German-Jewish Research Articles

Denied a Certificate of Fitness to Marry: The Nuremberg Race Laws as a Threat to Black German Futures

Abstract The 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws were one of the cornerstones of Nazi racial policy. Among other racial restrictions, they prohibited marriages and sexual relationships between German Jews and so-called Aryans. Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, extended them to also cover men and women racialized as Black. The fact that this extension remains widely unknown is emblematic of the wider public and academic ignorance of Black experiences under the Nazis racial state. Using a wide range of new source materials, this article considers the application of the Race Laws, in word and spirit, as part of a more general assault on Germany’s Black residents, their children, and their white partners, which the Nazi regime undertook to protect German “racial purity.” In multiple localities, Nazi policing forces intervened in the private lives of Black residents, resorting to violence, in particular the very real threat of sterilization, to prevent the development of future generations of Black Germans.

"If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Antisemitism and psychosocial health among Jews in Germany.

Amid escalating global antisemitism, particularly following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, this study addresses critical gaps in understanding the psychosocial impact of antisemitism on Jewish communities worldwide. Focusing on the Jewish community in Germany, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 420 Jewish individuals (mean age = 40.71 years, SD = 15.90; 57% female). Participants completed measures assessing four distinct forms of perceived and experienced antisemitism: everyday discrimination, microaggressions (subtle antisemitism and collective experiences such as encountering antisemitic comments on social media), vigilance against antisemitism, and perceived prevalence of antisemitism. Psychosocial outcomes-including depression, anxiety, subjective well-being, and social participation-were also measured. Data were analyzed using correlation analyses and multiple linear regressions, and Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) identified distinct groups based on shared perceptions and experiences of antisemitism and levels of Jewish identification. Results indicate that experiences of antisemitism, particularly everyday discriminatory acts, were significantly associated with poorer mental health outcomes and reduced social participation. The LPA revealed three distinct groups, with the high-identity, high-antisemitism group (53% of the sample) reporting significantly higher anxiety levels than those with average identification and more rare experience with antisemitism. These findings underscore the pervasive nature of antisemitism and its detrimental effects on the well-being of Jewish individuals. The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to promote resilience within Jewish communities and calls for broader societal efforts to combat antisemitism.

Joseph Jacob Gumprecht, ein jüdischer Mediziner im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: blockierte Universitätskarriere, geöffnete Zivilgesellschaft

Abstract Joseph Jacob Gumprecht, MD, 1772–1838, is the first Jew known as a university lecturer (Privatdozent) at a German university. This biographical article analyses the network of family, friends and colleagues, in which his life course was embedded. It shows his achievements, failures and partial successes. When his career at the University of Göttingen was blocked, he moved to Hamburg, practised as a physician and man-midwife. He was not successful economically, and his family broke up. But he made noteworthy contributions to the emergent discipline of obstetrics, both as an author and editor of periodicals. Moreover, he was active in establishing associations in several fields: for the profession of medical men, and in the context of the Jewish reform movement. Gumprecht’s example shows that German Jews not just integrated themselves into the middle class, but that they actively contributed to shaping civil society and the culture of the middle class.

Home after Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust by Anna Koch (review)

Home after Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust by Anna Koch (review)

In hiding? Multifaceted reactions of German Jews to the threat of antisemitism

ABSTRACT The paper investigates reactions of Jews to the perceived risk of antisemitic incidents in Germany by using a mixed-methods design. First, findings from qualitative interviews with 21 German Jews are presented: They perceive Jewishness as a stigmatized identity which ‘spoils’ everyday interactions, often simply because it is linked to the ‘weight’ of German history. We derive two analytical types of reaction to perceptions of stigmatization: defensive efforts to hide one’s Jewish identity and intervening engagement to actively combat antisemitism. In the second part of the paper, we report the findings of a quantitative survey of 295 Jews living in Germany to answer the question who choses which type of reaction. Especially the characteristics of the area where Jews live and the specifics of their Jewish identity are important correlates for explaining variance in their reactions.

The Population History of German Jewry: 1815–1939. Based on the Collections and Preliminary Research of Prof. Usiel Oscar Schmelz, by Steven Mark Lowenstein

The Population History of German Jewry: 1815–1939. Based on the Collections and Preliminary Research of Prof. Usiel Oscar Schmelz, by Steven Mark Lowenstein

Martin Heinrich Corten (1889-1962): Nazi victim or perpetrator?

At first glance, Martin Heinrich Corten's biography appears to be the classic story of a German physician persecuted by the Nazis. Because of his "Jewish descent," Corten lost his position as a pathologist in Berlin and later his license to practice medicine. Emigration failed. But Corten was not a typical Nazi victim. In 1933, he applied for membership in the Nazi Party, and during the last two years of the war he collaborated with the Gestapo as the Hamburg representative of the "Reich Association of Jews in Germany." Although he tried to provide basic welfare and health care for Hamburg's remaining Jewish population, he was heavily involved in the deportation of Jewish citizens to concentration and extermination camps. After the war, Corten thus came into conflict with the Jewish community and lost his position as medical director of the Jewish Hospital in Hamburg. He became a "double outcast" and was unable to re-establish himself in academia. His biography, however, is a vivid example of how the line between victim and perpetrator can be blurred.

