Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Ein Schrei ins Leere? , and: Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Deutschen Kaiserreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des deutschen Bürger-tums in der Krise der Moderne (review)

Abstract

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XClI, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 306-311 Christian Wiese. Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Ein Schrei ins Leere? Preface by Susannah Heschel. New York: Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1999. Pp. xxv + 507. Wolfgang E. Heinrichs. Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des Deutschen Kaiserreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des deutschen Bürger-tums in der Krise der Moderne. Köln: Rhineland-Verlag, 2000. Pp. xiii +851. Despite the works of Leonore Siegel-Wenschkewitz, Christhard Hoffman, Walter Homolka, Karl Hoheisel, and Ulrich Kusche, it could be claimed that scholarship on Protestantism and its relationship to Judaism in the period of the Kaiserreich has lagged. To be sure, studies on Stoecker and the origins of the German Christians have certainly given us a better picture of antisemitic individuals and movements on the periphery. The pointed observations of George Foot Moore regarding unfair presentations of pharisaic Judaism have been expanded and sharpened by E. P. Sanders, Charlotte Klein, and others. Nevertheless, in comparison with the enormous attention given to the German Church's role in the Holocaust, the historical debate over the Kaissereich as a preparatory stage for Nazism, and interest in Jewish-Christian relations, there has been no fundamental advance over the picture offered by Uriel Tal's Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich 1870-1914, written a quartercentury ago—until now. The works reviewed here, along with Susannah Heschel's Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998), offer a picture of Protestant-Jewish relations at once more hostile and more imbricated than Tal's. Christian Wiese's work can rightly claim to be the first analysis of German Lutheran Protestantism's contest and collaboration with the world of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Wilhelmine Germany. Wolfgang Heinrichs, a minister in the Freie evangelischer Bund, has compiled an erudite, encyclopedic catalogue of the views held by German Protestants about Jews and Judaism. The subtitle of Heinrich's book accurately describes the scholarly focus. Drawing on a distinction borrowed from Volker Seilin, Heinrichs sets out to illuminate a fluid mentalité, not an already arrived at and ready to be propagated ideology. Central to Heinrichs' conclusion is the assertion that Jews played a significant role in the German Protestant crisis of modernity. This interpretation of the ebb and flow of antisemitism in the Imperial period as a function of a series of crises is not new—it can be found in the works of Werner Jochman, Hans Rosenberg , Reinhard Rürup, and others. But Heinrichs, to my knowledge, is the first to apply this thesis to the field of religion. Heinrichs combines this GERMAN PROTESTANT VIEWS OF JUDAISM—LEVENSON 307 sensitivity to the malleable nature of the Judenbilder (on this point, his work could be compared to that of Bryan Cheyette in English Jewry), with a pronounced and acknowledged debt to Fritz Stern and other scholars who have focused on the cultural pessimists and their hostility to modernity. The longest section of the book is devoted to the organs of the Church and theological faculties. I found the discussion of the important journal Freunde der Christlichen Welt (CW) particularly helpful. This important liberal journal became the sounding board of the framers of Kulturprotestantismus , a view that evangelical Christianity ought to pervade and inform all facets of national life, yet stay clear of the clericalism and governmental compulsion that liberal Protestants associated with Catholics and their more conservative Protestant opponents. I found Heinrichs' discussions of Martin Rade, Otto Baumgarten, and Friedrich Naumann particularly illuminating . All three opposed antisemitism. Rade, the editor of CW, criticized the Russian Church and all Christianity for its anti-Jewish violence; Baumgarten was a very active member in the Abwehrverein-, Naumann opened his "Christlich-sozialen Bewegung" to Jews, earning the opprobrium of the Christian right. Yet Rade spoke of Jews as the bearers of "negative influences," and attacked antisémites principally because it was the response of "natürlichen Menschen" not "Christians." Baumgarten agreed with Wagner's view that Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's creative oeuvre was compromised by his ultimately "Jewish" qualities (p. 458). Naumann called on the more cultivated members of the Jewish community ". . . Beweis...