Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in "Ost und West"

Abstract

This work analyzes how Ost und (East and West), first Jewish magazine (1901-1923) published in Berlin by westernized Jews originally from Eastern Europe, promoted ethnic identity to Jewish audiences in Germany and throughout world. Using techniques of modern marketing, such as stereotyping, editors of this successful journal attempted to forge a minority consciousness. Marketing Identities is thus about beginnings of ethnicity as we know it in late 20th century. As a cultural history of pre-Hitler Germany, this book also addresses whether a German-Jewish symbiosis ever existed, revealing possibilities and limitations of multiple identities for turn-of-the-century German Jews. Even though magazine's editors succeeded in creating a public sphere for pan-Jewishness (Gesamtjudentum), they were confronted with serious obstacles such as negative perception of East European Jews (Ostjuden) since Enlightenment by many West European Jews (Westjuden) and non-Jews. Since late 18th century, an elite group of intellectuals and policymakers called on Ostjuden to become less Jewish and to regenerate themselves into a group more like the Germans or the French. The Ostjuden were increasingly caricatured in literature, arts and sciences, a development that had reached a point as Ost und began publication. As a means of correcting these negative images of Eastern Jews, Ost und attempted to legitimize public expressions of Jewishness in West, yet its founders knew they would have to reflect presuppositions of broader Jewish audience if they were to attract more readers. To influence Jews in Germany (and elsewhere) who knew little about Eastern Jewry, editors of Ost und appealed specifically to three main audiences (each subject of a chapter in book): Jewish intellectuals, middle-class Jewish women, and middle-class Jewish men. Judging by its wide circulation - at least 10 percent of 625,000 Jews in Germany at its height - Ost und was a success, bringing Westjuden closer to Ostjuden, at least in public sphere. Such an approach to ethnic identity in early 20th-century Germany is innovative in looking at minority self-stereotyping as an instrument of marketing, not just as a socio-psychological phenomenon to be explained as self-hatred or assimilation. An interdisciplinary study, Marketing Identities illuminates contemporary discussions in Europe and Americas regarding experience of self-understanding of minority groups and combines media and cultural studies with German and Jewish history. Its negotiation of ethnicity, race, nationalism, gender, class and religion makes Marketing Identities appealing to those engaged in debates about multiculturalism and relationship between high and low culture.