelernt hatte, wollte sterben, sehnte mich zurück in den dunklen, aber sicheren Schoß meiner Mutter . . . und landete plötzlich bäuchlings auf dem Friseursessel, der vor dem Waschbecken stand” (Edgar Hilsenrath, Der Nazi und der Friseur [1977; repr., Munich: DTV, 2006], 22). Erin McGlothlin, The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), 196. Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 23 (“Ich weiß, was Sie sagen: ‘Max Schulz spinnt! Ein Alptraum! Nichts weiter!’” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 23]). Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 23 (“Aber warum behaupten Sie das? Hat der liebe Gott nicht die Unschuld erfunden, damit sie zertreten wird . . . hier auf Erden? Und werden die Schwachen und Wehrlosen nicht von den Starken überrumpelt, niedergeknüppelt, vergewaltigt, verhöhnt, in den Arsch gefickt?” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 23]). Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 23–24 (“Und wenn es so ist . . . warum behaupten Sie dann, daß Max Schulz spinnt?” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 24]). Max Schulz’s deployment of “monologic dialogue” functions as a narrative strategy that allows him to mimic a practice of confidentiality and full disclosure with his audience even though he is ultimately supplying both sides of the conversation between himself and projecting them onto a (perceived) interlocutor. I expect to find additional iterations of this technique and develop my analysis of its usage further as my research progresses. Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 23 (“Ich, Max Schulz, zukünftiger Massenmörder, zur Zeit noch unschuldig, stieß einen markerschütternden Schrei aus” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 23]). Alan Rosen, “Autobiography from the Other Side: The Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguity,” Biography 24, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 553. Ibid., 554. Ibid., 556. Max refers to his “Dachschaden” (“loose screw”) throughout the entire novel; for example, see Hilsenrath, Der Nazi under Friseur, 35, 52, 62, 66, 195–98, 240, 307, 316, 344, 407, 454, 464. McGlothlin, “Narrative Perspective,” 164. Hilsenrath, Der Nazi und der Friseur, 47–68. Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 62–63 (“Mein ehemaliger Deutschlehrer Siegfried von Salzstange hatte einmal zu mir gesagt: ‘Max Schulz, in der braunen SA findet jeder Platz, der richtig furzen kann. Aber nicht in der SS!’—Denn die SS, das war der Verband der Schwarzen Puritaner, die Elite des Neuen Deutschlands. Für Mäuschen wie den Max Schulz, die nicht wie Herrenmenschen aussahen, sondern wie Untermenschen . . . genau so und nicht anders . . . eben so aussahen, als ob sie die Ethik des Völkermords nicht kapieren würden . . . gar nicht kapieren . . . für die war der Eintritt in die SS alles andere als leicht. Was hab ich gesagt? Nicht leicht? Das stimmt. Ich muß hier allerdings hinzufügen, daß gute Beziehungen . . . und zwar zu den richtigen Leuten . . . im Leben oft eine entscheidende Rolle spielen” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 66]). Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 62 (“durch das meckrige Rassen- und Bewährungssieb des Schwarzen Korps” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 66–67]). Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber, 65 (“Die SS ließ mich nicht los. Die brauchte mich genauso wie Slavitzki, der mich immer gebraucht hatte. Die brauchten meine Hände. Und die brauch-

246 | COREY L. TWITCHELL ten auch meinen Hintern, damit er eines Tages herhalten sollte für den Rückschlag des großen Glückrads, mit dem wir damals Geschichte machen wollten” [Der Nazi und der Friseur, 70]). 37. McGlothlin, “Narrative Transgression,” 220–39. 38. See Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon 1 (1986): 9–20. 39. See McGlothlin, “Empathetic Identification,” 251–76.

Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Diner, Dan. “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz.” Babylon 1 (1986): 9–20. Dopheide, Dietrich. Das Groteske und der schwarze Humor in den Romanen Edgar Hilsenraths. Berlin: Weißensee, 2000. Freytag, Gustav. Soll und Haben. Leipzig: Fikentscher, 1855. Fuchs, Anne. A Space of Anxiety: Dislocation and Abjection in Modern German-Jewish Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Garloff, Katja. Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Graf, Andreas. “Mörderisches Ich: Zur Pathologie der Erzählperspektive in Edgar Hilsenraths Der Nazi und der Friseur.” In Das Unerzählbare erzählen, edited by Thomas Kraft, 135–49. Munich: Piper, 1996. Gwyer, Kirstin. Encrypting the Past: The German-Jewish Holocaust Novel of the First Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Hildesheimer, Wolfgang. Paradies der falschen Vögel. Munich: K. Desch, 1953. ———. Tynset. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965. Hilsenrath, Edgar. Der Nazi und der Friseur. Munich: DTV, 2006. First published in 1977 by Helmut Braun. ———. Nacht. Munich: DTV, 2007. First published in 1964 by Kindler. ———. The Nazi and the Barber. Translated by Andrew White. Berlin: Barber Press, 2013. First published in 1971 by Doubleday. Kafalenos, Emma. “Not (Yet) Knowing: Epistemological Effects of Deferred and Suppressed Information in Narrative.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, 33–65. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Kafka, Franz. “Der Bau.” In Die Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996. First published in 1931 by Kiepenheuer. Lawson, Robert. “Carnivalism in Postwar Austrian- and German-Jewish Literature—Edgar Hilsenrath, Irene Dische, and Doron Rabinovici.” Seminar 43, no. 1 (February 2007): 37–48. Lind, Jakov. Eine Seele aus Holz: Erzählungen. Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1964. Malkmus, Bernhard. The German Picaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter. New York: Continuum, 2011. McGlothlin, Erin. “Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse.” The German Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 220–39.

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———. “Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, edited by Jenni Adams, 159–77. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. ———. “Empathetic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response.” Narrative 24, no. 3 (October 2016): 251–76. ———. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2021. McGlothlin, Erin, and Jennifer M. Kapczynski, eds. Persistent Legacy:The Holocaust and German Studies. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. Morris, Leslie, and Jack Zipes, eds. Unlikely History:The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Prince, Gerald. Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Roberts, Sam. “Edgar Hilsenrath, 92, Writer of Unvarnished Holocaust Novels, Dies.” New York Times, 3 January 2019, 12. Retrieved 13 March 2021 from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/ obituaries/edgar-hilsenrath-dead.html. Rosen, Alan. “Autobiography from the Other Side: The Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguity.” Biography 24, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 553–69. Schwan, Gesine. “The ‘Healing’ Value of Truth-Telling: Chances and Social Conditions in a Secularized World.” Social Research 65, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 725–40. Wander, Fred. Der siebente Brunnen. Munich: DTV, 2006. First published in 1971 by Aufbau.

 CHAPTER 12

(Un-)Jewish Musical Spaces in Munich Past and Present

 Tina Frühauf

Arcisstraße 12 in Munich is an address with history. Between 1889 and 1933 it was the home of the Pringsheim family. Alfred Pringsheim, a Jewish professor of mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilian University, and his wife Hedwig were fully acculturated through the nineteenth-century embourgeoisement of their families. They had a keen interest in high culture. The Palais Pringsheim, a neo-Renaissance villa, became a cultural meeting point in fin-de-siècle Munich, a home for the intellectual elite and for artists and musicians. Having a deep interest in music, Alfred built a large music room on the ground floor adorned with a mural by painter Hans Thomas. Since his student years, Pringsheim had been an ardent supporter of Richard Wagner. Among his prominent guests at the Palais were Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Bruno Walter, but also lesser-known figures such as Elsa Bernstein (1866–1949), daughter of Wagner’s friend Heinrich Porges and a librettist in her own right, spent time there. In 1904 Thomas Mann, who would go on to marry Katja Pringsheim, wrote to his brother after one of the social gatherings at the Pringsheims’ home: “No thought of Judaism arises towards these people; one feels nothing but culture.”1 But 1933 saw an end of this site, when in August of that year Pringsheim was forced to sell the Palais. Three months later the building was demolished to make room for a new construction. In September 1937, Arcisstraße 12 became the administrative home of Adolf Hitler and his staff, known as the Führerbau. When I walked up the grand marble staircase on a rainy Friday morning on 15 March 2019, little did I know about the history of this monumental site, which now houses the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. A haunting and imposing National

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Socialist building, today it is framed by two significant neighboring institutions, the NS-Dokumentationszentrum and the Israeli Consulate General, both in its immediate vicinity, albeit in its shadow. Having lived and worked abroad for almost half my life and being originally a child of northwestern Germany, my entrance came with the surprise of the innocent. After all, my mind was focused on a different mission. This was the building where I would teach one of three seminars related to Jewish music as DAAD guest professor. In this building I would also help lay the groundwork for the Paul Ben-Haim Research Center, named after the famous Israeli composer and son of this history-laden city who had studied at the Hochschule’s predecessor institution, the Akademie für Tonkunst. This aside, my work in Munich came at a crucial juncture. I was about to complete my book project on the musical life of Jewish communities in the two Cold War Germanys, supported by the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship. This chapter presents a recast version of part of this work, focusing on the musical life of the Jewish community in Munich during the years 1945 to 1950. In particular, my chapter explores the different spaces of its Jewish musical activity, from the Reichenbachstraße Synagogue to the airwaves, and the figure of Cantor Kurt Messerschmidt, who inhabited and bridged many of them. It does so by applying a multidirectional approach that, while concentrating on historical events pertaining to the postwar years, also includes observations made during the author’s 2019 stay in Munich about current events, especially the transmission or dissemination of local music histories at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Rooted in German-Jewish studies and musicology, this chapter relies on several methods pertinent to history and music studies, among them oral history and (auto)ethnography. It also leans on the anthropological practice of reflexivity, referring to the acknowledgment of one’s own subjectivity and the part one plays in one’s work. Indeed, this chapter seeks to underline the importance of several perspectives with the researcher at its center: pursuing German-Jewish studies onsite, i.e., being in Germany, and from a distance/abroad—which becomes necessary when interacting with one’s “own” history. Following the recent spatial turn in Jewish studies,2 this chapter ultimately seeks to tie space to notions of cultural rebirth and transformation, cross-cultural encounters and collaborations, but also division and politics. To be sure, Munich, known for the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and for being the capital of “The Movement,” as the Nazis called it, is a difficult site for researching the history of Jewish music. As one of the largest Jewish communities on German soil in the postwar period, it seems ideal to serve as a major case study, but the source situation complicates research: on 13 February 1970, the community archive burned down due to arson, fracturing historical records so that a comprehensive survey of the community’s postwar musical practices is not possible. What one can gather about these practices are fractions, though fascinating ones, that revolve around different sites in the city, the first being the Bürgerbräukeller.

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Sounds of Rebirth On the evening of 26 July 1945, about twenty survivors, who had conferred earlier at the St. Ottilien Displaced Persons camp, gathered at the Bürgerbräukeller—the same location where the Nazi movement was born. In front of foreign press correspondents, they read a proclamation demanding permission to immigrate to Palestine. Thereafter they recited Kaddish for the deceased and sang the “Hatikvah.”3 Jewish life in Munich was thus reawakened to the sounds of an anthem that at the time was already associated with Zionism. With its lyrics strongly expressing the postwar sentiments of “hope” (the meaning of ha-tikvah) and freedom, but also displacement and longing for the land of Israel, the anthem commonly concluded gatherings of Jews in postwar years.4 The postwar Jewish community in Munich, then the second largest in occupied Germany after Berlin, became a center of a new musical life that from the outset differed from the one prior to 1933. Munich was a nexus of many relief organizations and home of the headquarters of the Organization for Rehabilitation and Training. The city quickly became the largest hub of Jewish displaced persons (henceforth DPs), who numbered up to seven thousand people, though that number continuously fluctuated. Eastern European Jews dominated the image of the city, quickly forming more than 50 percent of the Jewish population after the war.5 Rising numbers of DPs aside, the surviving Jews who were born in Germany tried to reestablish their community. Already in June, lawyer Siegfried Neuland had approached the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs in Munich in order to reconstitute it, but he only received permission from the US Military Government on July 19, for a gathering in the Jewish nursing home at Kaulbachstraße, which culminated in the community’s inception.6 The local Jews initially objected to DPs becoming members—perhaps an echo of prewar animosities—and excluded them from the community board, at least initially. But Aron Ohrenstein, Munich’s first postwar rabbi, supported the presence of Eastern European survivors. He himself, although born in Berlin, held Polish citizenship. But all—German-born Jews as well as DPs—held their first service together on Rosh Hashanah, 7 September 1945, in a newly established prayer room near the former Herzog-Max-Straße Synagogue, which had been demolished in the summer of 1938 to improve the city’s traffic flow. During the war years, members of the Jewish community had buried ritual objects in the Jewish cemetery on Ungererstraße for safekeeping, and they unearthed them for this first postwar celebration. In 1938 the Munich Bishop’s Office had “purchased” the three-manual organ built in 1929 for the Herzog-Max-Straße Synagogue by the G. F. Steinmeyer firm and moved it to the church of St. Korbinian on Gotzingerplatz shortly before the synagogue was demolished. According to a report in the Tel Aviv German-language paper Jedioth Hadashoth/Neuste Nachrichten, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, who was well-known for his opposition to the Nazi regime, had offered to hold the organ and other valuables in safe custody for the community. No information is provided about whether all objects were returned.7 About 150 survivors attended the service, which the American Forces Network (the

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first AFN station to operate in occupied Germany) broadcast via Radio Munich. Jacob Gross (1887–1967) and Kurt Messerschmidt (1915–2017) sang repertoires they previously performed in the concentration camps of Terezín and Auschwitz.8 Writing down music from memory, Messerschmidt assembled the pieces for the service and performed choral music together with singers who had formed a choir. Gross hailed from Kiełpino (now Poland) and continued to serve as Munich’s chief cantor well into the 1950s.9 Of the two cantors, Messerschmidt would become a seminal and influential figure, making and shaping postwar history.10 Born in Werneuchen, a town in Brandenburg northeast of Berlin, Messerschmidt grew up in a family with a great appreciation of music.11 He learned the piano at a young age and also received lessons in theory; during his years at the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gymnasium he sang in the school choir. After his bar mitzvah at the Oranienburger Straße Synagogue he helped out once or twice as cantor. In 1933 he enrolled at the Orientalisches Seminar at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt University), the only department still open to Jewish students at the time, but in 1934 the nazification of the seminary forced him to terminate his education. Messerschmidt subsequently enrolled at the local Jüdische Lehrerbildungsanstalt (Jewish teachers seminary), which offered a two-year degree for teachers and cantors. There he took lessons with Theodor Schoenberger (piano), the head of the music department Karl Adler (singing circle, conducting, composition),12 Erwin Jospe (a very popular teacher of music pedagogy),13 and the chief cantor of Fasanenstraße Synagogue, Magnus Davidsohn (cantorial studies). After his graduation in 1936, Messerschmidt became a teacher at the Jewish elementary school at Rykestraße. While he gave classes in nearly every subject, music education became his special calling, and he taught singing and three- and four-part harmony while also founding a small children’s orchestra that consisted of mandolins, guitars, recorders, ocarinas, accordions, and violins; he also directed a choir. In April 1942, after the dissolution of the school, Messerschmidt, in accordance with the forced labor rules established for Jews, worked for a German furniture-moving firm whose owner, Erich Scheffler, according to Messerschmidt, employed former Jewish educators to help them avoid deportation.14 Kurt Messerschmidt remained in Berlin until 27 February 1943, when he was deported to Terezín. On 13 June, his family and fiancée Sonja followed.Within the ghettocamp, despite long days of forced labor, Messerschmidt continued to make music. He performed German and Yiddish songs accompanied by lute.15 Kurt and his brother Henry also participated in performances of George Bizet’s Carmen, Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung, and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s Elias under conductors Karel Ancˇerl and Karel Fischer. Being active as performers, they received additional food rations.16 Messerschmidt also served as cantor, singing from memory liturgical pieces by Lewandowski, Naumbourg, and Sulzer.17 A former fellow inmate, Philip Manes, recalls that Messerschmidt “performed this beautiful function in his distinguished way, with a great deal of musical artistry, accompanied by the Durra choir.”18 Messerschmidt often performed with this double quartet, named after its conductor, the composer and

