Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.