WORLD WAR II: Apocryphal and Endorsed Holocaust of Zionist Jews in Germany (1941) versus Factual and Censored Holocaust of Germans in Poland (1939)

WORLD WAR II: Apocryphal and Endorsed Holocaust of Zionist Jews in Germany (1941) versus Factual and Censored Holocaust of Germans in Poland (1939)

Illustrating a Jewish Life: Portrait Photography, Biography and the Creation of a Jewish Public Sphere

Abstract Portrait photography is a fixed element in the history of German Jewry. This article asks what we can learn about a Jewish biography like that of the German–Jewish writer Sammy Gronemann by seeking to follow his life’s trajectories through the images he and others created of him and the appearances he coined. It argues that photography not only represented but also actively shaped his work as a writer and a Zionist politician and that it influenced the worlds he inhabited. It does so by situating Gronemann, the German Jew, in the history of German portrait photography, Gronemann, the Western Zionist, in the history of international Zionist image politics and Gronemann, the writer in the history of the creation of a visible cultural scene in the Yishuv and later Israel. Pondering Gronemann’s relationship with visual arts offers insights into the ways public visibility shaped German–Jewish realities both in Europe and in Palestine, both before and after the foundation of the State of Israel.

The German-Jews' Identity and Reactions to the Nazi Policy

In early April 1933, the racist laws went into effect in Nazi Germany. These officially dictated that all involvement with Jews should be severed by keeping a safe distance. On the eve of Hitler’s taking power, there were some six hundred thousand Jews in Germany. They enjoyed full civil rights and were deeply involved in social and political life. The German Jewish identity was clear-cut to most of them, and some were convinced that Nazi ideology had nothing to do with them. The following article, which focuses on the period between January 1933 and November 1938, will present some responses and identical dilemmas of those German Jews, who found it difficult to accept that Nazi laws include them as Jews only. It will describe their conduct within a community preparation that was gradually being formulated already in Zionist and German-Jewish responses and activities. Most of the sources and examples in this article are aimed to observe the German Jewish dilemma based on their dual cultural loyalty as Germans and as Jews as well. Describing these difficulties, and the German Jews' reactions to the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and after the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, intends to describe expressions of uncertainty and a sense of detachment that characterizes German Jews more prominently. This article deals with the Legal-Racial Lows experienced as German Jews and its future impacts on their fate during the war and afterward.

East German-Jewish spaces in Berlin: Jewish heritage societies (Heimatvereine) and their diasporic milieu during the 1920s and 1930s

ABSTRACT Following the First World War and the loss of German territories in Posen, West Prussia and Silesia, many German Jews from those areas left their homes and settled either in Germany or moved to the USA, Latin America or Palestine. Quite a few of them came to Berlin. There and in other German cities as well they founded so called Heimatvereine, Jewish Heritage Societies. This article analyses the spaces those societies created – concrete spaces, in which people met, but also metaphorical spaces, in which a specific East-German-Jewish diasporic milieu was created and maintained that also transcended the borders of the Weimar Republic.

German Jews in Love: A History by Christian Bailey (review)

German Jews in Love: A History by Christian Bailey (review)

Being and not being in time and place

ABSTRACT Based on an analysis of one family album, this article asks: How do the categories of place and space help to expand our understanding of the Jewish experience under the National Socialist dictatorship, a time when the regime sought to dis-place German Jews? The photographs reveal complicated attempts to insist upon their belonging to the local landscape and society, just as many of the images pointed to the family’s marginalization and absence from the places they visited. I show that experience and deployment of time play a key role in the family’s strategy to make claims to place and belonging.

Camp Blanding as German Latin American Enemy Alien Internment Camp in 1942: Microcosm of Larger Diplomatic and Moral Conundrums

Abstract: Camp Blanding's Enemy Alien internment camp was only in existence between February and June of 1942. However, it presented its "German" Latin American civilian captives from Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama and their U.S. military captors with the larger diplomatic and moral problems that would confront the entire Enemy Alien internment program. Particularly troubling were the presence of "enemy aliens" who were deemed "enemies" of their Latin American homes and of the Colossus of the North, but who were really enemies of Hitler's Germany. Among the 200 internees at Camp Blanding were eighteen Jewish Germans, a Jewish Austrian, and a German priest. Deprived of their families and properties in the Latin American countries to which they fled from Europe, they faced the dangers of forced "repatriation" to a Nazi-ruled Germany in which Jews, self-described "Austrians," and outspoken Christians were declared "enemies of the Fatherland."