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bass-baritone Hermann Durra.19 Their repertoire consisted of German and Hebrew songs as well as folk songs from different parts of the world.20 Kurt and Sonja married in Terezín in April 1944 but were separated when Kurt and Henry were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 28 September 1944. There, through sharing his musical talent, Kurt continued to provide comfort to fellow inmates, singing from memory. Because of his outstanding voice (he was also blond and blue-eyed) he was forced to perform German songs in front of Nazi officials, among them “Die Gedanken sind frei.” The Nazis heard it as a folk song—but for Messerschmidt, its text, with the refrain emphasizing that thoughts are free, conveyed his resistance. Eventually, the brothers were transferred to the labor camp Golleschau, a subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and assigned to work detail. Kurt and Henry remained at Golleschau until January 1945 when the camp was evacuated due to the approaching Red Army. On 18 or 19 January, they embarked on a death march to Bavaria. The brothers arrived at Sachsenhausen, and on 6 February they were interned in the Flossenbürg concentration camp near Bayreuth. Kurt continued on alone to the Ganacker camp. He was already quite ill, but managed to survive thanks to American troops who rescued him and a small handful of survivors in Surberg, near Traunstein, on 2 or 3 May 1945. Messerschmidt eventually ended up in Munich, where he initially stayed at the Jewish nursing home. At one of the centers for DPs, he overheard a conversation between Julius Spanier (1880–1959), a physician and the first chairman of Munich’s postwar community, with a Sergeant Lehman from the American Communication Service.21 They discussed the plans for the aforementioned Rosh Hashanah service on 7 September 1945, including its public broadcast and service music by an orchestra and choir. Messerschmidt introduced himself and asked to participate, a move that would influence the next five years of his life and that of the Munich community. Shortly thereafter, Messerschmidt left Munich to locate his wife. He reunited with her in Bielefeld and then returned to Munich in time for the service. Thereafter he became chief cantor of the Landesverband der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinden in Bayern (in Auschwitz he had decided to dedicate his life to the sacred profession of being a cantor). He also applied to be a teacher with the Munich school administration but never received a response. Messerschmidt’s work as cantor was largely honorary. Rather than singing every Friday or Saturday, he only sang important services or on special occasions; for example, he recited the Megillah on Purim. He also contributed to festivities, such as Hanukkah parties where he performed Yiddish songs, and in the absence of a suitable pianist he often accompanied himself. As the community was a waystation for Eastern European Jews, Messerschmidt, upon request, sang hazanuth (cantorial song) in the Eastern style, which he had learned when becoming a teacher and cantor in Berlin— the former capital had experienced a large wave of immigration of Eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century, and their culture impacted the repertoire used by local Jews. Messerschmidt both created a cultural oasis and served as the glue for a diverse community. He provided the German-born Jews with Kultur and evoked a

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sense of prewar identity while also catering to the cultural heritage of the DPs, thereby bridging the needs of two populations. By March 1946 the Jewish community in Munich numbered about twenty-eight hundred, with membership fluctuating given its function as a transitional space for many of the DPs. During the inauguration of the rebuilt synagogue at Reichenbachstraße on 20 May 1947, the Lithuanian-born cantor Saul Schenker (1912–79) and Jacob Gross provided the service music.22 Schenker opened the inauguration ceremony with a “Mah tovu” and also recited the commemoration of the dead, while Gross recited the prayer for the solemn opening of the Ark. The ceremony closed with Schenker’s chanting of the psalm for the consecration of the house of worship. Services adhered to the Orthodox rite.23 An organ—the emblem of liberal Judaism that had played an integral part in worship service at Munich’s Westenriederstraße and Herzog-Marx-Straße synagogues—was not even considered for the rebuilt synagogue. Reports on a choir vary, and given that the community was a waystation, it may well have formed temporarily, appearing for dedicated services.24 As such, this service was a pivotal moment, an indication that musical practices in worship would change. Previously, the original Reichenbachshul or Polish synagogue, inaugurated on 5 September 1931, had been the home of Eastern European immigrants until the building was partly destroyed during Kristallnacht. After the war it became the home of a

Figure 12.1. Choir of the synagogue at Reichenbachstraße in Munich with Cantor Saul Schenker in the center, ca. 1946/47. Reproduced by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inventory no. 81061, courtesy of George Kadish/Zvi Kadushin.

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highly diverse community, also evident in the heritage of its cantors and prayer leaders. In contrast to Messerschmidt, Saul Schenker hailed from Lithuania. Born in Plungyen, he had studied music at the conservatories in Riga and Memel. A survivor of the Kovno Ghetto and the Dachau concentration camp, he served as cantor in various DP camps and also conducted services beginning in early May 1945. Schenker only stayed for a short time in Munich. He moved to Paris in 1947 and left Europe in September 1950 for Windsor in Ontario, where he served the Orthodox synagogue Sha’ar Hashomayim until his death on 3 November 1979. He is buried in Israel under the name he had assumed upon leaving Munich, Saul Nadvan.25 Messerschmidt was one of the few survivors who decided to stay. At least that was his initial plan. Germany had been his home before the Holocaust, and for him postwar Munich proved to be a city with many opportunities. One such was his employment at the local radio station, which on 1 May 1946 established the Bavarian Radio Choir. A well-versed singer with a broad repertoire, Messerschmidt became one of its approximately forty singers. In this position he would serve as a link between the Jewish community and the public, making radio an important site in the rebirth of Jewish liturgical music after the war.

Jewish Music on the Airwaves About one year after the broadcast of the Rosh Hashanah service on 7 September 1945, the American-controlled Radio Munich (after 1949 known again as Bayerischer Rundfunk) began to regularly broadcast Yiddish music programs.26 Initially, these broadcasts were quite infrequent and catered to the DPs. But by September 1947 Radio Munich had instituted the weekly Religiöse Feierstunde der israelitischen Kultusgemeinden in Bayern to reach the scattered Jewish community and the DPs in the American Zone, as well as the general population, in order to inform them about the events of the community, perhaps as part of the cultural reorientation program initiated by the Americans. Neue Welt reported on the 1947 broadcast for Rosh Hashanah, which, in addition to Messerschmidt, featured the Bavarian Radio Choir under the baton of its founder, Robert Seiler. Rabbi Aron Ohrenstein gave a short speech on the meaning of the Jewish New Year.27 The same week Radio Munich broadcast the premiere of the “Fantasie in Gelb.” Percy Haid (1913–77) had composed the orchestral piece in 1944 in Dachau, naming it after the yellow star that had branded Jews during the Nazi era. The radio orchestra under Hans Altmann performed the “Fantasie”; thereafter two unnamed Jewish artists from Berlin played Joseph Joachim’s Hebräische Melodien, op. 9.28 But it was the Religiöse Feierstunde that remained central. It was broadcast every Friday at 7:45 P.M. with Messerschmidt singing for about fifteen minutes. He usually selected two liturgical pieces that framed a short speech or sermon given alternately by Aron Ohrenstein, the Jewish chaplain Herman Dicker of the Fifth Infantry, and Philipp Auerbach.29

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Given Messerschmidt’s musical and cultural background, he was the most suitable to be cast for the radio programs and was put in charge of programming. As barely any sheet music was available, he wrote down the repertoire from memory. It consisted of solo and choral music in Hebrew by Salomon Sulzer, Samuel Naumbourg, Louis Lewandowski, Leon Kornitzer, and Emanuel Kirschner, as well as a previously unheard repertoire by suppressed Jewish composers.30 Through his employment at Radio Munich, Messerschmidt was also able to recruit singers and accompanists for the Feierstunde.31 As the singers were professionals, Hebrew—or for that matter other foreign languages—did not pose a challenge. In absence of more suitable spaces, the broadcasts often aired live from different churches in Munich, among them the Protestant church in Schwabing and the cathedral Zu Unserer Lieben Frau. The churches sometimes provided accompanists of varying talent. Messerschmidt held cathedral organist Heinrich Wiesmeier in especially high regard. The Religiöse Feierstunde thus enabled musical collaborations and interaction between Jews and others, equally fostering reintegration and reeducation. Looking back, Herbert Hupka, head of cultural affairs at Radio Munich, confirmed in a reference letter for Messerschmidt that these broadcasts not merely offered religious service to listeners of Jewish faith but also helped to overcome antisemitic prejudices by “presenting to the entire listening audience the greatness of the Jewish religion and the beauty of the sacred music . . . making German audiences understand the cultural chants of the Jewish religion.”32 According to Hupka, they succeeded in gaining popularity and in bringing Jewish culture closer to German audiences due to Messerschmidt’s programming and overall engagement. The reception of these broadcasts exceeded expectations. Messerschmidt remembers that everybody “just loved it.”33 That these broadcasts were especially well received by the non-Jewish population is perhaps surprising, given that antisemitism was still virulent during the postwar years.34 The extraordinary amount of fan mail Messerschmidt received confirms that he was heard across Europe (specifically Denmark, Sweden, and Serbia), behind the Iron Curtain, and as far away as Israel by both Jewish and other listeners. It ultimately attests to the far-reaching mobility of musical sounds and practices. Edmund Schechter, chief of the Radio Control Branch of the Information Control Division for Bavaria, wrote that the festive hour on Rosh Hashanah was truly beautiful.35 Heinz Stark emphasized that he had no words to express his gratitude for listening to “the singing to God our father.”36 A letter sent by a certain D. Hornthal of the Alpenruhe Home in Saanen in Switzerland confirms that the enthusiastic audience consisted of all denominations; the same writer suggested that Messerschmidt give a recital of secular or religious songs.37 Karl Kisskalt (1857–1962), previous chair of the Munich Hygiene Institute but in no way involved in the sinister experiments the Nazis had conducted there, admitted that he did not understand the words and would like to know which psalms were being sung so that he could follow the text in the Bible.38 Other letters lauded Messerschmidt’s voice and interpretations,39 expressed gratefulness to become familiar with Jewish liturgical music,40 and even suggested collabora-

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tions with high-caliber musicians such as Joseph Messner (1893–1969), the Salzburg composer and cathedral kapellmeister.41 According to Messerschmidt’s own account, his voice received praise from professionals, among them the bass-baritone Benno Kusche, who from 1946 to 1958 sang at the Bavarian State Opera, and the contralto and stage director Hedwig Fichtmüller. Indeed, because of his fine voice and broad appeal, Messerschmidt received a number of invitations. After hearing him on the radio, the Liberaal Joodse Geemente in Amsterdam contacted Messerschmidt in February 1949 to offer him a position, which he declined.42 Concert agent Hanns Schömmer suggested a professional collaboration after hearing Messerschmidt’s interpretation of Beethoven songs.43 As such, Messerschmidt’s performance dissolved what Frank Stern calls the “social distance” of non-Jews toward Jews (and vice versa).44 The musical collaborations Messerschmidt initiated truly built bridges, connecting Allies and Germans, Jews and non-Jews, as well as distant listeners to a musical world that had just been resurrected. A postwar utopia, as it were. The collaborations also show Messerschmidt’s devotion to causes that fostered tolerance and interfaith dialogue, motivated by his goal to combat antisemitism. As Anthony Kauders states with regard to Munich’s Jews: “They frequently lamented antisemitism, the absence of a democratic consciousness, the desire of some Jews to remain in Germany, the impertinence of other Jews controlling the community, the lack of support from abroad, and the absence of sympathy from the city’s inhabitants.”45 With this awareness and working closely together with Bishop Anton Scharnagl and Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, Messerschmidt became active in the Gesellschaft für christlich-jüdische Zusammenarbeit, a society that fostered Christian-Jewish cooperation. Founded on the initiative of the International Council of Christians and Jews and US Military Government, who initially financed it, the society supported collaborative projects by Christians and Jews as part of the Wiedergutmachungspolitik—but it was less about religious dialogue than conversations about religious causes and consequences of the catastrophe.46 The society’s first branch formed in Munich in July 1948 (Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and Bad Nauheim founded branches the same year), followed in November 1949 by the establishment of a National Coordinating Council. Interfaith dialogue was a special and serious concern for the Church in order to put Christian-Jewish relations on a new foundation. Relationships were strained because of the Catholic Church’s role during the Holocaust and its latent antisemitism. After the war, emotions ran high and even escalated within the sensitive subject of restitution. To be sure, Messerschmidt’s dedication to interfaith causes was motivated by both his pre- and postwar experiences. As for the latter, he found much sympathy for his wartime experiences. Among the fan mail he received was a letter by a Karl Bühler from Illerberg, who wrote that Messerschmidt’s singing made him think of the “ineffable suffering” Messerschmidt must have endured and still might endure in the present.47 Bühler also shared that his circle of acquaintances wonders why the Jews had

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to bear so much given that they “had not committed more crimes than other races or denominations in their struggle for existence.” The sender identified himself to be of Catholic faith and disclosed that he was still being harassed for having spoken up against “Nazi theology.” Bühler’s views also led to his recent dismissal as a municipal employee. Indeed, Bühler insisted that the “Third Reich” had not yet ended and that the Nazis had planted followers in municipal and government positions, which, the writer cynically remarked, can only happen in a democracy. Bühler was convinced that “Nazis in disguise” continued to persecute Jews and those who did not agree with current politics. He ended his observation with rhetorical questions: what would eliminate Nazism, who could establish a truly democratic state, and who would educate the youth to think and act democratically? The letter closed with greetings to the Jewish community in Munich. Messerschmidt’s performances on the airwaves evidently hit a nerve, triggering larger questions of postwar politics, at least to some listeners. The reception of Messerschmidt also reveals how divided occupied Germany was in the immediate postwar years, with residents ignoring, acknowledging, or adhering to the past. Overwhelmingly, however, the period immediately following the surrender was marked by an urge to avoid rather than face the Nazi legacy with guilt and shame. Following David Monod, the positive reception of Jewish music by non-Jews may have been “the litmus test of independence from Nazism,”48 during a time when antisemitism, though extant and taboo, was thus fashioned into a philosemitic mode of behavior. Frank Stern emphasizes the persistence of antisemitism among a substantial percentage (perhaps a third) of the population; and then, as he claims, “anti was switched to philo.”49 Messerschmidt himself asserts that he did not directly experience antisemitism in the postwar period. In his experience, barely anybody commented on the Nazi past, and “if anybody started I waved them off.”50 Still, Nazism and its manifestations in the postwar present would be the trigger for his sudden emigration: When a neighbor girl mentioned that her elementary school teacher talked about the discontinued antisemitic weekly Der Figure 12.2. Kurt Messerschmidt, MuStürmer, Messerschmidt felt great concern nich, ca. late 1940s. Reproduced by perfor his young daughter. He feared that Ger- mission of the United States Holocaust many could not provide a safe future for Memorial Museum Collection, invenJews. On 3 July 1950, he left for Brooklyn tory no. 2016.412.1, gift of the family of (the previous year he had still declined an Henry and Inge Oertelt.

