Leo Baeck Institute London
for the Study of the History and Culture of German-speaking Jewry
 
 
 

 
home
about us
conferences
lectures
projects
publications
research
board
membership
appeal
contact

 

 
     


LBI Year Book XLVIII (2003)

 

Preface 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 of 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 legal, 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: Kust 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 grounded picture 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

top

back to publications

 

Preface by Prof John Grenville and Dr Raphael Gross

In his introduction to the "record of a discussion of Jewish questions" (Niederschrift einer Besprechung über Judenfragen) included in this volume, Jrgen Matthäus examines a crucial Weimar Republic debate about the policies to be instituted regarding Jewish immigrants to Germany from western Europe. This debate - held on 31 March 1919 under the auspices of the German Foreign Office in Berlin - mirrors the fundamentally ambivalent situation of a great part of European Jewry in the age of nationalism. The concerns of the peace-makers in Versailles in 1919, as well as of the Jewish minorities in countries where they had previously been oppressed and threatened, was to establish minority rights through special treaties. Such a development, however, could not fail to have an impact on the status of Jews in the seemingly more progressive Western European states, where discrimination was generally not sanctioned by law. The majority of Jews in these states rejected the idea of being regarded as members of an ethnic minority, rather viewing themselves as German, French, or British. Within this conceptual framework, religion was understood to be a matter of personal choice. But at the same time, Western European Jews found themselves forced to act together in distinctive groups to protect themselves from those attacking them for being an alien element in the Volksgemeinschaft; such self-protection was, for instance, one of the important purposes of Germany’s famous Centralverein, the "Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith". It is striking that participants in the debate on "Jewish questions" seem already to have been well aware of something that seems much clearer from our twenty-first century perspective: that such ambivalence defines the position not only of Western Jewry, but in fact of many other minority groups as well (for participants in the debate, those in Eastern Europe; as we can now perceive things, those throughout the world). This underscores the vital role the history of German-speaking Jewry can play in our understanding of broader historical problems, and of the world we live in. In addressing the issue of "Equality for Jews and Judaism in all countries of the world" during the debate, Walther Rathenau himself revealed a particularly strong awareness of the dilemma facing national minorities; the difficulties involved in trying to resolve it seem reflected in his rather convoluted contribution to the debate:

"Gentlemen! I regard this recommendation [to guarantee equality for the Jews in every country and to give them specific status as a national minority] as creating a serious [international] precedent [Präjudiz]. At the moment when the government of the German Reich interferes with the selfdetermination of other nationalities we have to expect reciprocity as a matter of course. … If, however, one sees things from the perspective of this precedent, if one does not shrink from interfering with the setting-up of new nations and with their legal systems, then there is no reason to single out the Jews. In that case we must be the advocates of Ruthenians, Serbian minorities, and Walachian minorities in the other countries. Then raising these claims on behalf of Jews would constitute an exclusionary measure [Ausnahmebestimmung] in favour of a tightly defined national group. And this precedent goes further. For the German Reich would thus stabilise the fact that at least elsewhere the Jews form a nation, even if by doing so the German Reich does not establish a precedent in the question of whether the Jews form a nation in Germany."

Was Rathenau afraid that defining Jews in the newly-created European states as a minority nationality with specific rights could backfire, leading to German Jews being regarded as a national minority, hence not totally German? This political dimension has certainly deep roots; it can also be analysed in a social context. Jewish social life was predominantly centred on the family, but also, to be sure, around Jewish religious, communal and national institutions. But in both their professional and leisure activities, Germany’s Jews likewise integrated with the non-Jewish majority, to varying degrees. They contributed to non-Jewish charities and cultural associations, and played an important role in state and national politics. For some, this involved tensions; others lived easily enough in both worlds, accepting the limitations this imposed without feeling great hardship. In general, it is clear that most German Jews were able to come to terms with the ambivalence underlying their situation, the older Jews tending to feel more in common with their non-Jewish neighbours than with the more recently arrived Ostjuden, but also recognising at the same time the link between their fates.

As a complement to all the contributions, the LBI Year Book bibliography offers, as usual, a wider sense of the breadth and depth of current research than can ever be adequately reflected in a single volume. In this regard, we call the reader’s attention to a new feature being planned: the publication of thesisabstracts submitted by authors for inclusion in the Year Book.

It is always a pleasure to be able to thank our manuscript editors, bibliographers, and members of our advisory board, as well as external referees and, not least of all, our publisher. Generous financial support has again been provided by the Bundesministerium des Inneren and the Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepbulik Deutschland. Without this support, maintaining both the scholarly standards and wide circulation of the Year Book would be far more difficult. We also wish to express our appreciation to the foundations listed on the first page of the bibliography for making its production possible.

John A. S. Grenville and Raphael Gross now jointly edit the Year Book.

top

back to publications