“German Jews,” “National Jews,” “Jewish Volk” or “Racial Jews”? The Constitution and Contestation of “Jewishness” in Newspapers of Nazi Germany, 1933–1938

Abstract

After reading the “Jewish News Bulletin” (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt) in early 1939, the Romance language scholar Victor Klemperer wrote: “Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else … They were and remain (even if now they no longer wish to remain so) Germans …” Klemperer, a convert to Protestantism, but a “full Jew” by Nazi decree, continued, “It is part of the Lingua tertii imperii [LTI, language of the Third Reich] that the expression ‘Jewish people’ [Volk] appears repeatedly in the ‘Jewish News'…”