Hidden in plain sight: advertisements for Jewish ritual objects in Germany, 1871–1933

ABSTRACT Jewish ritual objects are rather niche products and yet, the advertisements, as well as other factors, indicate an industrial scale production during the German Second Empire (1871–1918) and the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). As I will argue, these advertisements provide us with intriguing insights into the Jewish community, and how German Jewry was perceived by the non-Jewish population. Especially when companies used methods of ethnic marketing, I surveyed how they addressed the different strata of the Jewish community. In addition, some company advertisements bear traces of an understanding of Judaism on equal footing with Christian denominations. Yet, I also find hints of industrial overproduction which, as I argue, might have been stimulated by stereotypes of Jews. Perhaps in response to the overproduction, some retailers advertised Jewish ritual objects as “decorative” rather than religious items, and therefore veiled their link to Judaism. While this might have been a protective measure against anti-Semitic slurs, it ties in well with the observation that producers and retailers might have expected higher sales. Overall, analysing advertisements for Jewish ritual objects helps us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the positioning of Jewish consumers within the market in Germany before the Shoah.

Das Tagebuch von Heinz Heilbronn 1932-1938. Narrativieren auf der Sekundarstufe 1 mit dem Zeugnis eines «diachronen Peers»

The diary entries of a young Jewish adolescent are the focal point of the presented course material, documenting the increased persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s. The course material consists of five units, each provided in two levels of difficulty. The students are tasked with creating their own narrative of the events by using a timeline and other scaffolding-tools. The author revised the sources and adapted it based on ethnographic observations, in order to optimally support the students in acquiring new skills and competences from the course material.

Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman, and: After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle by Cedric Johnson (review)

ABSTRACT: In Left Is Not Woke , the moral philosopher Susan Neiman attempts a sorely needed intervention against the woke left in the hope of rescuing it from its addiction to identity politics in their most reductive form. Neiman is the author of, among other acclaimed works, Learning from the Germans , an account of how a country can come to terms with its barbaric past. Her new book will hopefully be read by those whom it critiques. It is also a missed opportunity. Neiman is an American who directs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam; she has lived in Germany for many years (and has written about the experience of being a Jew in Germany). Despite its essential insights, her book illustrates the great intellectual gap between the left in the United States and Europe—in ways that, frankly, left me profoundly dispirited. And it illustrates the intellectual abstraction that bedevils parts of the left.

Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman, and: After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle by Cedric Johnson (review)

ABSTRACT: In Left Is Not Woke , the moral philosopher Susan Neiman attempts a sorely needed intervention against the woke left in the hope of rescuing it from its addiction to identity politics in their most reduc tive form. Neiman is the author of, among other acclaimed works, Learning from the Germans , an account of how a country can come to terms with its barbaric past. Her new book will hopefully be read by those whom it critiques. It is also a missed opportunity. Neiman is an American who directs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam; she has lived in Germany for many years (and has written about the experience of being a Jew in Germany). Despite its essen tial insights, her book illustrates the great intellectual gap between the left in the United States and Europe—in ways that, frankly, left me profoundly dispirited. And it illustrates the intellectual abstraction that bedevils parts of the left.

Moritz Lazarus: A Marginal Man in the Centre of German Society

German-Jewish philosopher Moritz Lazarus and his work are an example of how someone could live at the centre of society and still be marginalised, how living at the margins can shape the theoretic reflection on society, and at the same time how this theory can then become a part of political and social struggles to overcome marginality. He envisioned a social theory that included the idea of ‘objective spirit’, which was meant as the whole world of objective, human-made and historically emerged ideas, traditions, institutions and things – what we today would describe as culture. His ideas about group membership and society were pluralistic at best, if not constructionist: he rejected the idea that belonging to a collective would be determined by language, descent, ‘race’ or place. For him, it was the subjective act of taking part, not external traits that determined belonging. Lazarus’s ideas were accepted, absorbed selectively or contested, but, in the end, the ambivalence of their perception stems from the modernity of his questions and conclusions. Like many German Jews of this time, and according to his own ideas of belonging to a collective, Lazarus did not consider himself a stranger in Germany at all. Jews like Lazarus were actively co-constructing the national project – and in many cases without being questioned. He was a prominent representative of this era of national, liberal and idealist optimism that ended around 1879, when the pluralist liberal tradition was in less demand and modern antisemitism spread throughout academia and the educated public. Lazarus’s theory of culture based on and developed through plurality was rediscovered in the 1980s, and in many respects it is still useful as a descriptive as well as a normative tool to engage with the modern situation, owing to his own position at the centre and the margins.

A Conversation with Doris H. Gray on the Power and Limitations of Restorative Justice across History, Culture, and Gender

Abstract This interview with Doris H. Gray, author of Leaving the Shadow of Pain: A Cross-cultural Exploration of Truth, Trauma, Reconciliation, and Healing, explores the impact of political trauma across time, and the strategies for healing and justice. The conversation with Gray focuses on the ways in which her own experiences, as the child of a traumatized German Jew, intersect with those of formerly persecuted and incarcerated Tunisian women before and after the Arab Spring. What are the possibilities and limitations of restorative justice for those haunted by history?