LEO BAECK INSTITUTE LONDON

‘PUBLICATIONS’

Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook LIV (2009)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. DISCUSSION
The Future of German-Jewish Studies

II. JEWISH IDENTITY, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS THINKING

NIMROD ZINGER: ‘‘Our hearts and spirits were broken’’: The medical world from the perspective of German-Jewish patients in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

CHRISTIAN WIESE: ‘‘Let his Memory be Holy to Us!’’: Jewish Interpretations of Martin Luther from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust

MARTINA URBAN: Towards what Kind of Unity? David Koigen, Leo Baeck and the Monism-Theism-Debate

III. ANTISEMITISM AND RESPONSES

LARS FISCHER: The Social Democratic response to anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany: The case of the Handlungsgehilfen

KAI DREWES: The Invention of Deviance: How Wilhelmine Jews Became Opponents of Ennoblement

WILLIAM OLMSTED: Turning the Tables: Freud’s Response to Anti-Semitism in The Interpretation of Dreams

IV. THE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION, RELIEF AND RESCUE
VERENA DOHRN: Diplomacy in the Diaspora: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Berlin (1922-1933)

A. J.  SHERMAN and PAMELA SHATZKES: Otto M. Schi¡ (1875-1952), Unsung Rescuer

V.THE JEWISH PRESENCE IN POST-WARGERMANY

PHILIPP J. NIELSEN: ‘‘I’ve never regretted being a German Jew’’: Siegmund Weltlinger and the Re-establishment of the Jewish Community in Berlin

MICHAEL BIRNBAUM: Jewish Music, German Musicians: Cultural Appropriation and the Representation of a Minority in the German Klezmer Scene

VI. REFLECTIONS

ARNOLD PAUCKER: Robert Weltsch.The Enigmatic Zionist: his personality and his position in Jewish politics

JÜRGEN MATTHÄUS: ‘‘You have the right to be hopeful if you do your duty’’ – Ten Letters by Leo Baeck to Friedrich Brodnitz, 1937-1941. Introduced and annotated by Jürgen Matthäus

YFAAT WEISS: ‘‘Nothing in my life has been lost.”  Lea Goldberg revisits her German Experience

VII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY

IX. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook LIII (2008)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. THE PERCEPTION OF JEWS IN GERMAN SOCIETY

AYA ELYADA: Yiddish – Language of Conversion? Linguistic Adaptation and its Limits in Early Modern Judenmission

CHRISTIAN STUART DAVIS: Colonialism and Antisemitism during the Kaiserreich: Bernhard Dernburg and the Antisemites

MICHAH GOTTLIEB: Publishing the Moses Mendelssohn Jubiläumsausgabe in Weimar and Nazi Germany

DAVID HEREDIA: Der Spiegel and the Image of Jews in Germany: The Early Years, 1947-1956

II. IMMIGRATION AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE

SIBYLLE QUACK: Immigration and Change: German Jewish Presences in the United States and Germany, 25-27 March 2007, New York. A Conference Report

PETER GAY: Reflections on Hitler’s Refugees in the United States. Keynote Speech.

MARION A. KAPLAN: “A Very Modest Experiment” – The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940-1945

ATINA GROSSMANN: German Jews as Provincial Cosmopolitans: Reflections from the Upper West Side

MICHAEL REISCH: The Democratic Promise: The Impact of German-Jewish Immigration on Social Work in the United States

III. RESTITUTION

KATHARINA RAUSCHENBERGER: The Restitution of Jewish Cultural Objects and the Activities of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc.

IV. MEMOIR

WILFRIED WEINKE: “… what the word liberty means to me now.” Harry Lipstadt’s Imprisonment and Escape from Hamburg

V. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2007

VI. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

VII. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook LII (2007)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. JEWISH IDENTITY

AMY BLAU: Claims of Language: Translation as a Mediation of Jewish
Identity and the Yiddish Reception of Nelly Sachs

MANFRED JEHLE: “Relocations” in South Prussia and New East Prussia:
Prussia’s Demographic Policy towards the Jews in Occupied Poland
1772–1806

JONATHAN M. HESS: Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy,
1857–1890: Orthodoxy and the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel

DAVID RECHTER: A Nationalism of Small Things: Jewish Autonomy in Late
Habsburg Austria

HANNAH-VILLETTE DALBY: German-Jewish Female Intellectuals and the
Recovery of German-Jewish Heritage in the 1940s and 1950s

II. OTHER GERMANS AND JEWS
SONJA WEINBERG: Germania and the Anti-Jewish Riots in Germany and
Russia, 1881–1882

ERIK GRIMMER-SOLEM: “Every True Friend of the Fatherland”: Gustav
Schmoller and the “Jewish Question”, 1916–1917

III. THE SWISS AND THE JEWS

JOHN M. EFRON: The Most Cruel Cut of All? The Campaign Against Jewish
Ritual Slaughter in Fin-de-Siècle Switzerland and Germany

BEATRIX MESMER: The Banning of Jewish Ritual Slaughter in Switzerland
JONATHAN STEINBERG: The Swiss and the Jews: Two Special Cases?

