SHARON GILLERMAN. Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic.

Abstract

Sharon Gillerman's concise study documents German Jews' creation of an extensive interventionist social welfare program during the Weimar Republic. The study covers initiatives that reinvigorated families, disciplined wayward youth, aided war veterans, orphans, widows, and Eastern European immigrants, and ultimately sought to reverse demographic decline. Bedeviled by the weakening of traditional identities, the perceived unraveling of communities in large urban centers, and losses of the war, Jewish leaders sought to revive the community. Already before World War I, the urban environment was viewed as the cause of lowering birthrates and other challenges. Statistical evidence indeed pointed to a decline of the community. Contemporaries attributed the unraveling of social bonds and loss of traditional values in society to the weakening of the family. Jews married later and had fewer children, numbers of marriages decreased, and intermarriages increased (p. 59). Jews believed particularly that the “new woman” furthered the loss of male authority. The experience of World War I and the inflation of 1923 only intensified the sense of crisis and compelled Jews and Germans into collective action to heal the nation.