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offer from the Liberaal Joodse Gemeente in Amsterdam), and in 1951 settled in Portland, Maine, where he served as cantor at Temple Beth El until his retirement.51 But while still extant, antisemitism in postwar Bavaria would change from prewar attitudes, as the population was under pressure from the occupying forces and their denazification goals.52 Indeed, increasing awareness of the atrocities toward Jews during Nazism played an important role, and Messerschmidt was instrumental in heightening it: “What they tried to destroy, by my work I could counteract this and be a strong voice against anti-Semitism. . . . I presented the beauty of what they tried to destroy.”53 Messerschmidt took a categorical stance during his time in Munich. He did not want to be directly confronted with the atrocities of the Holocaust or hear apologies, which would have implied that people felt sorry for him. Rather, he wanted to be respected as a singer and treated as a human being. In fact, he saw his primary task in sharing his “God-given talent” through radio and other public performances to educate people with a new goodwill instead of recalling horrible experiences. Looking ahead, Messerschmidt worked toward reconciliation while at the same time coping with denial and repression. Music historian Otto Ursprung, who in 1938 declined to help his Munich-born colleague, the musicologist Alfred Einstein, was the only person who spoke about “his sin” with Messerschmidt. Messerschmidt’s reaction to this was one of shock, probably because antisemitism became tangible again instead of remaining a thing of the past.54 He refused to give Ursprung absolution. That Messerschmidt maintained a parallel secular career and a second identity as a singer helped him reintegrate into mainstream musical life. He participated in a good number of recordings as chorister and as soloist, mostly under conductor Hans Altmann and with the orchestra and chorus of Radio Munich.55 As a cantor, and notwithstanding broadcast recordings, Messerschmidt preferred to work outside churches—in spite of his interest in and engagement with interfaith dialogue. When Messerschmidt left Munich, the radio station and Jewish community acknowledged their loss and the fact that he would be hard to replace—at the time there was nobody with his charisma and musical skill who could have picked up the threads and continued.56 Left with no successor, the radio station broadcast Messerschmidt’s recordings throughout the 1950s, preserving his legacy and continuing what he had established, thus acknowledging the absence of a cantor of similar caliber.57 There is no doubt that the broadcasts in occupied Munich and beyond were of great importance in reestablishing the Jewish communities. Radio aided the circulation and promotion of music as mediator and disseminator, creating a contact zone between a dispersed people, especially those who lived in remote areas where a community had not yet been established. They were now able to join a virtual community. In this way, radio contributed to the democratization of everyday life, creating a sense of community, with new communicative potentials for marginalized groups.58 As radio had been at the center of political developments such as the rise of Nazism and the Cold War, the participation of non-Jewish listeners and performers cannot be underestimated. Allies

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and locals generally limited their involvement in Jewish cultural life and its reorganization.Yet the radio was somewhat of an exception. Deemed responsible for establishing aesthetic and cultural norms under occupation policies, it was “assigned the pedagogical task of exposing the listeners to international and contemporary culture.”59 In order to fulfill this Bildungsauftrag (educational mandate) to make these broadcasts work, the occupying forces connected with the Jewish community and thus helped reintegrate Jewishness into the soundscape of postwar Germany.

Parallel Worlds and Encounters While Jewish spaces reconstituted themselves under most difficult conditions, mainstream Munich began to be rebuilt as well. Around 80 percent of the buildings in the target areas were destroyed, save for the Führerbau and neighboring structures, a fact that historian Alexander Krause sees as entirely coincidental.60 After the war, Arcisstraße 12 was first used as the Central Art Collecting Point to accommodate repositories of Nazi-confiscated works of art and other cultural objects hidden throughout Germany and Austria, which were discovered by the Allies at the close of World War II. In 1947 the building housed the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Institut für Bayerische Geschichte, and the Institut für Rechtsgeschichte. On 12 July 1948, the Amerika Haus occupied the southern wing of the building, and offered lectures, courses, and cultural events. During its time at the site it organized about seven hundred concerts as well as lectures on music.61 The Amerika Haus’s music department also offered recordings, sheet music, and books—all related to the music of the United States. In the summer of 1957, after much institutional reorganization and renovation, Arcisstraße 12 became the home of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, which inhabits the building today. Given the building’s status as a protected monument, much of its interior and exterior has remained unchanged. The room Hitler once used as his office, in the southern wing on the second floor and outfitted with a balcony overseeing the Königsplatz, was at one point reduced by one window axis. It still has the original walnut paneling, marble fireplace, and art deco ceiling lights. On 30 September 1938, it had been the site where Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement, a settlement that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. The Hochschule now uses this room for lectures, ensemble instruction, and smaller events. The fireplace has been repurposed as a storage space for music stands (figure 12.3). Soon, these music stands would serve in performances of music by Paul Ben-Haim, Max Löwenstamm, Heinrich Schalit, and many other composers from southern Germany heard again in twenty-first century Munich. How could German-Jewish studies be more relevant than by having related musical repertoires revived through performances by young musicians who re-presence it with their instruments and voices?

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Figure 12.3. Kaminzimmer, Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Photo by Tina Frühauf.

The Kaminzimmer (fireplace room) was also the site where I gathered with my students for the block seminar “Compositional Processing of the Holocaust and Exile” (taught in German as “Kompositorische Verarbeitungen des Holocaust und Exils”). This was entirely coincidental. Because of another class, rooms had to be switched last minute, and a colleague ushered me and my students into the only available room. The gravity of the meeting and its relation to the historical meaning of the space did not get lost. This was probably the first time a group of music students assembled in this room to discuss compositions that memorialize the Holocaust or that were conceived by émigrés on the subject of exile, such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s The Divan of Moses-Ibn-Ezra and the Sinfonia no. 5 for organ by the Leipzig-born organist Herman Berlinski. Composed between 1964 and 1968, each of the sinfonia’s five movements is based on an excerpt from Nelly Sachs’s poetry in English translation (in 1967 the poems were published in the collection O the Chimneys, translated from the German by Michael Hamburger), evoking images of the Holocaust by way of program music.62 I mention this work in particular because a month into the semester I read the exact excerpts Berlinski used at the event “München liest—aus verbrannten Büchern” (Munich reads—from burnt books), which takes place annually at the Königsplatz as a public commemoration of the Nazis’ book burning in 1933. The interrelation between research subject, teaching, and spatiality has never been more profound in my work as musicologist and professor devoted to Jewish studies. Indeed, not only did the students analyze this and other works in historical context and with a view toward musical perception of the atrocities, but some also performed them at Arcisstraße 12.

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In order to contextualize Jewish music through the sites of Munich, I also offered excursions. We visited the Jüdisches Museum München, attended a Friday evening service at the Reform congregation Beth Shalom (one of the five extant Jewish congregations in the city), and participated in a walking tour on the subject “Jewish Musical Munich,” which I organized, with visits of sites past and present, such as the Westenriederstraße and Herzog-Marx-Straße synagogues and the Sankt-Jakobs-Platz. Experiencing Jewish culture in a broader context allowed the students to learn much about a subject area that was new to them. They found comfort in the knowledge that new life emerged out of the ruins and ashes of destroyed sites, that humanity and humane existence did survive, that culture could still thrive in a harsh environment, and that music could be heard (again) in spite of trauma. Indeed, Jewish music in Germany is extant, alive, and evolving. Some students also attended the 2019 conference “Jewish Music in Southern Germany: History, Exile, Continuance,” which I co-organized with my colleagues at Arcisstraße. It brought together scholars from the United States, Israel, and various parts of Europe to discuss local and regional music histories and cultures under the umbrella of the given topic and to bring some of them to life through performances. For many of the attendees, both speakers and audiences, it was of special significance that our coffee breaks were held in the infamous Kaminzimmer, where we offered kosher refreshments. Emil Fackenheim’s 614th commandment (or 614th mitzvah) to not grant Adolf Hitler posthumous victory became tangible exactly in these moments.63 For me, my students, and guests experiencing Jewish Munich—past and present—made it ever more clear why German-Jewish studies matters, especially through the lens of music. Interdisciplinary and holistic approaches such as the combination of German studies, Jewish studies, and musicology have the potential to stimulate the development of new subjects that equally inform several disciplines.64 Such distinct approaches in and for German-Jewish studies, which hopefully will advance the field toward considering music and cultural studies more vigorously than it has in the past, also attest to why the field is so relevant: it is ripe for an evolution of its methods and subject areas, to become relevant beyond disciplinary boundaries. On a political level, too, the field is becoming ever more pertinent. In 2019, more than a quarter of non-Jewish Germans agreed with antisemitic statements. Between January and June alone, Germany counted 442 anti-Jewish offenses (and many of them took place in Munich).65 Examining postwar Jewish (musical) developments in Germany continues the important task of putting the persecuted in plain sight—both inside and outside the academy—so that the Holocaust cannot be denied or brushed aside, instead allowing it to remain an integral part of our present realities. There is no doubt that this also applies to recent developments outside of Germany, where new waves of antisemitism are shaking our world as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century.

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Tina Frühauf is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University in New York and serves on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2019, she was a DAAD guest professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. The study of Jewish music in modernity has been her primary research focus for two decades. Her publications include Orgel und Orgelmusik in deutsch-jüdischer Kultur (Georg Olms Verlag, 2005), Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021), and the edited volumes Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts (Boydell Press, 2020).

Notes 1. “Kein Gedanke an Judenthum kommt auf, diesen Leuten gegenüber; man spürt nichts als Kultur.” Quoted after Alexander Krause, Arcisstraße 12. Palais Pringsheim—Führerbau—Amerika Haus— Hochschule für Musik und Theater, 15th rev. ed. (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2015), 29. For an analysis of Mann’s antisemitism in the context of culture, see Paul Levesque, “The Double-Edged Sword: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Wagnerianism in Thomas Mann’s ‘Wälsungenblut,’” German Studies Review 20, no. 1 (1997): 9–21. 2. One of the first publications in Jewish studies to lean on the spatial turn is the anthology by Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds., Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space,Traditions of Place (Aldershot, Burlington: Routledge, 2008). In her seminal book, Barbara Mann challenges the normative identification of Jewishness with exile, history, and textuality by demonstrating that while Jews are “often viewed as the ‘people of the book,’ and as somehow lacking geography, spatial thinking has in fact permeated Jewish cultural expression.” Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies, Key Words in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 153. Focused on the German-Jewish realm is the anthology by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, eds., Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017). 3. Accounts slightly differ (especially with regard to the number of attendees, which ranged from twenty to ninety), except for the musical details; see Juliane Wetzel, Jüdisches Leben in München, 1945–1951: Durchgangsstation oder Wiederaufbau? (Munich: Kommissionsverlag Uni-Druck, 1987), 154; Alex Grobman, Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 109; and Leo W. Schwarz, The Redeemers: A Saga of theYears 1945–1952 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953), 31. 4. See Harry Maòr, “Über den Wiederaufbau der jüdischen Gemeinden in Deutschland seit 1945” (PhD diss., Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 1961), 21. For concrete examples of contexts in which the “Hatikvah” was heard, see the Yiddish newspaper from Bergen-Belsen DP camp, Undzer shtime (Our voice). The anthem was sung at the end of a protest assembly in Celle (Undzer shtime 6 [1 January 1946]: 10); and at the end of another assembly in Celle (Undzer shtime 9 [15 April 1946]: 20–21). When Neustadt hosted an assembly for the “workers of Israel,” the gathering closed with the “Hatikvah” and the “Internationale” (Undzer shtime 21 [12 July 1947]: 27–28). It also closed a Zionist assembly in Celle (Undzer shtime 21 [12 July 1947]: 67). Published by the DPs of Bergen-Belsen, the Zionist newspaper served as the main Jewish organ in the British Zone. 5. See Anthony D. Kauders, Democratization and the Jews: Munich, 1945–1965 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 42. 6. For further details, see Wetzel, Jüdisches Leben in München, 4–6.

(UN-)JEWISH MUSICAL SPACES IN MUNICH | 263 7. See Jedioth Hadashoth/Neuste Nachrichten, 6 June 1947. 8. See Wetzel, Jüdisches Leben in München, 6–7. 9. For the announcement of his sixty-sixth birthday, see Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland 7, no. 44 (6 February 1953): 15. 10. Messerschmidt’s biography is based on the author’s discussion with Kurt Messerschmidt, 4–5 October 2009; Ann Page’s discussion with Messerschmidt for the USC Shoah Foundation, 24 June 1997; and Henry A. Oertelt, An Unbroken Chain: My Journey through the Nazi Holocaust (Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2000), 47–48. 11. Kurt’s uncle Adolf Messerschmidt was a well-known conductor and composer; his cousin Steffi was a talented accordion player. While Adolf’s career terminated with the rise of Nazism, Steffi Messerschmidt fled to Belgium in 1937, where she was arrested by the Nazis in 1942 and subsequently murdered in Auschwitz. 12. For a detailed biography, see Matthias Pasdzierny, “Adler, Karl,” in Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit, retrieved 2 April 2020 from https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/ object/lexm_lexmperson_00002536. 13. For a detailed biography, see Helga Gläser, “Jospe, Erwin,” in ibid., retrieved 2 April 2020 from https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00003983. 14. See Oertelt, An Unbroken Chain, 47–48. 15. See Philipp Manes, As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 120. 16. See Oertelt, An Unbroken Chain, 70–72. A performance of the finale of Mendelssohn’s Elias has been captured in the Nazi propaganda film Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt. 17. On choral activities in Terezín, see Joža Karas, Music in Terezín, 1941–1945 (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 1990), 25. 18. Manes, As If It Were Life, 239. 19. Born to Silesian immigrants in New York, Hermann Durra moved to Germany in 1876 at the age of five. He studied music with Albert Becker, Emil Bohn, Moritz Brosig, and Salomon Jadassohn. Besides his work as pianist and voice teacher, Durra composed operatic, piano, and choral works. His small collection (he was thrice dislocated, and his publishing house in Berlin was bombed during World War II) is housed at the music archive of the Künstlergilde in Regensburg. See Heinrich Simbriger, “Schlesische Komponisten im Musikarchiv der Künstlergilde in Regensburg,” Schlesien: Eine Vierteljahresschrift für Kunst,Wissenschaft und Volkstum 15, no. 3 (1970): 168. An article mentioning Durra appeared in the SS journal Das schwarze Korps, 18 May 1939, 14. It called him a baptized “music-Jew,” who had been receiving five hundred marks a month unemployment compensation derived from church taxes. 20. Members of Durra’s chorus included Edith Weinbaum (wife of music director Alexander Weinbaum), Durra’s wife, Messerschmidt’s brother, and an unidentified woman from Holland. 21. Wetzel states that Joseph Ravotto, the US official who ran Radio Munich in 1945, arranged for the broadcast. See Jüdisches Leben in München, 6. 22. See Juliane Wetzel, “Jüdisches Leben in München,” in Leben im Land der Täter: Juden im Nachkriegsdeutschland (1945–1952), ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Berlin: Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 83–85. For details on the inauguration and its program, see Leo Baerwald Papers, AR 3677 / MF 699, Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin. 23. See Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 70. 24. Messerschmidt asserts that, during his time, the Munich synagogue had no standing choir and that congregational singing during services was poor. Kurt Messerschmidt, in discussion with the author, 4–5 October 2009. 25. See Jonathan V. Plaut, The Jews of Windsor, 1790–1990: A Historical Chronicle (Toronto: Dundurn, 2007), 146; Michael Sumner, The Golden Jubilee Book: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Build-

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

ing of Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, 1930–1980 (Windsor: Sumner Press, 1981). See Norbert Horowitz, “Yidish teater fun der sheyres-hapleyte” [The Yiddish theater of Holocaust survivors], Fun noentn over, ed. Meyer Balaban (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1955), 1:142. See Ernst Landau “Jüdisches Kulturleben im Münchner Radio,” Neue Welt: Mitteilungsblatt der jüdischen Gemeinden in Bayern 1, no. 2 (October 1947): 6. See ibid. Evidently, stations in postwar Germany collaborated as Radio Frankfurt shared with Radio Munich the radio play Die Schlacht im Warschauer Ghetto. Auerbach also paid for Messerschmidt’s voice lessons with Franz Theo Reuter from the Bavarian State Opera, who according to Messerschmidt wanted to turn him into a high and light tenor. (Messerschmidt followed his instincts and stayed in the baritone fach, asserting that “a voice is not just a muscle but a personality.” Kurt Messerschmidt, in discussion with the author, 4–5 October 2009). Auerbach was a German-born chemist and businessman who was deported to Auschwitz and served there as the chief chemist preparing medicines and pesticides. After liberation he served as the first chairman of the State Federation of North Rhine and Westphalia and later as the chairman of the Association of Jewish Communities in Bavaria. In 1946 he was appointed state commissioner of the Bavarian provincial government for religious, political, and racial victims of the Nazis, thereby becoming one of the first Jews to play a role in postwar German political life. He was among the first to work for the financial compensation of victims of Nazism. He committed suicide in 1952 in response to false accusations of financial misconduct and forgery in regard to reparations payments. In 1949 Messerschmidt visited the RIAS Berlin as the emissary of the Munich radio station; he also attended a service at Pestalozzistraße Synagogue to hear the musical program with harmonium accompaniment. All of the tapes from that period had been destroyed except for three of Messerschmidt’s cantorial performances, which remain in the archives of the Bayerischer Rundfunk. Herbert Hupka to Kurt Messerschmidt, 17 April 1950, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. The letter is in English. Kurt Messerschmidt, in discussion with the author, 4–5 October 2009. See Wetzel, Jüdisches Leben in München, 9. See Edmund Schechter to Kurt Messerschmidt, 16 September 1947, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. Heinz Stark to Kurt Messerschmidt, 21 February 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See D. Hornthal to Kurt Messerschmidt, 12 October 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See Karl Kisskalt to Kurt Messerschmidt, 28 October 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See S. Veitenheimer to Kurt Messerschmidt, 20 February 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. Josef Schöffel to Kurt Messerschmidt, 19 September 1948, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See “Zimmerin” to Kurt Messerschmidt, undated, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. Josef Schöffel to Kurt Messerschmidt, 19 September 1948, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See Thessa Kaps-Bergmann to Kurt Messerschmidt, 13 April 1950, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See Liberaal Joodse Geemente to Kurt Messerschmidt, 6 February 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. See Hanns Schömmer to Kurt Messerschmidt, 15 September 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt.