IV. TECHNICAL TRANSFER: A REFUGEE IN ENGLAND

GERHARD WOLF: Mac Goldsmith and the Modernisation of British Industry
(1936–1982)

V. HOLOCAUST

CHRISTINE HARTIG: “Conversations about taking our own lives—oh, a poor
expression for a forced deed in hopeless circumstances!” Suicide among
German Jews 1933–1943

STEPHANIE SEUL: The Representation of the Holocaust in the British
Propaganda Campaign directed at the German Public, 1938–1945

VI. DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS

VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2006

VIII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

IX. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook LI (2006)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. SUSTENANCE FOR THE SOUL

MICHAEL A. MEYER: German Jewish Thinkers reflect on the Future of the
Jewish Religion

UTA LOHMANN: “Sustenance for the Learned Soul”: The History of the
Oriental Printing Press at the Publishing House of the Jewish Free School
in Berlin

II. JEWISH LIFE AND SOCIETY:

FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

REINHARD RÜRUP: Jewish Emancipation and the Vision of Civil Society in
Germany

STEVEN M. LOWENSTEIN: Reflections on Statistics: Hopes and Fears about
Changes in the German Jewish Family, 1815-1939

NILS ROEMER: Between the Provinces and the City: Mapping German-
Jewish Memories

JON GUNNAR MØLSTRE SIMONSEN: Perfect Targets-Antisemitism and
Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919-23

CHRISTIAN WIESE: The Janus Face of Nationalism: The Ambivalence of
Zionist Identity in Robert Weltsch and Hans Kohn

III. A NEW START IN BRITAIN

CHARMIAN BRINSON: Science in Exile: Imperial College and the Refugees
from Nazism-A Case Study

GERHARD WOLF: Mac Goldsmith: A Jewish Career in the German
Automobile Industry (1925-1936). Part 1

IV. RESISTANCE

ARNOLD PAUCKER: Researching German-Jewish Responses and German-
Jewish Resistance to National Socialism: Sources and Directions for the
Future

MIRIAM INTRATOR: Storytelling and Lecturing during the Holocaust: The
Nature and Role of Oral Exchanges in Theresienstadt, 1941-1945
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V. AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

ROBERT KNIGHT: The Road from the Taborstrasse: Austrian Restitution
revisited

VI. MEMOIR

BERNARD NATT: Growing up in Nazi Germany. Experiences and Memories

VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2005

VIII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

IX. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook L (2005)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE IN THERESIENSTADT

MIRIAM INTRATOR: The Theresienstadt Ghetto Central Library, Books and Reading: Intellectual Resistance and Escape during the Holocaust

II. LITERARY INTERPRETATION AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

ELIZABETH PETUCHOWSKI: “Ein Wort—du weißt”: Finding a Solution to a Riddle in Paul Celan’s Poem Nächtlich Geschürzt

JOEL GOLB: Celan’s “Tones”: A Reading of Huhediblu

PAUL MONOD: Reading the Two Bodies of Ernst Kantorowicz

III. ANTISEMITSM

PETER STAUDENMAIER: Rudolf Steiner and the Jewish Question

PETER MELICHAR: Who is a Jew? Antisemitic Defining, Identifying and Counting in pre-1938 Austria

IV. JEWS IN GERMAN POLITICS

ALEXANDER JOSKOWICZ: Liberal Judaism and Confessional Politics of Difference in the German Kulturkampf

JONATHAN WRIGHT AND PETER PULZER: Gustav Stresemann and the Verband Nationaldeutscher Juden. Right-Wing Jews in Weimar Politics

V. JEWISH SELF-PERCEPTIONS

SANDER L. GILMAN: The Problem with Purim: Jews and Alcohol in the Modern Period

JACOB GOLOMB: Jewish Self-hatred: Nietzsche, Freud and the Case of Theodor Lessing

