Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 1935 Nuremberg laws labeled individual Germans as ‘full racial Jews’ if they possessed a minimum of three grandparents who had ever been members of a Jewish congregation. This ‘group’ was chosen for discrimination and the self-identification of its members was ignored. Outside the realm of Nazi fantasies, the nonracial reality of ‘Jewishness’ had seen many Jews leave behind secular and religious Jewish identities, as well as interaction with Jewish communities. This paper presents the example of the Eisig family, a family of non-Jewish ‘full Jews.’ Several other examples are also examined, in order to capture the reality that the everyday lives of non-Jewish ‘Jews’ under Nazi persecution often could not have been more different from the lives of self-identifying Jews. These differences have received minimal attention in the current historiography. The family primarily discussed in this paper found itself caught between the ‘Aryan’ and Jewish spheres. Until then, their lives had been lived entirely alongside non-Jews, with whom they were now increasingly prohibited from having contact. Often lacking established relationships with Jews, they neither wanted nor were welcome to join the Jewish community. Before looking at the example of the Eisig family, this paper also reviews the English- and German-language publications on ‘Jewish’ everyday life under Nazism. Though non-Jewish ‘Jews’ receive inadvertent coverage in discussions of Nazi policy, their everyday life is almost completely absent from the literature, especially in English-language studies. The situation is much the same in the German literature, though there are some notable but ultimately insufficient exceptions. Alongside displaying the isolation that non-Jewish ‘Jews’ faced, and the latter’s historiographical omission, this paper also draws attention to the impact of two much under researched concepts within everyday life: wealth and status.