(UN-)JEWISH MUSICAL SPACES IN MUNICH | 265 44. See Frank Stern, “Breaking the ‘Cordon Sanitaire’ of Memory: The Jewish Encounter with German Society,” in Thinking about the Holocaust after Half a Century, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 223. 45. Kauders, Democratization and the Jews, 38. 46. See Josef Foschepoth, Im Schatten der Vergangenheit: Die Anfänge der Gesellschaften für ChristlichJüdische Zusammenarbeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 140. 47. Karl Bühler to Kurt Messerschmidt, 12 May 1949, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. 48. David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 55. 49. See Frank Stern’s essay on German-Jewish relations in the postwar period, “German-Jewish Relations in the Postwar Period: The Ambiguities of Antisemitic and Philosemitic Discourse,” in Jews, Germans, Memory, ed.Y. Michal Bodemann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 77–98. In 1946, about 18 percent of the German population was openly antisemitic; see Günther B. Ginzel, “Antisemitismus in Deutschland heute: Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme,” in Antisemitismus nach dem Holocaust: Bestandsaufnahme und Erscheinungsformen in deutschsprachigen Ländern, ed. Alphons Silbermann and Julius H. Schoeps (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1986), 19–32. 50. Kurt Messerschmidt, in discussion with the author, 4–5 October 2009. 51. The Jewish community of Munich reported on his departure; see Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland 5, no. 14 (14 July 1950): 12. 52. See Kauders, Democratization and the Jews, 269. 53. Quoted in Kelley Bouchard, “A Majestic Voice . . . For Freedom and Justice and Tolerance and Friendship and Love: Cantor Emeritus Kurt Messerschmidt Will Celebrate His 90th Birthday with His Adoring Temple Beth El Family,” Portland Press Herald, 20 November 2004. 54. Kurt Messerschmidt in discussion with the author, 4–5 October 2009. 55. Messerschmidt also gave recitals with the Bavarian Radio Choir. He was the featured tenor soloist in a recital of lieder by Robert Schumann on 21 June 1947 in the Turnhalle Solln. In February 1949, he performed Ludwig van Beethoven’s Six Songs, op. 48, based on poems by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. 56. See Aron Ohrenstein to Kurt Messerschmidt, 5 October 1950, private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt. Ohrenstein writes that the community is getting smaller as many emigrate. HansJoachim Schoeps, in 1953, confirms that no “educated cantors” exist and that Messerschmidt’s recordings are used instead. Hans-Joachim Schoeps, “Jüdischer Glaube und jüdisches Gesetz heute,” in Die Juden in Deutschland, 1951/52–5712: Ein Almanach, ed. Heinz Ganther (Frankfurt am Main: Neuzeit Verlag, 1953), 186–87. 57. See Hugo Nothmann, “Die religiöse Situation des Judentums im Nachkriegsdeutschland,” in Die Juden in Deutschland, 1951/52–5712: Ein Almanach, ed. Heinz Ganther (Frankfurt am Main: Neuzeit Verlag, 1953), 187. 58. See Paddy Scannell, “Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life,” Media, Culture and Society 11, no. 2 (1989): 135–66. 59. Alexander Rothe, “Rethinking Postwar History: Munich’s Musica Viva during the Karl Amadeus Hartmann Years (1945–1963),” Musical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (2007): 256. 60. Krause, Arcisstraße 12, 90. 61. Ibid., 103–4. 62. On the role of the Holocaust in the poetry of the German-Swedish Nobel Prize winner Nelly Sachs, see Elaine Martin, Nelly Sachs:The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011). 63. See Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Re-reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), x.

266 | TINA FRÜHAUF 64. As such, music has found its way into German historiography, with several discrete interdisciplinary interfaces at which recent works on the cultural history operate. See Neil Gregor, “Why Does Music Matter?” German History 34, no. 1 (March 2016): 113–30. 65. See Marc Pfitzenmaier and Hans-Christoph Schlüter, “Hass auf Juden ist in Deutschland Alltag,” Die Welt, 24 October 2019.

Bibliography Interviews Messerschmidt, Kurt. In discussion with Ann Page, 24 June 1997. ———. In discussion with the author, 4–5 October 2009.

Newspapers AllgemeineWochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland Jedioth Hadashoth/Neuste Nachrichten Das schwarze Korps Undzer shtime DieWelt

Archives Leo Baeck Institute – New York|Berlin Private collection of Kurt Messerschmidt

Primary and Secondary Sources Bouchard, Kelley. “A Majestic Voice . . . For Freedom and Justice and Tolerance and Friendship and Love: Cantor Emeritus Kurt Messerschmidt Will Celebrate His 90th Birthday with His Adoring Temple Beth El Family.” Portland Press Herald, 20 November 2004. Brauch, Julia, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds. Jewish Topographies:Visions of Space,Traditions of Place. Aldershot, Burlington: Routledge, 2008. Brenner, Michael. After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Fackenheim, Emil. The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Re-reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Foschepoth, Josef. Im Schatten der Vergangenheit: Die Anfänge der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993. Ginzel, Günther B. “Antisemitismus in Deutschland heute: Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme.” In Antisemitismus nach dem Holocaust: Bestandsaufnahme und Erscheinungsformen in deutschsprachigen Ländern, edited by Alphons Silbermann and Julius H. Schoeps, 19–32. Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1986. Gläser, Helga. “Jospe, Erwin.” In Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit. Retrieved 2 April 2020 from https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/content/index.xml. Gregor, Neil. “Why Does Music Matter?” German History 34, no. 1 (March 2016): 113–30. Grobman, Alex. Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944– 1948. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.

(UN-)JEWISH MUSICAL SPACES IN MUNICH | 267 Horowitz, Norbert. “Yidish teater fun der sheyres-hapleyte” [The Yiddish theater of Holocaust survivors]. In Fun noentn over, edited by Meyer Balaban, 1:142. New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1955. Karas, Joža. Music in Terezín, 1941–1945. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 1990. Krause, Alexander. Arcisstraße 12. Palais Pringsheim—Führerbau—Amerika Haus—Hochschule für Musik und Theater. 15th rev. ed. Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2015. Kauders, Anthony D. Democratization and the Jews: Munich, 1945–1965. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Lässig, Simone, and Miriam Rürup, eds. Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Landau, Ernst. “Jüdisches Kulturleben im Münchner Radio.” Neue Welt: Mitteilungsblatt der jüdischen Gemeinden in Bayern 1, no. 2 (October 1947): 6. Levesque, Paul. “The Double-Edged Sword: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Wagnerianism in Thomas Mann’s ‘Wälsungenblut.’” German Studies Review 20, no. 1 (1997): 9–21. Manes, Philipp. As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Mann, Barbara E. Space and Place in Jewish Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Maòr, Harry. “Über den Wiederaufbau der jüdischen Gemeinden in Deutschland seit 1945.” PhD diss., Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 1961. Martin, Elaine. Nelly Sachs:The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Monod, David. Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Nothmann, Hugo. “Die religiöse Situation des Judentums im Nachkriegsdeutschland.” In Die Juden in Deutschland, 1951/52–5712: Ein Almanach, edited by Heinz Ganther, 185–87. Frankfurt am Main: Neuzeit Verlag, 1953. Oertelt, Henry A. An Unbroken Chain: My Journey through the Nazi Holocaust. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2000. Pasdzierny, Matthias. “Adler, Karl.” In Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit. Retrieved 2 April 2020 from https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/content/index.xml. Pfitzenmaier, Marc, and Hans-Christoph Schlüter. “Hass auf Juden ist in Deutschland Alltag.” Die Welt, 24 October 2019. Plaut, Jonathan V. The Jews of Windsor, 1790–1990: A Historical Chronicle. Toronto: Dundurn, 2007. Rothe, Alexander. “Rethinking Postwar History: Munich’s Musica Viva during the Karl Amadeus Hartmann Years (1945–1963).” Musical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (2007): 230–74. Scannell, Paddy. “Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life.” Media, Culture and Society 11, no. 2 (1989): 135–66. Schoeps, Hans-Joachim. “Jüdischer Glaube und jüdisches Gesetz heute.” In Die Juden in Deutschland, 1951/52–5712: Ein Almanach, edited by Heinz Ganther, 212–13. Frankfurt am Main: Neuzeit Verlag, 1953. Schwarz, Leo W. The Redeemers: A Saga of the Years 1945–1952. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953. Simbriger, Heinrich. “Schlesische Komponisten im Musikarchiv der Künstlergilde in Regensburg.” Schlesien: Eine Vierteljahresschrift für Kunst, Wissenschaft und Volkstum 15, no. 3 (1970): 164–67. Stern, Frank. “German-Jewish Relations in the Postwar Period: The Ambiguities of Antisemitic and Philosemitic Discourse.” In Jews, Germans, Memory, edited by Y. Michal Bodemann, 77–98. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. ———. “Breaking the ‘Cordon Sanitaire’ of Memory: The Jewish Encounter with German Society.” In Thinking about the Holocaust after Half a Century, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, 213–32. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

268 | TINA FRÜHAUF Sumner, Michael. The Golden Jubilee Book: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Building of Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue inWindsor, Ontario, Canada, 1930–1980. Windsor: Sumner Press, 1981. Wetzel, Juliane. Jüdisches Leben in München, 1945–1951: Durchgangsstation oder Wiederaufbau? Munich: Kommissionsverlag Uni-Druck, 1987. ———. “Jüdisches Leben in München.” In Leben im Land der Täter: Juden im Nachkriegsdeutschland (1945–1952), edited by Julius H. Schoeps, 81–96. Berlin: Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, 2001.



Epilogue The Dynamic Relationship of “German” and “Jewish”



Michael A. Meyer

The chapters in this volume set out in a variety of directions, collectively giving voice to a wide spectrum of specific interests and innovative methodologies. Taken together, they represent a nuanced image of German-Jewish studies as the field is developing today: encompassing multiple disciplines that range from history to literature, philosophy, and beyond. I shall not duplicate the editors’ introduction that describes the chapters of the rising scholars who appear here. Rather, I shall step back from the contributors’ individual projects in order to present a personal analysis of the nature of the field as a whole and to make some suggestions for future concentration.1 When I began to study the history of the German Jews fully sixty years ago, Jewish and German were understood as distinct markers of identity, and I was concerned with showing how inherited Jewish identifications diminished to make room for German ones. I knew that in the process of its diminution the Jewish component would assume new forms in relation to the religious heritage both through distancing from earlier attachments and longings as well as through application of critical approaches, learned from the university, to Jewish texts and traditions. At the same time, conflicting values were being absorbed from the non-Jewish environment. I also recognized that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German intellectuals were shifting from the Enlightenment’s reliance on philosophical thought to a fervent attachment to Romanticism with its preference for historical truth over abstract reason. However, I did not proceed to trace the interaction of the two components, Jewish and German, beyond the period when these two elements of the German Jews’ identity first confronted each other. Nor did I fully realize the extent of the internal dynamism of the two identities. Recent scholarship has justifiably argued against understanding “Jewish” and “German” as representing a fixed binary. Rather, both elements of the relationship are now understood to be unstable. Given our current understanding, I would therefore like to examine here the relationship between Jewish and German as we might

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helpfully view it and also how studies of and within the relationship can lead to new and fruitful domains of research. It might initially be useful in understanding the nature of German-Jewish studies (why do we rarely, if ever, hyphenate “American-Jewish studies”?) to compare the hyphen between German and Jewish to the fulcrum of a scale. In the course of German-Jewish history in modern times, one side of the scale descends and the other goes up. But unless this model is subjected to refinement, it seriously leads astray. And this for a number of reasons. Jewish integration into German life proceeded differentially according to economic and social position. The first German Jews to be affected were the wealthy and the intellectuals at the top of the economic and cultural ladders along with the poorest elements, who sometimes joined religiously mixed criminal gangs. Among middle-class and rural Jews, the German mark of their identity gained weight only later. Moreover, although it remains true for the great majority of German Jews that over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their Germanness increasingly outweighed their Jewishness, we have come to realize that the process was not a linear one. There was not only “assimilation” to Germanness—there were periods of “dissimilation” as well. Zionism is the obvious example of reversal for Jewish ethnic identity; the religious renaissance sparked by Martin Buber in the early twentieth century and the return to the synagogue in the first years of Nazi rule are examples of a turn back to the religious heritage. One must also distinguish with regard to religious identity a changing spectrum of ritual observance that embraces not only the synagogue but also the Jewish home. The effects of antisemitism need to be considered. In modern Germany, various kinds and levels of rejection worked to diminish expressions of Jewishness. Seeking to escape rejection, some German Jews chose to hide their identity by changes of name and manners or, in the hope of breaking the bond entirely, by totally rejecting Jewishness, distancing themselves by converting to Christianity. Of course, none of these diminutions or rejections of Jewish identity prevented antisemites from regarding the converts as Jews and, ironically, thereby preserving an element of Jewish awareness, though that insuppressible awareness could sometimes turn into Jewish self-hate. But antisemitism could also, paradoxically, resuscitate a dying Jewish identity as it did for individuals who became so-called Trutzjuden (sometimes also called Trotzjuden). Although such a Judaism born of defiance or spite was a Jewishness devoid of content, it could be held with a fervor that was almost religious. For most German Jews, antisemitism necessitated a coming together to defend their right to be Germans, but, once again paradoxically, it added weight to their Jewishness as they joined in defense, most notably in the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, whose members did not deny their Jewishness and who, in fighting against their opponents, developed a certain esprit that was based on pride in their Jewish origins. The novel element in recent German-Jewish scholarship has been less in the recognition of the interplay of diminishing, enriching, and changing Jewish identities than it has in applying the same analysis to the German side of the equation and, ultimately, to