VI. RUSSIAN JEWS IN GERMANY

YINON COHEN AND IRENA KOGAN: Jewish Immigration from the Former Soviet Union to Germany and Israel in the 1990s

SIMON RABINOVITCH: The Dawn of a New Diaspora: Simon Dubnov’s Autonomism, from St. Petersburg to Berlin

OLAF TERPITZ: Between Russendisko and the Yid Peninsula: The Concepts of Art and Lebenswelt in the Work of Wladimir Kaminer and Oleg Iur’ev

VII. MEMOIR

GERTRUD H. THOMPSON: The Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt Schule (1935-1941)

VIII. DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS

IX. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2004

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLIX (2004)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. THE END OF THE WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST

ANDREAS KOSSERT: “Endlösung on the ‘Amber Shore’”: The Massacre in January 1945 on the Baltic Seashore – A Repressed Chapter of East Prussian History

II. JEWISH INTELLECTUALS

CHRISTIAN WIESE: “For a Time I was Privileged to Enjoy his Friendship…”: The Ambivalent Relationship between Hans Jonas and Gershom Scholem

JÖRG HACKESCHMIDT: The Torch Bearer: Norbert Elias as a Young Zionist

DOROTHEA McEWAN: “The Enemy of Hypothesis”: Fritz Saxl as Acting Director of the Bibliothek Warburg

ROBERT S. WISTRICH: The Last Testament of Sigmund Freud

III. REMIGRATION

MARITA KRAUSS: Jewish Remigration: An Overview of an Emerging Discipline

MERON MENDEL: The Policy for the Past in West Germany and Israel: The Case of Jewish Remigration

TOBIAS WINSTEL: “Healed Biographies”? Jewish Remigration and Indemnification for National Socialist Injustice

ARND BAUERKÄMPER: Americanisation as Globalisation? Remigrés to West Germany after 1945 and Conceptions of Democracy: The Cases of Hans Rothfels, Ernst Fraenkl and Hans Rosenberg

LARS RENSMANN: Returning from Forced Exile: Some Observations on Theodor W. Adorno’s and Hannah Arendt’s Experience of Postwar Germany and Their Political Theories of Totalitarianism

NICOLAS BERG: Hidden Memory and Unspoken History: Hans Rothfels and the Postwar Restoration of Contemporary German History

GABRIEL MOTZKIN: Comment

IV. THE HASKALAH

MOSHE PELLI: The German-or-Yiddish Controversy within the Haskalah and the European “Dialogue of the Dead”: Tuvyah Feder’s Kol Mehazezim versus Mendel Lefin’s Translation of the Book of Proverbs

V. DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS

VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2003

VII. LIST OF CONTIBUTORS

VIII. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLVIII (2003)

by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. RELIGIOUS RENEWAL

EDWARD BREUER AND DAVID SORKIN: Moses Mendelssohn’s First Hebrew Publication: An annotated Translation of the Kohelet Mussar

This is the first translation into English of Moses Mendelssohn’s first Hebrew work, the Kohelet Mussar or Preacher of Morals, published sometime in the 1750s. The translation comes with annotations and an introduction. While scholars can agree on little about this obscure work, the text shows an attempt to create a journal in Hebrew that could merge philosophical categories (Wolff ) with ideas drawn from Hebrew texts (ranging from the Bible to the 17th century), to address questions of metaphysics, aesthetics and language.

ANDREAS BRÄMER: The Dialectics of Religious Reform: The Hamburger Israelische Tempel in Its Local Context 1817-1938

German Reform Judaism established its first firm base in Hamburg, where, from 1818 onwards, the Neuer Israelitischer Tempelverein attempted to create new varieties of religious observance reflecting its members’ middle-class way of life. The Tempelverein was more concerned with matters of religious practice than with providing a theoretical foundation for its reforms. It underwent a somewhat changeable history, the twentieth century seeing a gradual return to older traditions of German Judaism. The Tempelverein’s existence was cut short 120 years after its foundation: after the November 1938 pogrom no further religious services were allowed.

II. JEWISH SOCIAL LIFE. ANTISEMITISM AND JEWISH REACTIONS IN IMPERIAL GERMANY AND DURING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

MARION KAPLAN: Unter uns: Jews Socialising with other Jews in Imperial Germany

Jews bridged two worlds. They maintained intense relationships with their Jewish families, friends, and communities, while interacting with non-Jewish Germans as well. This essay explores the inner, Jewish world of sociability. Just a s Catholics related almost exclusively to other Catholics and Protestants to other Protestants, relationships with other Jews took up the bulk of Jewish social life. Jews remained deeply enmeshed in their extended families. Families gave crucial emotional and material support. Jews also showed a staunch allegiance to their religious and ethnic communities. Whereas the synagogue provided a community for those who attended, most Jews also maintained other kinds of personal relationships and more formal, secular affiliations with other Jews. This broad range of contacts enriched Jewish social life.

