Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (eds.) Towards Normality? Assimilation and Modern German Jewry After two successful conferences at Clare College, Cambridge, which resulted in the conference volumes "Second Chance" (1988) and "Two Nations" (1997), published in our Schriftenreihe in 1991 and 1999, we held a third Cambridge conference from 9-13 September 2001. Once again we publish a volume based on papers delivered at the conference. The assimilation and acculturation of German-speaking Jews from the Napoleonic Wars to the 1930s are central topics of Jewish historiography. "Towards Normality?" was a stock-taking of the existing views and a platform for innovative ideas in this area of research. The volume explores a broad spectrum of social and cultural change within German and Austrian Jewry in the modern period. Building on the customary political, social and economic themes that played key roles in the processes of assimilation, contributors present a number of innovative approaches and topics which have hitherto received less attention: the development of Jewish historiography, the politics of Jewish religion and ritual, comparisons with Catholic strategies of assimilation, and the relevance of gender to the acculturation of Jews. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Werner E. Mosse. Contents

Peter Pulzer
Professor Werner Eugen Mosse, 1918-2001

Rainer Liedtke - David Rechter
Introduction: German Jewry and the Search for Normality

Michael A. Meyer
German Jewry's Path to Normality and Assimilation: Complexities, Ironies, Paradoxes

Christhard Hoffmann
Constructing Jewish Modernity: Mendelssohn Jubilee Celebrations within German Jewry, 1829-1929

Johannes Heil
"...durch Fluten und Scheiterhaufen": Persecution as a Topic in Jewish Historiography on the Way to Modernity

Christian Wiese
Struggling for Normality: The Apologetics of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Wilhelmine Germany as an Anti-colonial Intellectual Revolt against the Protestant Constuction of Judaism

Deborah Hertz
The Troubling Dialectic Between Reform and Conversion in Biedermeier Berlin

Simone Lässig
The Emergence of a Middle-Class Religiosity: Social and Cultural Aspects of the German-Jewish Reform Movement During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Gregory A. Caplan
Germanising the Jewish Male: Military Masculinity as the Last Stage of Acculturation

Lisa Swartout
Segregation or Integration? Honour and Manliness in Jewish Duelling Fraternities

Ulrich Sieg
"Nothing more German than the German Jews"? On the Integration of a Minority in a Society at War

Elisabeth Albanis
A "West-Östlicher Divan" from the Front: Moritz Goldstein Beyond the Kunstwart Debate

Keith Pickus
Divergent Paths of National Integration and Acculturation: Jewish and Catholic Educational Strategies in Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Darmstadt

Robin Judd
Jewish Political Behaviour and the Schächtfrage, 1880-1914

Silvia Cresti
German and Austrian Jews' Concepts of Culture, Nation and Volk

Helga Embacher
Jewish Identities and Acculturation in the Province of Salzburg in the Shadow of Antisemitism

Tobias Brinkmann
Exceptionalism and Normality: "German Jews" in the United States 1840-1880

Mitchell B. Hart
Towards Abnormality: Assimilation and Degeneration in German-Jewish Social Thought

List of Contributors - Index

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