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the nature of the hyphen, which I have compared to a fulcrum. Germany, in modern times, transformed from a relatively loose association of individual states into a united nation, then into a nationalist and colonialist empire, a fragile democracy, a racist autocracy, and finally, after the Holocaust, into a stable republic. Culturally, Germany remained fragmented. The process of German-Jewish integration and rejection took place within a changing nation and culture. German Jews held persistently to an enlightened vision of Deutschtum, shared sometimes by more and sometimes by fewer non-Jews. Some non-Jews abandoned the shared Deutschtum entirely in favor of a Germanentum that warded off every Jew who sought entry to the sanctum. It is, however, the hyphen—the fulcrum—that has recently been of the greatest interest. What is the hyphen’s history? How and when did Jew and German become merged into a single identity? What significance is there to the word “German” preceding the word “Jewish”? For it is now clear that some elements from the Jewish side of the scale entered the scale’s German pan on its other side while some qualities from the German side moved over to the Jewish dish. Germanness came to bear marks of Jewishness and Jewishness of Germanness. This process has been called “entanglement,” or being “intertwined”; its result is “hybridity.” The student of German Jewry in the modern period cannot fully or easily distinguish the German from the Jewish. And what is true for the study of individuals is true for the study of German-Jewish culture as a whole. For some modern Jews, being German and being Jewish were not to be separated by clearly differentiable, let alone contradictory values. As a result, it has, for example, been difficult to separate Jewish from German elements in writers like Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach, and Franz Kafka. But of course those German Jews who made the assertion of their essential unity, or at least compatibility, those who argued that both sides of the scale contained similar content, necessarily read both traditions selectively. The Bible became “Love your neighbor as yourself,” to the neglect of passages separating ancient Israel from the nations and stressing its particular destiny. Similarly, German culture became for Jews Kant, Schiller, and Heine, not the exclusionary völkisch ideology. Yet the composite grew ever denser. Only a racial definition of Jewishness could once more tear it asunder. A further consideration in any analysis of German-Jewish studies is the specific meaning of the two designations, German and Jewish. Each has its particular components.The term German can be used to express geographical limitation, making GermanJewish studies the study of Jews living within the changing borders of the German state. But it can also mean German-speaking Jews, as it does for the Leo Baeck Institute, regardless of where Jews lived or still live: in Austria and Switzerland, for example, not less than in Germany. But, especially recently, the “German” in German-Jewish studies has not been confined to the German language any more than to location. Yiddish and Hebrew within a German context are now considered part of German-Jewish studies, while at the same time Germany is classified in transnational perspective as but one locale for cultural efforts within various languages. Or the field may mean German Jews living in areas that are German neither politically nor linguistically, but where Jews are

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emigrants from Germany or merely of German-Jewish lineage, and may, or may not, be preserving something of their heritage. The designation on the other side of the hyphen, Jewish—especially when using the German term Judentum—may mean religion, ethnicity, or community. Intensity of Jewish identity may be determined by criteria of personal religious faith and religious practice in synagogue and home, but also by ethnic or national affiliation—or by some mix of the two. Thus refined, the scale is seen to bear on each side a variety of ever-changing content and weight, called respectively German and Jewish, but in fact subject to new configurations as elements move across the fulcrum, remain attached in various ways to one side or the other, or remain attached to the fulcrum itself. One conclusion is clear: to engage in German-Jewish studies is to pursue an elusive—because it is variously dynamic—object of research. The history of the field of German-Jewish studies is itself an object of research for those active within it. Its origins can be traced from the beginnings of a critical examination of the Jewish past, within the cradle of Wissenschaft des Judentums, down to its practice today. Like the multiple objects of German-Jewish studies, the history of its practice displays extraordinary dynamism. From the start, it adapted to the prevailing currents of academic discourse. The founders of the Wissenschaft school looked to the reigning disciplines of philology and history. Only later would their successors broaden their view to include sociology, statistics, and data gathered from archives. And only late in the nineteenth century, with the publication of the first Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, did scholars of German Jewry cast a focused glance upon the recent history of German Jewry itself. Not only did the objects of research shift but so did the methods, in accordance with the dominant historiographical trends of the time. Jewish scholars, some German and some not, variously placed German Jews and German Judaism under the lenses of positivism, Jewish nationalism, and Marxism. It quickly became a truism that an understanding of Jewish history and culture is inconceivable without setting each diaspora Jewish community into its particular historical context. This same truism with regard to the historical contextualization of the objects of research came to be recognized as holding also for the historians or linguists, literary scholars, or anthropologists themselves. A comprehensive history of the scholarly study of Jews and Judaism undertaken in Germany or with regard to German Jews, embracing both the subjects and the scholars, would be a challenging project. We students of German-Jewish studies are ourselves products of the scholarly trends of our time, able to reflect critically on earlier trends, seeking to become more knowledgeable of our own directions of thought, but having to admit that we are at best dimly aware of whether our current tools of research will hold up in the future. Will what piques the interest of German-Jewish studies scholars today still seem relevant a generation from now, or will current concepts fall by the wayside as flash-in-the pan fads, their light extinguished by persistent critique? We write of “turns” in German-Jewish studies, which nearly always reflect turns in the disciplines that compose the field. An incomplete list that has been expanding

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during the period of my lifetime would surely include greater attention to women and, more recently, queer studies, transnationalism (which has been judged to be so very fitting for the Jewish experience), and the spatial dimension (to be understood as not merely geographical places but rather sites of identity performance), as well as analysis of Jewish material culture (which necessarily plays a large role in Alltagsgeschichte). Perhaps because German-Jewish history can scarcely avoid dealing with the Holocaust, the history of memory has come into focus as an indispensable component of the historical enterprise. It is, of course, linked to the expanding interest in the German-Jewish diaspora, scattered as it is in sizable numbers from Israel to the Americas and beyond. The émigrés’, refugees’, and survivors’ recollections—what they remembered and what they suppressed—has become very much a part of transnational German-Jewish studies. With the above as background, what might we consider as desirable approaches and subject matter for the future of German-Jewish studies? In answering that question it is necessary to keep both sides of the hyphen in mind. The field requires a twofold contextualization: Jewish in the German context, German in the Jewish context. Only when related both to German history apart from Judaism and to Jewish history beyond Germany can we fully understand the various elements of our subject. Although the Holocaust will continue to serve as caesura, and while the significance of its remembrance looms large for Jews and non-Jews, it has been convincingly argued that seeing German Jewry through that lens has a severely distorting effect. Unfortunately, it continues to be true that today’s Germans in general—and not they alone—understand German Jews primarily as victims, as objects and not as subjects of their history. In the future, German-Jewish studies will need to reinforce the image of a community, a culture, and a faith that are worthy of study in their manifestations preceding the Holocaust as well as the image of their problematic revival in new and changing forms within the Jewish framework of post-Holocaust Germany. A useful tool for understanding German-Jewish history that deserves greater attention is the category of generational change. As we focus more on the Jewish family, we will be able more readily to understand change as reflected, not only in new ideas and institutions but also in how one generation relates to its predecessor and successor. For example, Jews raised in Wilhelmine Germany absorbed the bourgeois values of that society while their children were often drawn to the far more laissez-faire culture of Weimar. The result was a generation gap, exacerbated among those younger Jews who were attracted by Zionism. In religious families, generation gaps were created when the next generation set aside ritual practice or even chose non-Jewish partners. Consideration of generational misunderstanding or conflict relates to an area of research that is rapidly becoming popular and will—and should—become more prominent: the history of emotions. Scholars will need to familiarize themselves with psychological concepts and be willing to enter the realm of sexual behaviors, as these change in relation to Jewish integration and cultural context. What can we say about

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social interactions between Jews and non-Jews? How, in spite of antisemitism, did the interfaith marriage rate in Germany rise so rapidly before 1933? Another tool, perhaps too little employed, is the concept of salience, an indicator of rising or falling Jewish significance. It is of particular value in tracing and explaining the ups and downs of Jewish identity in the lives of individual German Jews and of their Jewish communities. When salience reaches its nadir, Jewishness becomes wholly peripheral, or even mere residue. What is that remnant of Jewishness for the so-called “non-Jewish Jew”? What are the outcomes when salience resurges? German-Jewish studies will need to pay more attention to the post-Holocaust period, which presents two very different subjects for study. On the one hand there are the Jews of the German-Jewish diaspora, their memories of what it was like in Germany before they left, the remainder of the earlier consciousness that they carried with them to new and culturally different lands. Much research has already been done in that area. On the other hand there is also the Jewish community in present-day Germany, a community in so many respects removed from its predecessor. A major subject of German-Jewish studies, currently coming into focus but to be expanded in the future, will be the process whereby Russian and Israeli immigrants to Germany relate to the pre-Holocaust Jewish community and its culture and how they bring new elements from their own diaspora into the lives they are building as Jews in Germany. Aside from their focus on the Holocaust, popular writings on German-Jewish history often give their principal attention to the lives of the most prominent German Jews. I think it a worthy task for German-Jewish studies in the future to give more attention to those persons, institutions, and values that are less well-known except to its specialists. The focus on Alltagsgeschichte, with its emphasis on women and domestic life, is an important step in that direction. Perhaps one could consider the particular histories of various age groups, such as children and the elderly, for example. Child-rearing practices among Jews, compared to those of non-Jews, would be of great interest, as would Jewish treatment of grandparents. Did these relationships change as German Jews urbanized, as they faced varying degrees of antisemitism? How did communal ties differ in larger as opposed to smaller Jewish communities? What is lost when the smaller Jewish community fails to maintain its critical mass? To what extent were Jewish communities directly involved in the lives of Jewish families? A subject that, to my knowledge, has been only initially explored within the German-Jewish context is the changing relationship between rabbinical and lay leadership. How was the authority of the modern rabbi altered in relation to the lay leaders of the rabbi’s community? Was it a continuing process whereby rabbis became ever more subject to the whims of laymen? How much freedom did rabbis have with regard to controversial issues such as the abandonment or retention of synagogue customs, or with regard to the manner of celebrating life-cycle events? How much freedom did they have to express their views with regard to such controversial matters as Zionism? And were the rabbis or the laymen the ultimate authority for major decisions that affected the community?

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I have long believed that biography is essential for historical understanding. We have plentiful studies of the “big names” but are only beginning to research individuals whose lives can shed light well beyond their own private sphere. We have produced collective volumes in which each chapter deals with an aspect of an individual life or thought. But such volumes cannot present a rounded and balanced picture of the person. In the area of Jewish religion, for example, we still lack comprehensive, updated biographies of such figures as Rabbis Seligman Baer Bamberger and Abraham Geiger. Fortunately, the long-neglected biographies of German-Jewish women have become the subject of an increasing number of biographical studies. I hope that in the years ahead younger scholars will work toward new syntheses that will integrate and complement their case studies. I can imagine a work titled “Germany through Jewish Eyes: Jews and Judaism through non-Jewish German Eyes.” Such a work would consider how observers from the outside understood, structured, and often distorted the objects of their gaze. A similar work, perhaps titled “The Changing German-Jewish Self-Image,” could consider how Jews viewed themselves as Jews. Proceeding both diachronically and synchronically, it could survey change over time as well as divisions within the community. Analysis should not stand in the way of synthesis, nor should nuanced narrative be cast aside simply because there is no convincing master narrative. It is only when we tell a story (critically, to be sure) that we reach a larger readership. More attention should be given to comparative studies. The characteristics of an individual or of a collective often appear more clearly when they are set against an object of comparison. Such studies might include detailed internal comparisons of individuals—religious thinkers, rabbis, or community leaders—or comparisons between individual Jews and their non-Jewish counterparts. Or one might look at how a Jewish religious community is structured in comparison with its Christian neighbor, or which moral and aesthetic values and symbols are commonly held between the two and which carry greater weight in one group or the other. What did the Christmas tree mean in a Jewish home, and where did Jews set the borderline to their assimilation of Christian values and symbols? The question of continuity versus change is a perennial one among historians. It would be interesting to ask with regard to German-Jewish history: Is there a scarlet thread that ties together the various periods of German-Jewish history? Are there significant points of rupture and, if so, where and why do they occur? Do the disconnections hold true for the entire Jewish community or only for a segment of it? And in what ways has the obvious hiatus between pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust German Jewry been worsening or healing from generation to generation? Irony is a powerful element in all history. Expectations so often don’t turn out as hoped for or awaited. German-Jewish history is full of painful unanticipated results. A clear instance occurred in the early Nazi period when assimilationist Jews hoped that their loudly proclaimed loyalty to Germany would be reciprocated, only to learn of their utter rejection and expressed preference for the emigration enthusiasm of the

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anti-assimilationist Zionists. I am confident that scholarship could reveal other such instances and, by noting them, enrich the narrative. The spatial turn in the humanities opens up numerous possibilities for students of the German-Jewish experience, some of which have been activated, while others still await. Among the questions that arise are: How was a particular Jewish space understood by a historical figure? Is that understanding the same as that of the historian? How does a space, for example a Jewish newspaper or scholarly journal, evolve? Does its evolution gain and lose rapidity? How do certain spaces move from sacrality to secularity or merge the two? The New Synagogue in Berlin, for example, began its life as a symbol of Jewish pride, then, over the course of time, became mostly a remnant of religious devotion as ever fewer Jews prayed there regularly. During the Nazi years it became a place of spiritual refuge and a space whose sacrality lent gravitas to Jewish philanthropy when concerts benefiting the annual winter drive for the Jewish poor were held there. And finally, following its partial destruction during the war, most of the building—except for a small Conservative synagogue on an upper floor—became a museum, a space of memory. Space, moreover, may be physically bereft of Jews yet remain alive in Jewish imagination, as Zion was through the centuries. And what of the space that Jews occupied in non-Jewish German consciousness? When and how did that space grow larger or smaller, and what positive or negative imaginings were competitors for public concern? What is the process by which Jewish spaces are erased, and how are they reestablished? Allied to the spatial turn is the greater emphasis upon the tangible elements of German-Jewish life. In recent scholarship, this has meant the Jewish body, the Jewish home, and the objects that convey Jewishness. This much-neglected area is surely deserving of further attention. Perhaps it needs to be extended by paying closer attention to differences in lifestyle between wealthier and poorer Jews. In that regard it should be legitimate to use the much-abused concept of social class, albeit while taking care to avoid the danger of reductionism. With regard to the focus on material culture, I would only plead that it be followed by the next step: the integration of the material with the intellectual and spiritual components, thereby promoting the creation of a balance between the two. The determination of motivation is perhaps the most difficult objective that humanities scholars face. Positivists shied away from it, relying upon the explanatory power of the facts alone. In German-Jewish studies there are fundamental differences of opinion among scholars regarding issues of motivation. One of the most obvious and highly determinative differences lies in the question: To what degree was the religious and cultural integration of German Jews motivated by the self-interested quest for political emancipation, and to what extent was it driven by internalization of norms originating outside the traditional Jewish society? Was religious reform merely a “price” to be paid for political and social integration, or was it an end in itself? In the years ahead, scholars working in German-Jewish studies will, like their colleagues in other humanistic fields, need to grapple with the question of subjectivity

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if they choose not to limit themselves to the most minute subjects. They will have to make decisions with regard to the relative weight they give to their own motivations and goals. Dominant without question must remain the effort to convey the historically true. But does that leave out the good? Should the German-Jewish studies scholar’s choice of subject or manner of treatment perhaps be influenced, as well, by whether that article or book can do any good in the world, be able to serve some moral purpose? This consideration is by no means limited to the student of German Jewry, but weighing it may be more significant in this area than in others, given the fraught nature of the subject, especially for the Nazi period and its consequences. And finally, what is owed to the beautiful? Is it only important to get all the details straight, or also to present a narrative from which readers may derive aesthetic pleasure? The latter consideration appears most relevant when the goal of historical writing is expanded beyond the explanation of events, situations, and personal actions, to include evocation of a time or a personality. The consideration of the relative weight to be given these values raises the question of whether German-Jewish studies scholars should ask if it is their task to issue a warning, to point to a lesson, or, contrariwise, to suggest a model worth emulating. Should the field speak to a broader readership of non-Jews? Should it bear a particular message for present-day Jews? In recent years, scholars have been less reluctant to include themselves in their work, to use the first-person singular, to introduce their own reflections. In this there is, to be sure, the obvious danger of distortion or instrumentalization. But perhaps the reader does have the right to know how the student of a period relates personally to the object of his or her study. Finally, the future scholar of German-Jewish studies will surely continue to pay increased attention to visual elements: to portraiture, photographs, and film. And that same scholar will likewise not only employ media resources that provide a verbal account of the subject under discussion but also engage such devices as a mapping of Jewish scholarly and personal relationships within and beyond the boundaries of Germany itself. Expanding digitization will make research easier, if perhaps also, on account of making archives visits less necessary, less fun. New approaches and subject matter that have already appeared and are evident in this volume will multiply and be further developed. But the fundamental issues I have sought to raise here—and no doubt others, as well—will continue to serve the younger generation of scholars, such as those represented here, as fundamental considerations for their new and challenging research. Michael A. Meyer is Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History emeritus at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. His books include The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Wayne State University Press, 1967), Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford University Press, 1988), German-Jewish History in Modern Times (Columbia University Press, 1996–98), and, most recently, Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

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Notes 1. Out of awareness that any listing would unavoidably be incomplete, I have intentionally refrained from citing the rich harvest of recent contributions to the field of German-Jewish studies. Many of the relevant innovative books and articles are mentioned in the notes to the editors’ introduction and to the chapters in this volume.