CHRISTOPHER JAHR: Ahlwardt on Trial: Reactions to the Antisemitic Agitation of the 1890s in Germany

This article examines how the Imperial German state dealt with antisemitism in the arena of the courts and, in turn, how this was evaluated by the various political factions. The predominant motive for the state was to combat an alleged challenge to  state authority, not to protect the Jews against antisemitism. Even further, judicial prosecution of “rowdy antisemitism” had had the consequence of making “moderate antisemitism” appear lawful, and therefore potentially legitimate. In the public debates many judicial, party-strategic, and political factors played a role generating surprising political alliances. But once again the wish to fight the malicious antisemitic agitation was not the decisive factor for most contemporary observers. Therefore no political consensus against antisemitism was attained.

JÜRGEN MATTHÄUS: Tagesordnung: Judenfrage – A German Debate in the Early Stages of the Weimar Republic

On 31 March 1919, at the German Foreign Office in Berlin, a meeting was held to discuss “Jewish questions” as a prelude to further debates in preparation for the Versailles peace conference. The meeting was attended by high-ranking German politicians, bureaucrats, and representatives of Jewish organisations, among them Walter Simons, Moritz Sobernheim, Eugen Fuchs, Richard Lichtheim, James Simon, and Walther Rathenau. The synopsis of the Besprechung printed in this volume highlights the war-time experiences and post-war hopes of organised German Jewry at this crucial point in time. As can be seen from the discussion, in the “new Germany”– despite official statements to the contrary – the prejudices of the past prevailed. Jewish attempts at a rapprochement clashed with the eagerness of the ministerial bureaucracy to perpetuate positions that had driven the Kaiserreich’s attitude towards the Judenfrage, an eagerness that would facilitate unprecedented anti-Jewish measures in the future.

ANAT FEINBERG: Leopold Jessner: German Theatre and Jewish Identity

Along with Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner (1878–1945) is the most significant Jewish contributor to the modernisation of the German theatre. Appointed general director of the Staatstheater in Berlin in 1919, he gained fame through his impressive, Expressionist productions and his concept of Zeittheater while at the same time facing repeated personal attacks laced with nationalistic and antisemitic slander. The article explores Jessner’s life as a German and a Jew, reviewing his conviction that a German-Jewish synthesis was possible and desirable, tracing his professional development and examining his changing attitudes to Jewishness during his years in Germany and later in exile.

CHRISTIAN SCHÖLZEL: Fritz Rathenau (1875-1949). On Antisemitism, Acculturation and Slavophobia: An Attempted Reconstruction

This essay offers a short biography of the German-Jewish judge and civil servant Fritz Rathenau (1875– 1949) and examines the paradigmatic character of his life. Rathenau, who became a leading official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior during the Weimar Republic, adopted a concept of acculturation that he defined in contradistinction to the “East”, which he viewed in a stereotypically negative light. This approach turned out to be unsuccessful, since the positive results of acculturation Fritz Rathenau had hoped for failed to appear. Instead, daily antisemitism persisted, and then gradually intensified after 1933. In reaction to this development, Rathenau moved his idea of Jewishness in a Zionist direction. The facts of his later life appear to confirm his disillusion with his earlier views: he was forced to emigrate to the Netherlands, from where he was deported to Theresienstadt. He survived that concentration camp, returning at the end of the war to the Netherlands, where he died in 1949.

III. SHATTERED HOPES UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM

GUY MIRON: Emancipation and Assimilation in the German-Jewish Discourse of the 1930s

This article deals with the representations of the concepts ‘emancipation’ and ‘assimilation’  in the German Jewish discourse of the 1930s. It shows how speakers of the main political and religious camps within German Jewry – the liberals, the Zionists and the Orthodox – interpreted these concepts, recreated related concepts like ‘re-emancipation’ or ‘natural assimilation’, and used historical images from German Jewish history as part of their struggle to understand and explain the meaning of contemporary upheavals to their readers. Based mostly on Jewish newspapers and periodicals, the article illuminates the development of German-Jewish self-perceptions during the time of the collapse of both assimilation and emancipation.

