Modern Germany

Abstract

The beginning of modern Jewish history in central Europe is associated with the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment (cited under Beginning of Periods: Haskalah and Emancipation, 1780–1871). During the middle decades of the 19th century, Jews in the German states achieved a remarkably high social mobility, moving as a group in little more than one generation from the margins of rural societies into the urban bourgeoisie. Emancipation (cited under Beginning of Periods: Haskalah and Emancipation, 1780–1871), even though it was first developed and debated in late-18th-century Berlin, proceeded only fitfully and differed between German states. All Jews were only fully emancipated when the German nation-state was founded in 1871. In Imperial Germany (see New Period: Imperial Germany, First World War, and Weimar Republic, 1871–1933), Jews were important innovators as entrepreneurs in banking, journalism, new academic fields such as chemistry or theoretical physics, and sociology. Rabbinical seminaries in Breslau and Berlin established Imperial Germany as a renowned center of academic Jewish studies. Jewish women were at the forefront of the women’s movement in and beyond Germany. Jews faced anti-Semitic discrimination and were excluded from certain positions in the civil service, the judicial system, the traditional academic system, and the Prussian officer corps. Before it was overtaken by the United States during the 1890s, Imperial Germany was home to the largest Jewish community outside of eastern Europe. By 1910 the 615000 Jews in Imperial Germany represented slightly less than 1 percent of the general population; almost 70 percent lived in cities. The First World War and the postwar political and economic crisis shattered the relative security Jews had enjoyed. In the war’s aftermath, anti-Semitic violence became more common. The democratic Weimar Republic provided more opportunities to Jews, especially in the civil service, the legal system, and the political sphere. Jewish scientists, writers, journalists, and artists were acclaimed representatives of Germany’s academic and cultural avant-garde. Eleven German Jews won Nobel Prizes before 1933, none after that date. The 1923 hyperinflation and the Great Depression of the early 1930s hit bourgeois Jewish families hard. After 1918 a growing number of younger Jews questioned the values of their parent’s generation and explored new forms of sociability. Some joined Zionist organizations. After coming to power in January 1933, the Nazi Regime systematically isolated Jews, drove them out of cultural and economic life as well as the civil service, stripped them of civil rights, and “aryanized” Jewish-owned businesses and property (see Aryanization). State-sponsored violence reached new levels of destruction during the occupation of Vienna in March 1938 and the notorious “Reichskristallnacht” pogrom on 9–10 November 1938. Between January 1933 and September 1939 about 304000 Jews emigrated from Germany. Of the estimated 192000 Jews living in Austria in 1938, about 117000 left between 1938 and 1940. The Nazi regime deported between 160000 and 180000 German Jews to ghettos, extermination camps, and other killing sites between 1939 and 1945. Few survived; few returned to their homeland. After liberation, Jewish survivors and refugees, mostly from eastern Europe, found protection in camps for Displaced Persons (DP), especially in the American-occupied zones in South Germany and Austria. Jewish life reemerged outside the DP camps, albeit on a modest scale. After most Jewish DPs had left for Palestine/Israel and the United States by the mid-1950s, the Jewish population in West Germany decreased to 30000. Many fewer Jews lived in East Germany. After German reunification in 1990, Jews from the Soviet Union and its successor states boosted the membership of Jewish communities to slightly over 100000 (as of 2010).