Index

Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev. See Moykher Sforim, Mendele acculturation: mathematical logic and, 121; Orthodoxy and, 63–64; religious denominations and, 68; Sephardic models of, 60; Yiddish and, 38–39, 49. See also assimilation; integration Achad Ha’am (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg), 107 activism, 2, 80, 83, 85, 90, 165n11 Adenauer, Konrad, 215 Adler, Karl, 251 Adler, Nathan, 60 Adorno, Theodor W., 92, 119–20, 122–23, 125, 130, 132, 135, 138n3 affective turn, 4 Africa, German colonialism in, 84–92 Africans, 86–88, 90–91 agency, 2, 10, 90, 172, 175 Agudath Israel, 67–69, 73n41, 106 Akademie für Tonkunst, 249 Aleichem, Sholem (Shalom Rabinovitz), 49, 109; Motl the Cantor’s Son, 159–60, 162 Allerlei Geschichten (All kinds of stories, Pappenheim), 48 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (periodical), 47 Alltagsgeschichte, 273–75 Alsberg, Paul, 196 Alter,Yitzchak Meir, 108 Altmann, Hans, 254, 258 American Jewish Archives, 35n37, 192, 195–98 American Jewish Historical Society, 194 American Medical Association, 181–82 Amerika Haus, 259 Amis, Martin, 242 Ancˇerl, Karel, 251 anthropology, 17, 27, 30, 221, 249, 272 anti-colonialism, 94n12, 97n56

antiracism, 2 antisemitism, 2–3, 5; attacks on Jewish graveyards, 218; in context of colonialism and racism, 79–92; in European academia, 26; ideological features of, 80–81; Islamophobia and, 79; “Itzig” name and, 244n16; Jewish identity and, 270; modernity and, 82; in occupied Germany, 255–59, 265n49; Orthodox Jews and, 65, 68–69; reason and, 119; resistance to, 256–58; self-irony as defense against, 162; Switzerland and, 172; technology and, 123, 125; in twenty-first century, 261 Arab Jews, 60 archives: digitization of, 7, 31, 34n37, 122, 277; fragmentation of, 123; German-Jewish diaspora and global networks, 10, 189–201, 272; in Munich, 249; professionalization, 198 Archiv für jüdische Familienforschung, Kunstgeschichte und Museumswesen (journal), 24 Arcisstraße 12, Munich, 10; as Hitler’s Führerbau, 248, 259; as Hochschule für Musik und Theater, 10, 248–49, 259–61; Kaminzimmer (fireplace room), 260–61; as Palais Pingsheim, 248 Arendt, Hannah, 3, 122, 125 Arendt, Otto, 85 Arnhold, Eduard, 85 Arnold, Otto, 97n56 art: family history and, 21; Nazi-confiscated works, 259. See also visual culture art history, 149–64 Asch, Sholem, 108–10 Aschheim, Steven, 81, 138n3 assimilation, 7, 58, 270, 275; loss and, 121; religious denominations and, 60–61. See also acculturation; integration Association for Jewish Studies, xi–xii, 106

280 | INDEX Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 178 audiences, 6, 113, 149, 151–55, 162–63, 255, 261 Auerbach, Berthold, 271 Auerbach, Philipp, 254, 264n29 Auschwitz, 155, 158, 252, 263n11 Austria, 5, 19–20, 28, 101, 111–12, 150, 156, 179, 230, 259, 271 autodiegetic narration, 230–31, 234–40, 243n3 autoethnography, 249 avant-garde modernist art, 155, 160 Bacon, Gershon, 62, 73n42 Baeck, Leo, 3, 59, 215 Bais Yaakov school system, 67 Bamberger, Seligman Baer, 65, 275 Bar Kochba rebellion, 61 Bartal, Israel, 107 Basel Institute, 172 Baskind, Samantha, 151, 165n11 Batnitzky, Leora, 59 Bavarian Radio Choir, 254 Bavarian State Opera, 256 Bayerischer Rundfunk, 254 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 255, 265n55 Behçet, Hulusi, 179–80 Behrens, Leffmann, 20 Bein, Alex, 190, 192, 195–96, 199 Belke, Ingrid, 133 Belletristik, 39 belonging, 42, 81, 83, 163; mourning rituals and, 212–13, 217, 221–22 Ben-Gurion, David, 109 Ben-Haim, Paul, 249, 259 Benjamin, Walter, xiv, 9, 119–20, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132–33, 135, 137, 158 Berger, Peter, 70 Berlin, xiv; archives in, 190–92, 194–95; artists in, 150, 154–56, 159; “Broadcasting House” (Haus des Rundfunks), 123; Eastern European Jews in, 252 Berliner Tageblatt (newspaper), 159 Berlinski, Herman, 260 Berman, Theo, 223 Bermann, David, 223, 224 Bernays, Isaac, 64 Bernstein, Elsa, 248 Beth Shalom (Reform congregation), 261 Beveridge, William, 180

Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 159, 191 Bildung, 49 binaries, 2, 154, 234, 259 biographies, 274–75; in context, 175–76; on early modern era, 25 Birnbaum, Nathan, 7, 9, 101, 105–14, 117 Birnbaum, Solomon, 105 Birnbaum, Uriel, 168n55 Black Lives Matter movement, 2 Blacks, 86–88, 90–91 Blau-Weiß, 109–10 Bloch, Ernst, 125–28, 130–36, 141n43 Block, Nick, 9, 102, 115 Blumenberg, Hans, 139n9 B’nai B’rith, 191 Bohemia, 20 Böll, Heinrich, 216 Brann, Markus, 190 Brenner, Michael, 114, 212 Breuer, Mordechai, 68 Brilling, Bernhard, 197–98 British Orthodoxy, 60, 71n9 Buber, Martin, xi, 3, 4, 106, 115n10, 127, 132–33, 133, 135, 151, 270 Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit (Book of folktales and legends from Jewish antiquity, Tendlau), 43–46 Buerkle, Darcy, 153 Bühler, Karl, 256–57 Bürgerbräukeller, 249–50 business networks, 19–23, 28–29, 84–85 Cairo Genizah, 191, 194 cantors, 7, 162, 249, 251–54, 258, 264n31, 265n56 capitalism, 80, 124; family history and, 26, 28–29 Caplan, Marc, 114 Carpi, Daniel, 196 Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario, 260 Catholic Church, 256–57 Celan, Paul, 211, 223 cemeteries, 10, 211–25, 250 Center for Jewish History, ix, 34n37 Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, 192 Central Art Collecting Point, 259 Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, 65, 270 Central Council of Jews in Germany, 215

INDEX

Centrum Judaicum, 195 Chagall, Marc, 114, 154–55, 158–59, 166n23, 166n26 Chamberlain, Neville, 259 charity, 19–21, 59 Charles VI, 19 Chevra Kadisha (Holy Brotherhood), 21 Christianity, 81, 270 Christian-Jewish relations, 256 Chun, Wendy, 135 class, 4, 81, 276 co-constitution, 81–82 Cohen, Daniel, 196, 198, 199 Cohen, Elieser Ezechiel Lippmann, 20 Cohen, Richard, 46 Cohen, Walter, 219–20 Cohn, Dorrit, 12n7 colonialism, German, 9, 97n46; in context of antisemitism and racism, 79–92; National Socialism and, 79 Commission for Cemetery Affairs, 215 comparative studies, 275 Conservative (denomination), 66. See also Positive-Historical correspondent networks, 124–38 court factors, 8, 17–21, 25, 29 Court of Restitution Appeals, 215 critical scholarship, 3 critical theory, 119, 135 cultural capital, 196 cultural history, 4; family history and, 21; mourning rituals and, 214; negativity and, 120; translation and, 41–42 cultural preservation, 49 cultural studies, 4 cultural theory, 122–23 cultural turn in translation studies, 41–42 Czellitzer, Arthur, 24–26, 30, 33n20 Czollek, Max, 3 Dachau, 254 Dadaism, 160 Daladier, Édouard, 259 Davidsohn, Magnus, 251 Davies, Winifred, 104 daytsh, 107–8, 110, 114 decolonization, 2 denazification, 258 Der Israelit (Orthodox newspaper), 47, 65 dermatology, 174–83

| 281

Dernburg, Bernhard, 87, 90, 97n56 Der Querschnitt (periodical), 159 Dessau, xiv Deutschbund, 88 Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (newspaper), 88 Deutscher Kolonialverein (German Colonial Association), 84 Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Union of German-Jewish Communities), 65, 191 Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (German East-African Society), 85 Deutschtum, 271 Dey, Bruno, 244n20 diachronic translations,Yiddish-German, 38–50 Diamant, Paul Joseph, 25, 30 diaspora, 5, 274; archives and, 10, 189–201 diaspora studies, 9, 272–73 Dickens, Charles, 159 Dicker, Herman, 254 difference, 4, 6–7, 47, 83, 86, 153, 160, 162, 175, 276 DigiBaeck, ix digital technologies, 9, 122–24, 138 digitization, 7, 31, 34n37, 122, 277 Dinaburg (Dinur), Ben-Zion, 191, 196 diplomacy, 18, 28, 87, 180, 186n57 discourse theories, 4 discrimination, 81–83, 86, 174, 183, 244n16 disfigurement (as narrative strategy), 232–42 displaced persons in Munich, 250–53 divine abandonment, 124–38, 140n23 Döblin, Alfred, 104, 105 documentary narrative, 229 Donahue, William, 13n19 Donath, Adolph, 155 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 130 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 129, 159 Dreyfus, Jean-Marc, 214 Dubnow, Simon, 109, 189, 191, 195, 198 Durkheim, Emil, 63 Durra, Hermann, 251–52, 263n19 Dutch lands, 105, 113 Dutch language, 106 “Dutch manual” (for archives), 194 Eastern Europe: folk art, 151, 191; modernity and, 67. See also specific countries Eastern European Jewry (Ostjuden): archives and, 191–92, 198–200; artists and, 152,

282 | INDEX 154–55; identity, 6, 7, 106–14; migration of, 114, 155–56, 166n30, 250, 252; Nazi Germany and, 193; religious rites, 214; visual depictions of, 158–63 East European Orthodoxy, 72n30. See also Orthodox Judaism Eckenheimer Landstrasse cemetery, 216, 218, 219 Eckstein, Olga, 220 Eichmann, Adolf, 244n20 Einstein, Alfred, 258 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 20 Elias, Julius, 160 Elijah the Prophet, 107–10 elites, 25, 39, 68, 89, 248 Ellenson, David, 70 Elyada, Aya, 8–9, 11, 50 emancipation, 21, 58, 59; archives and, 200; family history and, 25, 27; reason and, 119; Switzerland and, 172; Yiddish and, 39 émigré German Jews, xiv; challenges faced by, 158; compositions by, 260; Jewish burial grounds and, 10, 213–25; memories of, 273; scholars, 1, 3, 6, 10, 83, 200. See also refugees Emory University, 102–4 emotions, history of, 4, 273–74 Endelman, Todd, 59, 189 England, 192 Enlightenment, 39, 58, 67, 119, 193, 269 entangled history, 18, 173–74, 242, 271 equality, 41, 69, 83, 87–88, 90–91, 119 Erichsen, Regine, 179–80 Estraikh, Gennady, 114 ethnicity, xii, 60, 67, 69, 87, 114, 163, 175, 270, 272 ethnocentrism, 2 ethnography, 249 ethnonationalism, 69 Ettlinger, Jacob, 63, 65 Eugene of Savoy, Prince, 19, 29 eugenics, 24 exclusion, 83, 92, 163, 174, 177, 271 exile: academic careers and, 173–84; of Jews from Germany, 183; of visual artists in 1930s, 158; women’s employment in, 177– 78. See also émigré German Jews; refugees exile studies, 2, 9 Expressionism, 154–55, 160 expulsion, 20, 172, 180, 213, 222

Fackenheim, Emil, 261 family history, 17–31; after 1945, 25–31; beginnings of, 23–26, 30; continuity and discontinuities in, 18, 27–31; generational change, 273–74; genetics and eugenics, 24; material objects and, 27–28; networks and, 28–29; types of researchers, 26–27, 30–31 Fasanenstraße Synagogue, 251 Faulhaber, Michael, 250, 256 Feinstein, Margarete, 214 feminism, xi, 2, 48 Fenster, Hersh, 167n45 Ferziger, Adam, 59, 63, 70n3, 72n25, 72n30 Fichtmüller, Hedwig, 256 fictive kinship, 23 Fifth Aliyah, 196 film, 122–23, 125, 153 film studies, 153 finances: for care of Jewish cemeteries, 215–17; family history and, 29; of women scientists, 177, 179, 182–83. See also reparations First Israelite Synod in Leipzig, 21 First Zionist Congress, 106 Fischer, Karel, 251 Fischer, Stefanie, 10, 225 Flaubert, Gustave, 129 Flossenbürg, 252 folk musicians, 158–59 folktales, 24, 38–50 France, 154–55, 158, 163, 186n57, 192 Frankel, Zacharias, 59, 65–66, 72n34 Frankfurt am Main, Jewish cemeteries in, 216–20, 223 Frankfurter Zeitung (newspaper), 125–27, 130, 132–34, 136, 137 Frankfurt School, 9, 130, 133 Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Judaism, 69 Free Jewish Lehrhaus, 127 Free University of Berlin, 183 Freimann, Aron, 35n37 French Orthodoxy, 71n9 Freud, Sigmund, xiv Freytag, Gustav, 244n16 Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 251 Frühauf, Tina, 10, 262 Fuchs, Anne, 244n14 Fuchs, Eduard, 162, 168n58

INDEX

Galicia, 60–61, 67–68, 111, 114, 156 Ganacker, 252 Garloff, Katja, 13n22 Gaster, Moses, 47–48 Geck, Rudolph, 125, 126, 128, 136 Geiger, Abraham, 21, 275 Geistesgeschichte, 3–4 gender discrimination, 183 gender roles: in families, 29, 178; subversion of, 156–58. See also women gender studies, 2, 4, 9–10 genealogy, 23, 224 General Archive of the Austrian Jewish Religious Communities, 194 generational change, 273–74 genetics, 24, 31 Genizah, 194 Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, ix–xiii, xiv–xv German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), 9, 79–80, 84–92, 97n51 Germanentum, 271 German history, 5; integrative approach, 81 German identity, 3, 153, 269–71. See also identity German-Jewish history: archives and, 10, 189–201; colonialism and, 79–92; émigré synthesis of, 3, 200. See also Jewish history German-Jewish History in Modern Times (1996), 4, 13n22 German-Jewish studies, 1–11; aims of, xiv–xv, 1–2; case studies in, 7–11; challenges in, 6; cultural studies and, 4; fellowship in, ix–xiii, xiv–xv; future research, 10–11, 273–77; generations of scholars, 1, 4; global approaches, 2, 5, 10; history of the field, 3–7, 272–73; hybrid approaches, 2; identities and, 269–72; interdisciplinary approaches, 2, 8, 261; journals and book series, 13n18, 13n21; languages in, 4, 6; multilingual approaches, 2–3, 9; negativity and, 120; political context, 2, 5; relevance of, 8; spatial turn, 4, 10, 249, 262n2, 273, 276; in Switzerland, 171–74; topics in, xi– xii; transnational approaches, 2, 9–10, 17– 19, 23, 31, 150, 163–64, 165n6, 173–84, 271–73; turns in, 4, 272–73; visual culture and, 4, 149–54, 163–64; Yiddish in, 48–49, 101–14. See also Jewish studies