ADAM J. SACKS: Kurt Singer’s Shattered Hopes

This essay considers the aims and ideals of Kurt Singer, the founder and director of the Jüdischer Kulturbund. Singer moved his organisation beyond its primary function of aiding German-Jewish artists and cultural figures in the emergency situation created by the Nazis. Rather, the Kulturbund soon came to represent the hopes for a new and viable cultural movement – one that Singer eventually saw as the basis for continuing German-Jewish culture outside Nazi Germany. Singer’s effort to transplant the Kulturbund first to Palestine and then to the United States thus raises the question of how German-Jewish culture in emigration might have evolved. The central focus of the article are two letters written by Singer when he returned to Europe from New York shortly after Germany’s nation-wide pogrom in November 1938. In these letters – one addressed to the Reichskulturwalter, the other to the members of the managing committee of the Kulturbund – Singer reveals a keen awareness of the perils facing Jews in Germany.

STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM: Hans Litten 1903-2003: The Public Use of a Biography

This article explores the public use of the biography of Hans Litten (1903–2003). Since his early and violent death in Dachau concentration camp in 1938, many different aspects of Litten’s personality – the activist who was strongly influenced by the youth movement, the committed lawyer, the upright concentration camp inmate – have attracted renewed attention for various reasons. Therefore the reception history of Hans Litten’s biography can be read as an example of how memory is influenced by different interests, how it is instrumentalised for political purposes, and how members of successive generations use it to express their need for identification.

IV. YAD VASHEM AND THE GERMAN “RIGHTEOUS”

DANIEL FRAENKEL: The German ‘Righteous Among the Nations’: An Hisorical Appraisal

This article sets out to sketch a historically-based image of Germans who rescued Jews during the Holocaust based on a review of representative files in Yad Vashem. One may ask: what motivated the German ‘Righteous Among the Nations’? What made them behave so wholly differently from the vast majority of their compatriots? While arguing that the search for a single, overarching explanation is misconceived and rejecting the tendency to idealise or sanctify the rescuers, the article aims to provide a sense of both the range and singularity of German Holocaust rescuers by analysing them under four categories: (1) personally-motivated rescuers; (2) principled rescuers; (3) last-minute rescuers; (4) soldiers and army entrepreneurs in the occupied countries.

V. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2002

VII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

VII. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLVII (2002)

Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

I. JEWISH INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES TO TRADITION AND MODERNITY

ASTRID DEUBER-MANKOWSKY: Walter Benjamin’s Theological-Political Fragment as a Response to Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia

Taking Jacob Taubes’ polemical essay ‘Walter Benjamin – a modern Marcionite?’ as a starting point, this article aims to clarify the differences between Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. These mainly lie in Benjamin’s concept of the nature of  ‘desire’, which, unlike Bloch’s concept of  ‘hope’, is never thought of as aimed at a ‘concrete utopia’ and always remains in the realm of illusion: a realm that, however, is both unavoidable for and constitutive of a thinking about history. Unlike Bloch, Benjamin stays with a cognitively grounded idea of criticism. This leads him to a critical engagement with the philosophy of Hermann Cohen. Relating his own philosophy to Cohen’s critical idealism enables Benjamin to develop a philosophical criticism congruent neither with Marxist dialectics nor with the Jewish mysticism explored by Scholem. Beyond this, Cohen’s combination of critical philosophy and Jewish thought furnishes Benjamin with a self-definition as a Jewish thinker at some distance both from Taubes’ view of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and from the general understanding of Judaism argued for by Rosenzweig and Buber.

LOUISE HECHT: “How the power of thought can develop within a human mind.” Salomon Maimon, Peter Beer, Lazarus Bendavid: Autobiographies of Maskilim Written in German

The article analyses the autobiographies of the German speaking maskilim Salomon Maimon, Peter Beer, and Lazarus Bendavid. Its aim is twofold: on the one hand to point out similarities between these autobiographies and fit them into the literary context of German autobiography around 1800; on the other hand to explore the ways in which these particular maskilim dealt with Jews and Judaism. With regard to the autobiographies’ contents, it seems remarkable that politics and general history are strikingly absent from these texts. In confining themselves to a Jewish frame of reference, the maskilim are thus returning to the very ghetto from which they yearned to escape.

II. THE JEWISH ALLTAG IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

ROBERT LIBERLES: Introduction

RACHEL L. GREENBLATT: The Shapes of Memory: Evidence in stone from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the space known today as ‘The Old Jewish Cemetery in Pragu’ was one of the places in which the city’s Jews lived their daily lives. This article seeks to characterise those aspects of Jewish life in Prague that took place in the cemetery by suggesting a categorisation of various types of gravestone inscriptions, and by considering the stones’ changing shapes and graphic forms. In this context, it examines the relationships between the living and the dead, and the ways the living remembered the dead, during this period of Jewish life in Prague.

AVRIEL BAR-LEVAV: Ritualisation of Jewish Life and Death in the Early Modern Period

This paper examines the process, termed here ‘ritualisation of life’, in early modern Jewish society and analyses the new customs relating to death and dying that appeared in this period. It also focuses on ques-tions of  ‘beginning’  and ‘threshold’ in the acceptance of new rituals (terms borrowed in this context from the Dutch historian of literature Gert-Jan Johannes). The suggested explanations emphasize the social and cultural needs of the widening circle of Jewish readers, much enlarged due to the development of printing in Hebrew and Yiddish, and the sense of crisis in Jewish traditional society.

STEFAN LITT: Conversions to Christianity and Jewish Family Life in Thuringia: Case Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The Central German region of Thuringia included only a few Jewish settlements during the early modern period. Many of these were small and isolated from other Jewish centres. This article shows conversions to Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a phenomenon that can be seen as a certain expression of an acculturation to the majority Protestant-Lutheran denomination in its homeland. Here, three cases are presented that give better insight into the phenomenon, particularly regarding the fate of the converts’ families.

DAVID WARREN SABEAN: Kinship and Prohibited Marriages in Baroque Germany: Divergent Strategies among Jewish and Christian Populations

This article deals with different ways Jews and Christians in seventeenth-century Germany interpreted the Leviticus prohibitions against incest. Throughout Europe in both Protestant and Catholic countries, canon or ecclesiastical law forbade marriage with the deceased wife’s sister. Conflicts over this issue led, for example, in the 1590s to the exile of the Jewish population of Hildesheim, a case that was cited frequently over the next 150 years. The argument of the article is that incest discourse should be understood, at least in part, in the context of kinship and the circuits of exchange between allied families. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Christian populations with the support of the state adopted forms of marital alliance previously practised by Jews and considered by the former to be incestuous.

KENNETH STOW: Neofiti and Their Families: or, perhaps, the Good of the State

To be a neofita, a convert, has been called a profession. Neofiti were never allowed to forget their past, and their status deteriorated. In the Papal State, neofiti received financial aid by having parents give neofiti children inheritances during the parents’ lifetimes. In the case of minors, a Church-appointed guardian had these funds invested in luoghi di monti (public bonds), including in the Monte di pietà poor loan fund, which meant that monies earned in many cases from lending, and thus illegal by Church standards, were being invested in a Church fund. As occurred so often in the Papal State, the Church was privileging its material needs over spiritual ones. The Jews in general lost out because the Church had intervened on a personal level in matters like inheritance, where it normally did not tread – which in itself was also a sign of incipient modernity.

III. JEWISH LIFE IN AUSTRIA

EVYATAR FRIESEL: The Oesterreichisches Central-Organ, Vienna 1848: A Radical Jewish Periodical

The gradual development of the Jewish press in nineteenth century Western and Central Europe was one of the expressions of the growing adaptation of Jewish society to the general environment and its cultural ways. One interesting example of the Jewish press was the Oesterreichisches Central-Organ, published in Vienna during the months of the 1848 revolution. The periodical published original ideas regarding topics such as social tensions in the Jewish community, Jewish self-awareness, and connections of the Jews to their general environment. At some point, the Central-Organ adopted Jewish emigration to the United States as a major theme.

RICHARD HACKEN: The Jewish Community Library in Vienna: From Dispersion and Destruction to Partial Restoration

Analogous to the scattering and destruction of Viennese Jews during the Second World War was the scattering and destruction of their cultural treasures, including books. This article documents the fate of the rich research collections of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community of Vienna). The first two sections of the article outline the pre-1938 acquisition and growth of priceless holdings, the third details – within the context of a competitive Nazi bureaucracy – the dispersion and destruction of the volumes while the final two sections trace the various paths by which some books returned to Vienna under very different postwar circumstances.