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German-Jewish subcultures, 4; Old Yiddish literature and, 42, 50; Orthodox, 64; religious innovations, 58–59 German Jewry: birth of modern Judaism and, 58–62; centrality in Jewish studies, 189–90, 198–201; Eastern European representations of, 107–14; in present-day Germany, 6, 274; religious rites, 214–15 German language, 3, 6; Jewish adoption of, 39–41; Yiddish folktales translated into, 45–50; Yiddish studies and, 104–5 German nationalism, 84, 88–92 German studies, xi, 5; Yiddish in, 101–6 German Studies Association, xi–xii, 106 Gerstenhauer, Max Robert, 80, 88–89, 91, 97n51 Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, 191–92, 194–99 Gesellschaft für christlich-jüdische Zusammenarbeit, 256 Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation (Association for German Colonization), 84 Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung (Society for Jewish Family Research), 24 ghetto life: disappearance of, 44, 47; “ghetto archives,” 191; “ghetto literature,” 39, 44–45; Yiddish and, 54n43 Gilleir, Anke, 127, 132 Gillerman, Sharon, 1 Gilman, Sander, 4 Gobineau Society, 88 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 129 Goldstein, Moritz, 160, 168n50 Gollance, Sonia, 102 Golleschau, 252 Gomperz family, 23 Gorelik, Lena, 2 Gorelik, Shemarya, 109, 112 Göttingen, xiv Graetz, Heinrich, 23, 65–66, 189, 193, 200 Graf, Andreas, 239 graphic novels, 153 Grass, Günter, 242 gravesites. See cemeteries Grjasnowa, Olga, 2 Gross, Jacob, 251, 253 Grossman, Jeffrey, 47, 54n43 Grossmann, Anita, 178 Grossmann, Rebekka, 153 Grunwald, Max, 24–25, 30, 47–48

284 | INDEX Güdemann, Moritz, 61 Gutbier, Alexander, 176 Habsburg Empire, 18–21 Haggada, 39 Haid, Percy, 254 Halakhah (Jewish law), 29, 63–65, 67, 72n28, 219 Hall, Stuart, 81 Hamburg, 197 Hamburg Reform Temple, 63 Handelman, Matthew, 9, 138 Hansen, Miriam, 124 Hanukkah, 61 Haredi Jews, 63, 69 Hasidism, 61, 67 Haskalah, 27, 39, 193, 200 “Hatikvah” (anthem), 250, 262n4 Haumann, Heiko, 172, 184n3 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 104 hazanuth (cantorial singing), 252 Hebrew, 6, 271 Hebrew Union College, 195–97 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, 14n26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 120, 124 he-Hasid,Yehuda, 44 Heimat, 3 Heine, Heinrich, xiv, 159, 162, 271 Heintz, Bettina, 121 Heppner, Aron, 197 Herero, 88, 97n46 Herlitz, Georg, 194–96 Herzl, Theodor, 106, 109–10, 196 Herzog-Max-Straße Synagogue, 250, 253, 261 Hess, Jonathan, 1, 122 Heymann, Michael, 196 Hildesheimer, Esriel, 64–68 Hilsenrath, Edgar, 230, 232–34, 244n15; Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the barber), 10, 234–42; Nacht (Night), 233 Hindorf, Richard, 87 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 64–65, 66, 68, 72n31, 72n34 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 156, 158 historical network analysis, 175–76 Historical Society of Israel, 196

historiography, 4, 18, 28, 172–73, 175, 192, 200–201, 212, 272 history: entangled, 18, 173–74, 242, 271; oral, 249; social, 4. See also art history; family history; German history; German-Jewish history; Jewish history; women’s history Hitler, Adolf, 10, 69, 125, 239, 248, 259, 261 Hochschule für Musik und Theater, 10, 248–49, 259–61 Hofer, Karl, 155 Hokhmat Yisrael, 193 Holocaust: archival records and, 190, 193, 198; burial sites and, 10, 211–25; GermanJewish studies and, xiv, 273–74; musical compositions memorializing, 260; postwar awareness of, 258; refugees killed in, 158; Switzerland and, 171. See also Shoah; victimization Holocaust fiction, 10, 229–42 Holocaust studies, 5, 10, 163, 230 Holocaust survivors, xii, xiv, 3, 212–14, 216, 219, 222–23, 225, 230, 232, 234–35, 250–52, 254, 273 Holy Roman Empire, 19–20 homosexuality, 156–57, 167n34 Horkheimer, Max, 119–20, 123, 138n3 Hornthal, D., 255 Horowitz, Markus, 72n31 Höss, Rudolf, 238 humanities, 8, 122, 123. See also specific fields Humboldt University, 251 Hundert, Gershon, 189, 200 Hungary, 19, 28, 60, 64, 68, 70n3, 174 Huntington, Richard, 222 Hupka, Herbert, 255 Husserl, Sigmund, 194 identity, 269; colonialism and, 81, 83; family and, 24; formation of, 4; narrative and, 242; translation and, 49. See also German identity; Jewish identity images. See visual culture imaginative fiction, 229 improvement, colonial discourse on, 87, 96n36 inclusion, 83, 90, 92, 163 In dem yidishn kultur-vogn (In the Yiddish Culture Wagon), 107 industrialization, 127, 192 Institute of Sexual Science, 158 Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, 197

INDEX

integration: colonialism and, 80; identity and, 270–71; language and, 47; Old Yiddish literature and, 49. See also acculturation; assimilation intellectual communities: in “a world abandoned by God,” 124–38; negativity and, 119–24 intercession (Shtadlanut), 19–21, 28 interfaith dialogue, 256, 258 International Council of Christians and Jews, 256 Irwin, Sylvia, 102 Islamophobia, 79 Israeli Consulate General, 249 Israeli immigrants, 274 Israeli scholars, 5 Israelites, 72n28 Israelitisches Familienblatt (periodical), 153, 159 Israel/Palestine: archives in, 192, 195–96, 199; German Jews and, 6; migration to, 250; mourning rituals and, 221; Orthodox communities and, 61–62, 69 Itzig, Daniel, 244n16 Itzig family, 26 Jacob, Ferdinand, 220 Jacob, Lucy, 220 Jacobi, Lotte, 153 Jacobson, Jacob, 194, 197 Jay, Martin, 138n3 Jedioth Hadashoth/Neuste Nachrichten (newspaper), 250 Jeremiah (prophet), 109 Jewish authenticity, 59–61, 66 Jewish Historical General Archives (JHGA), 192, 194–96, 198 Jewish history: colonialism and, 79–92; continuity and discontinuities in, 18, 27–31, 58, 275; folktales and, 43–46; GermanJewish scholars on, 38. See also GermanJewish history Jewish identity, 127, 269–71; in art, 165n11; Eastern European, 6, 7, 106–14; mourning rituals and, 213–14; sociological definition of, 140n20; visual culture and, 149, 153–54. See also identity Jewish Museum (Vienna), 24 Jewish Museum Berlin, ix Jewish National Fund, 68

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Jewish nationalism, 2, 60–61, 67–69 Jewishness. See Jewish identity Jewish Renaissance, 10, 151 Jewish renewal movement, 133 Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO), 215 Jewish studies, xi; Germanocentrism, 189–90, 198–201; spatial turn in, 249; Yiddish in, 101–3. See also German-Jewish studies Jewish Trust Corporation for Germany (JTC), 215 Joachim, Joseph, 254 Jonas, Regina, 70n2 Joseph I, 19 Jospe, Erwin, 251 Judaism: religious denominations in, 9, 58–70; role of German Jewry in birth of modern, 58–62 Judentum, 272 Jüdische Familienforschung (journal), 24, 26 Jüdische Lehrerbildungsanstalt (Jewish teachers seminary), 251 Jüdische Rundschau (periodical), 159 Jüdisches Museum München, 261 Jugendstil (artistic style), 114 Jung, Dean, 183 Kaddish, 211, 213, 217–18, 223, 250 Kafalenos, Emma, 232, 239, 243n11 Kafka, Franz, xiv, 105, 114, 120, 137, 139n7, 142n60, 271; “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”), 230–31 Kalkowska, Eleonore, 167n37 Kant, Immanuel, 271 Kapitelman, Dmitrij, 2 Katz, Jacob, 25, 59, 62 Kauders, Anthony, 256 Kaufmann, David, 23, 25, 30 Kaufmann, Irma, 23 Kiepert, Heinrich, 95n24 Kirschner, Emanuel, 255 Kishinev pogrom, 198 Kisskalt, Karl, 255 Klapdor, Heide, 178, 183 Klauß, Klaus, 84 Klüger, Ruth, 12n7 Koller, Sabine, 160 Koloniale Rundschau (journal), 85, 87, 89 Kompert, Leopold, 44–45 Königswarter, Moritz Freiherr von, 22

286 | INDEX Kornitzer, Leon, 255 Kovno Ghetto, 254 Kracauer, Siegfried, 9, 120–23, 125–28, 132–38, 140n20 Krause, Alexander, 259 Kristallnacht, 253 Krutikov, Mikhail, 114 Kulturpolitik (cultural politics), 125 Kusche, Benno, 256 Landesverband der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinden, 252 Lange, Friedrich, 97n55 languages, 4, 6. See also German language; Hebrew; Yiddish Laqueur, Thomas, 214, 222 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 105 La Vopa, Anthony, 175 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 174, 177, 179 Lazarus, Moritz, 21 Lazier, Benjamin, 124, 140n23 le-dor va-dor (from generation to generation), 18, 30 Lefevere, André, 52n14 leftist politics, 4, 68–69, 125 legends and tales, Jewish, 43–46. See also folktales Lehrer, Erica, 221–22 Leo Baeck Institute (LBI): establishment of, 3, 120, 193, 197–98; family history and, 30–31, 34n37; historical focus, 5, 199, 271; research grants, 190; support for GermanJewish studies scholars, ix–xiii, xiv–xv, 1 Leo Baeck Institute Career Development Fellowship. See Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, ix, xii, 198 Leopold I, 19 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 108, 110 Lewandowski, Louis, 255 Liberaal Joodse Geemente, 256, 258 Liberles, Robert, 59, 70n2, 71n9 Liebesgaben (Gemilut Chassadim; acts of lovingkindness), 213, 217–18, 223 Lilien, Ephraim Moses, 109, 114 linguistic turn, 4 literature, 272; German-Jewish, 4; “ghetto literature,” 39, 44–45; on the Holocaust, 10, 229–42. See also Old Yiddish literature

lithographs, 159 Lithuania, 150, 155, 166nn30–31 Littell, Jonathan, 242 Łódz´, 156 Löhr, Isabella, 180 loss, 1, 7–8, 24, 121, 123–24, 133, 138, 212–13, 217 Löwenfels, Leo, 220 Löwenstamm, Max, 259 Lowenthal, Ernst Gottfried, 215 Lukács, Georg, 124–36, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Lustig, Jason, 10, 201 Luxemburg, Rosa, 97n56 Machsike Hadas (Orthodox political party), 67, 68 Mahler, Gustav, 248 Mahrer, Stefanie, 10, 184 Maimonides, 59 Malche, Albert, 178 Mané-Katz, 159 Manekin, Rachel, 62 Manes, Philip, 251 Mann, Barbara, 262n2 Mann, Thomas, 157–59, 248 Marchionini, Alfred, 177, 181–83, 185n27, 186n57 Marcus, Jacob Rader, 191, 195–97 Maria Theresa, 20 marriage, 22, 29–30, 156, 274 Marx, Karl, xiv Marxists, 123, 168n58 maskilim, 39–41, 51n7 material culture, 273, 276; family history and, 27–28 mathematics, 120–24, 139n14; divine abandonment and, 124–38 Mayse-bukh (“book of stories,” Basel, 1602), 39, 43, 48, 53n31, 54n51 McGlothlin, Erin, 234–35, 239, 241 Mecklenburg, Frank, xiii media, 122–23, 125, 138, 277 media studies, 139n15 medicine, 4. See also physicians Meidner, Ludwig, 155 Meinecke, Friedrich, 195 Meir of Rothenburg, 44 Meisl, Josef, 195–96 memorializing, 3, 260

INDEX

memory, 4, 43–45, 241; archives and, 191 (see also archives). See also Holocaust fiction; nostalgia memory studies, 5, 273 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 62 Mendelssohn, Felix, xiv Mendelssohn, Moses, xiv, 4, 39, 51n7, 59, 67, 109, 193 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 200 Merzbach family, 216–17 Messerschmidt, Adolf, 263n11 Messerschmidt, Kurt, 7, 249, 251–52, 254–58, 263n24, 264n29, 264n30, 265n55 Messerschmidt, Steffi, 263n11 Messiah, 107–10, 112–13 Messner, Joseph, 256 metaphysics, 130, 133–34 Metcalf, Peter, 222 Meyer, Isidore, 194 Meyer, Max, 219–20 Meyer, Michael, 10–11, 59, 277 Middle Ages. See Old Yiddish literature Middle Eastern Jews, 60 Middle High German, 105–6 Midrashic literature, 43, 53n31, 107 migration: of Eastern European Jews, 114, 155–56, 166n30, 250, 252; forced, 173, 222; of Jews from Germany, 183; mourning rituals and, 212; of scientists to Turkey, 178–81; visual culture and, 150, 155 migration studies, 2, 9 minority groups, 6; in Europe, 2–3; politics, 83 Mirjam, Marianne, 21 Miron, Dan, 107 Miron, Guy, 60 Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für JüdischeVolkskunde (journal), 24 Mizrahi Jewry, 200 Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv, 191, 195 mobility: family history and, 18, 23; of Jewish families, 28 modernity / modernization, 38, 49; antisemitism and, 82; colonialism and, 83; divine abandonment and, 129–30; Eastern Europe and, 67; family history and, 27; ghetto community and, 44; heresy and, 70; metaphysical conditions of, 133–38; Orthodoxy and, 62–63; pathway of, 192–93, 200; Zionists and, 60

| 287

Monatshefte (journal), 101–2 monoculturalism, 2 Monod, David, 257 monologic dialogue, 237, 245n26 Moravia, 20 Morgenstern, Julian, 197 Moses, Siegfried, xii, 197 Moss, Ken, 114 Mosse, George, 83 motivation, 276 mourning rituals, 10, 211–25 Moykher Sforim, Mendele, Fishke, the Lame, 159–62 Mülder-Bach, Inka, 124 Muller, Herman, 197 multiculturalism, 114 Munich, 10; archives in, 249; Jewish musical community in, 248–61 Munich Agreement, 259 Munich Hygiene Institute, 255 musical spaces in Munich, 248–61 Muslims, 6 Mussolini, Benito, 259 Nabokov, Vladimir, 232 Nagler, Chaim, 110 narrative causality, 231–33 narrative theory, 10, 229–32 Nathan the Wise (Lessing), 108, 110 nationalism, 192; Jewish art and, 151. See also German nationalism; Jewish nationalism National Library of Israel, 35n37 natural sciences, 120 Naumbourg, Samuel, 255 Nazism: book burning, 260; complicity with, 235–41; exclusion of Jews, 174, 177; in Munich, 248–49, 251, 259; postwar period and, 257–58; survivors of, 3. See also Holocaust; Shoah negativity, 9, 119–24; divine abandonment and, 124–38 Nékám, Lajos, 177, 179 neocolonialism, 84 Neo-Orthodoxy (denomination), 60, 63–64, 66–68, 72n25 network analysis: divine abandonment and, 124–38; eigenvector centrality, 132–33, 142n49; family history, 17–31; historical, 175–76; modularity, 142n55 Neubauer, Otto, 176