IV. JEWISH ORGANISATIONS BETWEEN ADVOCACY AND ACCOMMODATION

VIRGINIA IRIS HOLMES: Integrating Diversity, Reconciling Contradiction: The Jüdischer Friedensbund in Late Weimar Germany

This article shows how the short-lived German-Jewish pacifist organisation, the Jüdischer Friedensbund (1929–1933), united the prominent figures and philosophies of both Jewish liberalism and Zionism in pursuit of a common goal, the Friedensidee (peace idea), which members saw as grounded in their Judaism. It discusses the pacifist Weltanschauungen of prominent Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Leo Baeck, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wassermann, Alfred Nossig, Alfred Klee, Heinrich Stern, Ernestine Eschelbacher, Alfred Goldschmidt, and Rabbi Felix Goldmann and also addresses the issues of gender, antisemitism, and relations between East European and native German Jews.

JAY HOWARD GELLER: Representing Jewry in East Germany, 1945-1953: Between Advocacy and Accommodation

After 1945, Jews in eastern Germany organised religious communities and a central representative association (the Landesverband der Jüdischen Gemeinden). Despite communist obstructionion and antisemitism, the Landesverband, under the leadership of Jewish Communist Julius Meyer, was able to gain support for Jewish needs. However, Meyer’s political activities drew the ire of the ruling Communist party, which predicated its claim to power on its heritage of persecution under the Nazis; and Jewish claims to a legacy of even greater victimhood threatened the party. After the formation of the East German state in 1949, the Landesverband maintained a close relationship with non-communist governmental officials, who were among the few real allies the Jews had within the official administration. In 1953, the Communists withdrew the Landesverband’s independence and placed it under governmental supervision.

V. MEMOIRS

EDUARD BLOCH: The Autobiography of Obermedizinalrat Eduard Bloch

Dr. med. Eduard Bloch, the Jewish physician t0 the Hitler family in Linz, Austria, discusses his personal background, his treatment of Hitler’s cancer-stricken mother, and his impressions of the young Hitler. In recognition of his care of Hitler’s mother, Bloch was shown some consideration by the Nazis and was exempted from most of the restrictions imposed on Austrian Jews. He describes his efforts to aid other Jews in Linz and his various negotiations with the Linz Gestapo chiefs. The memoir concludes with an account of his emigration in 1938 and of the difficulties in adjusting to life in the United States.

DIETER FRANCK: Youth Protest in Nazi Germany

In 1933 German television producer and historian Dieter Franck was a boy of seven, the son of an ordinary Gentile German family. He describes various childhood experiences which made him detest Hitler. In 1943, aged seventeen, Franck and some of his friends began to clandestinely wrote and distributed handbills exposing Nazi crimes, especially the persecution of the Jews. It is astonishingly how much of the truth these young men managed to find out. Six of the handbills are reproduced in the article. In April 1945 the Gestapo finally caught up with the young men, but they were saved by the general chaos – Franck ironically by becoming a PoW in a French internment camp until he was recruited to re-educate his fellow prisoners.

VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2001

VII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

VIII. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLVI (2001)

Preface by John Grenville and Arnold Paucker

I. JEWS IN THE AGE OF METTERNICH

EDWARD TIMMS: The Pernicious Rift: Metternich and the Debate about Jewish Emancipation at the Congress of Viennna

NIALL FERGUSON: Metternich and the Rothschilds: “A Dance with Torches on Powderkegs”?

ROBERT J. W. EVANS: Progress and Emancipation in Hungary during the Age of Metternich

EDA SAGARRA: Grillparzer, the Catholics and the Jews: A Reading of Die Jüdin von Toledo (1851)

RITCHIE ROBERTSON: Karl Beck: From Radicalism to Monarchism

II. GENDER AND BOUNDARIES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

DEBORAH HERTZ: The Lives, Loves and Novels of August and Fanny Lewald, the Converted Cousins from Königsberg

MARIA BENJAMIN BAADER: When Judaism turned Bourgeois: Gender in Jewish Associational Life and in the Synagogue, 1750-1850

TILL VAN RAHDEN: Intermarriages, the “New Woman”, and the Situational Ethnicity of Breslau Jews from the 1870s to the 1920s

DAGMAR HERZOG: Telling Ethnic and Gender History Together: A Comment

PANELLIST’S RESPONSES TO DAGMAR HERZOG

III. PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION AND POLITICS

HENRI SOUSSAN: The Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1902-1915

DAVID N. MYERS: Hermann Cohen and the Quest for Protestant Judaism

ULRICH TEMPEL: Religion and Politics in the Berlin Jewish Community: The Work of the Repräsentantenversammlung, 1927-1930

IV. ASPECTS OF ANTISEMITISM

GERD KORMAN: When Heredity met the Bacterium: Quarantines in New York and Danzig, 1898-1921

ALAN T. LEVENSON: The German Peace Movement and the Jews: An Unexplored Nexus

V. MEMOIR

CHANAN BENHAR: 107 Days on the SH-7: Experiences and Events of the Last Large Refugee Transport from the Reichsgebiet

VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2000

VIII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

IX. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLV (2000)

Preface by John Grenville and Julius Carlebach

I. JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

RIVKA HORWITZ: Kabbalah in the Writings of Mendelssohn and the Berlin Circle of Maskilim

CHRISTOPH SCHULTE: Saul Ascher’s Leviathan, or the Invention of Jewish Orthodoxy in 1792

II. JEWISH ACCULTURATION AND SCHOLARSHIP

REINHARD RÜRUP: Jewish History in Berlin – Berlin in Jewish History

ANDREAS BRÄMER: Rabbinical Scholars as the Object of Biographical Interest: An Aspect of Jewish Historiography in the German-speaking Countries of Europe (1780-1871)

MANFRED VOIGTS: Fichte as “Jew-Hater” and Prophet of the Zionists

WILLIAM Z. TANNENBAUM: A Town on the Volkach: The Acculturation of the Jews of Zeilitzheim in the Nineteenth Century

III. JEWISH IDENTITY IN ART AND MUSIC

Katharina S. Feil: Art Under Siege: The Scholarship produced by Rachel Wischnitzer during her Berlin Years 1921-1938

WILLIAM KANGAS: The Ethics and Aesthetics of (Self) Representation: Arnold Schoenberg and Jewish Identity

IV. RESEARCH FROM THE OSOBYI ARCHIVE IN MOSCOW

AVRAHAM BARKAI: The C.V. Archives in Moscow. A Reassessment

JÜRGEN MATTHÄUS: Antisemitic Symbolism in early Nazi Germany, 1933-1935

V. FUTURE RESEARCH

Introduction by JOHN GRENVILLE. Contributors: AVRAHAM BARKAI, DAVID SORKIN, STEFI JERSCH-WENZEL, ROBERT LIBERLES, WERNER T. ANGRESS, MARION KAPLAN, MICHAEL A. MEYER, CHRISTOPHER BROWNING, EVYATAR FRIESEL, IAN KERSHAW, JEREMY NOAKES, GUY STERN, CHAIM SCHATZKER

VI. MEMOIR

ERNEST B. HOFELLER: Timetable to Nowhere: The Story of the Sosua Settlement

VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 1999

VIII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

IX. INDEX

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Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLIV (1999)

Preface by John Grenville and Julius Carlebach

I. GERMAN-JEWISH INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT FROM THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

MOSHE CARMILLY-WEINBERGER: The Similarities and Relationship between the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (Breslau) and the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest

EDWARD BREUER: The Deutsche Encyclopädie and the Jews

MICHAEL NAGEL: The Beginnings of Jewish Children’s Literature in High German: Three Schoolbooks from Berlin (1779), Prague (1781) and Dessau (1782)

MOSHE PELLI: When did Haskalah begin? Establishing the Beginning of Haskalah Literature and the Definition of Modernism

JACOB GOLOMB: ‘Thus Spoke Herzl.’ Nietzsche’s Presence in Herzl’s Life and Work

II. JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

JACOB BORUT: The ‘Province’ versus Berlin? The relations between Berlin and the Communities in the Regions at the End of the nineteenth Century

DAVID ELLENSON: The Israelitische Gebetbücher of Abraham Geiger and Manuel Joël: A Study in Nineteenth-Century German-Jewish Communal Liturgy and Religion

III. JEWISH EXPERIENCES IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC AND NATIONAL-SOCIALIST GERMANY

KATHARINA S. FEIL: Art under Siege: The Art Scholarship of Rachel Wischnitzer in Berlin, 1921-1938

SABINE THIEM: Kurt Sabatzky: The C.V. Syndicus of the Jewish Community in Königsberg during the Weimar Republic

YFAAT WEISS: Jews in Germany and Poland: Changing Roles in Times of Adversity

IV. JEWISH REFUGEES AND DISPLACED PERSONS

BARBARA GELDERMANN: “Jewish Refugees should be welcomed and assisted here.” Shanghai: Exile and Return

EVA KOLINSKY: Experiences of Survival

V. A CASE STUDY

STEVEN R. WELCH: Mischling Deserters from the Wehrmacht and their Fate

VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 1998

VII. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

VIII. INDEX