288 | INDEX Neuberg, Carl, 176 Neuer Jüdischer Friedhof, 223 Neue Welt, 254 Neuland, Siegfried, 250 newspapers, 125. See also specific newspapers New Synagogue (Berlin), 276 New Woman, 157 Nieszawer, Nadine, 167n45 Nobel, Nehemia Anton, 127 nodegoat, 175, 185n20 Nomberg, Hersh, 111 nostalgia, 7, 154, 160; Old Yiddish texts and, 43–45, 49. See also memory NS-Dokumentationszentrum, 249 Ohio State University, 104 Ohrenstein, Aron, 250, 254, 265n56 Old Yiddish literature, 8–9, 38–50, 51n9; defined, 39; Tendlau’s translations of folktales, 42–47 Olin, Margaret, 151 Olson, Jess, 112 Oppenheim, Hugo, 85 Oppenheim, Moritz Daniel, 39–40 Oppenheimer, Lea Eleonora, 29 Oppenheimer, Samuel, 19 oral history, 249 Oranienburger Straße Synagogue, 251 Organization for Rehabilitation and Training, 250 Orthodox Judaism (denomination), 9, 58–70, 113, 253. See also Neo-Orthodoxy; Ultra-Orthodox Osborn, Max, 155 Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv, 191, 195 Ost und West (periodical), 153 otherness, 4, 159 Ottenstein, Berta, 7, 10, 174–84 Ottoman Empire, 60 paintings: Jewishness and, 149; of Samson Wertheimer, 21–22, 28 Palais Pringsheim, 248 Palestine, xiv, 5, 48, 61, 65, 68, 221; archives in, 195–97; migration to, 250 Palestine Historical and Ethnographic Society, 196 Pan-German League, 88, 91 Pappenheim, Bertha, 48, 54n51, 105, 106, 115n10

particularism, 83 Pázmány-Péter-University, 177 Peretz,Y. L., 49, 107, 109–10 periodicals: images in, 149, 153, 155, 158–59, 162. See also specific periodicals perpetrators, literary depictions of, 10, 230, 233–42 Peters, Carl, 97n56 Petljura, Simon, 191 Petljura Pogroms, 195 philology, 43, 45, 48, 272 photography, 122, 138, 151, 153 physicians, 178–84. See also Ottenstein, Berta Pinski, David, 106, 115n10 pogroms, 155, 166n31, 198; documentation of, 191, 195 Poland, 91, 150, 155–56, 166nn29–30; archives in, 194, 199; conservatives in, 68 political Orthodoxy, 60–70 Porges, Heinrich, 248 positioning, 2, 81 Positive-Historical Judaism (denomination), 59, 65–66, 72n34 postcolonialism, 4, 84 postcolonial studies, 83 postmodernism, 4 postwar era, xi–xii, 1, 3, 10, 13n22, 132, 171, 196, 199, 212, 256–58. See also Holocaust fiction; mourning rituals; musical spaces in Munich Prague, 20 precarity, 2 Pringsheim, Alfred, 10, 248 Pringsheim, Katja, 248 privation, 121 propaganda, 123 provenance research, 28 psychiatry, 4 rabbinic law, 62 rabbis: family history and, 25; lay leaders and, 274; mourning rituals and, 213, 217–21, 223 Rabinovitch, Simon Pinchas, 189 race, 2, 4 racism, 9; colonialism and, 79–92 radio, 123, 125; democratization and, 258; Jewish liturgical music and, 254–59 Radio Control Branch, Information Control Division, 255

INDEX

Radio Munich, 254–56, 258, 263n21 Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki), 44 Ravotto, Joseph, 263n21 reason, 119–20, 124 reflexivity, 249 Reform Judaism (denomination), 59, 67, 72n34; emergence of, 63–66 refugees, 2, 158, 163; Jewish cemeteries and, 212–22; memories of, 273; scholars, 10, 173–84; Swiss policies on, 171. See also émigré German Jews; exile Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 215 Reichenbachstraße Synagogue (Reichenbachshul), 10, 249, 253 Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, 215 Reifenberg, Benno, 125, 126, 128, 136 Reimer, Dietrich, 85 Reinharz, Jehuda, 200 Religiöse Feierstunde der israelitischen Kultusgemeinden in Bayern, 254–56 religious practice, 6, 135, 270; Jewish identity and, 151, 272–73; mourning rituals, 10, 211–25; Orthodoxy and, 64–66 religious reform, 27, 63, 276 remembrance, culture of, 43–45. See also memory reparations, 182, 264n29 Reuter, Franz Theo, 264n29 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 198–99 right-wing extremism, 2–3, 125; Orthodox Jews and, 68–69 Roberts, Sam, 232 Roemer, Nils, 3, 44, 125, 137 Romanticism, 269 Rosen, Alan, 238 Rosenheim, Jacob, 73n41 Rosenzweig, Franz, 4, 120–22, 125, 126, 128, 132–36 Rost, Georg Alexander, 176–77, 183 Roth, Joseph, 105 Rothman, Istvan, 177 Rothschild family, 20, 21, 26 Ruderman, David, 189 Russia, 154–56, 189, 199 Russian immigrants, 274 Sabbath, 162 Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse (Sabbath Rest, Oppenheim), 39–40

| 289

Sachs, Nelly, 260 Sachsenhausen, 252 Salomon, Charlotte, 158 Salzmann, Sasha Marianna, 2 Samet, Moshe, 62 Sankt-Jakobs-Platz, 261 Schalit, Heinrich, 259 Scharnagl, Anton, 256 Schechter, Edmund, 255 Scheffler, Erich, 251 Scheler, Max, 132, 134 Schenirer, Sarah, 67 Schenker, Saul, 253–54 Schiff, Adolf and Rosalia, 216–17 Schiller, Friedrich, 271 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 59 Schlesinger, Akiva Joseph, 64 Schmidt, Gerhard, 181 Schneersohn, Menachem Mendel, 108 Schneider, Caroline, 218, 219 Schneider, Erna, 218, 219 Schneider, Joseph, 218 Schocken, Salman, 173 Schoenberger, Theodor, 251 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 265n56 Scholem, Gershom, 3, 4, 120–22 Schömmer, Hanns, 256 School of Paris (École de Paris), 10, 158 Schorsch, Ismar, 59, 72n34 Schroeder-Poggelow, Wilhelm, 87 Schwan, Gesine, 235, 241 Schwartz, Philipp, 178 Schwarz, Egon, 12n7 Schwarz, Karl, 154, 155 secularization, 38, 49; divine abandonment and, 130; in education, 64, 67–68; mourning rituals and, 214; negativity and, 124 Seelig, Rachel, 114 Seiler, Robert, 254 self-understanding, 4 Sephardic Jews, 60, 200 sexuality, 273–74; queer, 156–58, 163–64, 167n34 sexuality studies, 2, 9–10 Seyfer brantshpigel (Cracow, 1596), 39 Seyfer mayse nisim (“book of miraculous acts,” Amsterdam 1696), 43–44, 53n26 Seyfer simchas hanefesh, 43 Sha’ar Hashomayim synagogue, 254

290 | INDEX Shalit, Moyshe, 112–13 Shammes,Yuzpa, 53n31 Shanes, Joshua, 9, 70 shiva, 211 Shmuel-bukh (Augsburg, 1544), 39 Shoah, 18, 25–28, 30, 80, 171, 230. See also Holocaust shtetl life, 107, 110, 114, 155; visual depictions of, 158–63 Siddur, 39 Siedlungsgesellschaft für DeutschSüdwestafrika (Settlement Society for German South West Africa), 85, 88–89 Silber, Michael, 62 Silver, Larry, 151, 165n11 Silverman, Lisa, 153 Simmel, Georg, 124, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 140n20 Simmel, Gertrud, 127 Simon, Ernst, 3, 130 social history, 4 socialism, 60, 67, 68 social media, 153 social network analysis, 175 Society for Jewish Folklore (Hamburg), 24 sociology, 272 Sofer, Moses, 64 Sokel, Walter, 12n7 Sorkin, David, 3, 58, 59, 199–200 Sotbeer, Mathilde, 181 South West Africa, 88, 97n46 Spanier, Julius, 252 spatiality, 260. See also musical spaces spatial turn, 4, 10, 249, 262n2, 273, 276 Spengler, Oswald, 134 Spinner, Samuel, 102, 151 Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (proverbs and sayings of GermanJewish antiquity, Tendlau), 46–47, 53n39 Stanislawski, Michael, 199 Stark, Heinz, 255 statistics, 272 Stein, Cilly, 219 Stein, Fritz, 218 Steinhardt, Jakob, 155 Steinke, Ronen, 3 Steinschneider, Moritz, 43 STEM fields, 122–24 stereotypes, 88, 107, 162, 178, 244n16 Stern, Frank, 256–57

Stern, Moritz, 195 Stern-Täubler, Selma, 19, 125, 197, 199 stranger (social type), 140n20 Straßburg, Gottfried von, 104 Strauß, Ludwig, 48, 54n52 Strauss, Richard, 248 Struck, Hermann, 155 Stühmer, Alfred, 183 subjectivity, 130, 237, 239, 249, 276–77 suicide, 156, 167n34, 167n45, 174, 212, 264n29 Sulzer, Salomon, 255 Susman, Margarete, 9, 124–38, 139n7, 142n60 Switzerland, 171–74, 221, 271 Szalit, Julius, 156 Szalit-Marcus, Rahel, 7, 10, 149–64; biography, 154–58, 166nn28–29; depictions of Jews, 158–63; works, 152, 157, 161 Szankower, Majer, 223 Szöllösi-Janze, Margit, 175 Täubler, Eugen, 191, 194–97 Tcherikower, Elias, 191, 195 technology, 120, 124, 125; cultural theory and, 122 Tendlau, Abraham Moses, 7, 42–49 Thannhauser, Siegfried, 176–77, 180–81 Theresienstadt, 194, 197, 218, 219 Thomas, Hans, 248 Thulin, Mirjam, 8, 31 Tillier, Claude, 159 Tolstoy, Leo, 129, 159 translation studies: cultural turn, 41–42; group identities and, 49 transnational approaches, 2, 9–10, 271–73; in art history, 150, 163–64, 165n6; in family research, 17–19, 23, 31; networks of scientists in exile, 173–84 Treue Zionswächter (newspaper), 63 Trotha, Lothar von, 97n46 Trotzjuden (Trutzjuden), 270 Tsene-rene (“women’s Bible,” Basel [Hanau], 1622), 39, 40, 43, 51n9, 115n10 Tufts University, 180–81 Turkey, 178–81 Twitchell, Corey, 10, 242 Udel, Miriam, 104 Ulk (periodical), 159

INDEX

ultranationalism, 69 Ultra-Orthodox (denomination), 59, 63–64, 68, 70n3, 72n28 United Kingdom: academic contracts in, 180; mourning rituals and, 221 United States: academic contracts in, 180–81; archives in, 192; interfaith cooperation and, 256; mourning rituals and, 221; Orthodox communities in, 62, 69; physicians in, 181–82;Yiddish in German studies departments, 102 universalism, 83 University Library, Frankfurt am Main, 35n37 University of Basel, 172, 184n3 University of Berlin, 195 University of Bern, 10 University of Budapest, 179 University of California-Berkeley, 190 University of Chicago, 104 University of Erlangen, 176 University of Freiburg, 174, 182–83 University of Hamburg, 105 University of Istanbul, 179 University of Munich, 176, 182 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 102 University of Nuremberg, 174, 176 University of Pennsylvania, 102 University of Toronto, 104 Unorthodox (film), 62 urbanization, 38, 127 Ursprung, Otto, 258 Užventis, 155, 166n28 van Rahden, Till, 171 Verein der Künstlerinnen zu Berlin (Association of Women Artists in Berlin), 156 victimization, 233–42, 273 Vienna: imperial court and Jewish community, 19–21; Jewish archives, 194; Jewish cemetery, 221; museums, 22, 24 visual culture, 149–54, 163–64, 277; transnational and multilingual, 150. See also film; paintings; photography visual turn, 4 Vogel-Bergen, Alice, 218 Vogt, Stefan, 9, 92 Vohsen, Ernst, 9, 80, 84–91, 94n21, 96n36, 96n43, 97n51, 97n56 völkish ideology, 271

| 291

Volkskunde (folkloristics), 43, 47 Vorobeichic, Moyshe, 151 Wagner, Richard, 248 Wallach, Kerry, 10, 11, 164 Walter, Bruno, 248 Warburg, Otto, 85 Warner, Marina, 222 War of the Austrian Succession, 20, 28 Washington, Booker T., 86–88, 90 Weber, Max, 91, 124 Weill, Kurt, xiv Weimar Republic, 9–10; intellectual communities in, 124–38 Weinbaum, Edith, 263n20 Weinreich, Max, 105 Weinreich, Uriel, 105 Weis, Otto, 216 Weiss,Yfaat, 14n26 Weissberg, Liliane, 3, 4, 120 Weltsch, Robert, 5 Wertheimer, Joseph Ritter von, 21 Wertheimer, Max, xiv Wertheimer, Salomon, 20–21 Wertheimer, Samson, 19–22; painting of, 21–22, 28 Wertheimer, Simon Wolf, 20, 28–29 Wertheimer family, 8, 17–25, 27–30 Westenriederstraße synagogue, 253, 261 Western Europe, 67, 82, 105, 113, 154. See also specific countries Western Jewry (Westjuden), 6, 107–14 Westheimer, Gerald, ix–x, xiv–xv, 1 white supremacist movements, 2, 87–88. See also racism Wiedergutmachungspolitik, 256 Wien Museum, 22 Wiesmeier, Heinrich, 255 Windhager, Florian, 176 Winkler, Curt, 97n55 Wischnitzer-Bernstein, Rachel, 155 Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism), 23–24, 30, 41, 83, 94n12, 272; archives and, 191, 193; Volkskunde (folkloristics) and, 43 witnessing, 3 Woelk, Emma, 102 Wolf, Isaak Samson, 20 Wolf, Joseph, 20 Wolfthorn, Julie, 167n37

292 | INDEX women: academics, 177–84; artists, 150–51, 156, 163–64, 165n8 (see also Szalit-Marcus, Rahel). See also gender roles women’s history, 4, 12n8, 274–75 World War I, 125, 132, 137, 198 World War II, 125, 158, 171. See also Holocaust; Shoah xenophobia, 158, 163 Yad Vashem, 35n37 Yale Companion to JewishWriting and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, 4 Yale University, 104 Yiddish: discourse on, 39–41, 49, 51n11, 54n43, 105; Eastern, 49, 50n3, 105; as Jargon (German dialect), 105; literary aesthetics and, 46–47; music programs, 254; press in Eastern Galicia, 61–62; social

aspects, 47; Western, 50n3. See also Old Yiddish literature; Yiddish studies Yiddish realism, 159 Yiddish studies, 2, 6, 8, 9, 49, 101–14, 271 Yishuv, 6 YIVO, 190–91, 195, 198 Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 272 Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 195 Zentrum party, 68 Zionism, 60–61, 63–64, 66–69, 109–10, 114, 250, 270, 276 Zionist Archives, 194–96, 198 Zionist Organization, 194 Zivier, Ezechiel, 194 Zunz, Leopold, 43 Zweig, Arnold, 105