German-Jewish Research Articles

David Biale. Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. 232 pp.

Reviewed by: Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah by David Biale Michael A. Meyer David Biale. Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. 232 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942000032X In 1958, during an undergraduate year spent in Jerusalem, I received an invitation to visit Gershom and Fania Scholem in their Rehavia apartment. Aside from the courtesy and warmth with which the unexcelled—and sometime notorious—scholar of the Kabbalah welcomed my roommate and myself, the most lasting impression was of the library. In each room, volumes of various sizes stretched from floor to high ceiling, with additional books perched on dangling shelves suspended from above. Now close to forty years after Scholem's death, it is the abundance of books written about him and his brothers that arouses attention. A few years before Scholem passed away in 1982, David Biale was able to interview him and in 1979 to publish a first biography. In that volume, titled Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Biale argued that—for all of his critique of German Wissenschaft des Judentums—Scholem must be seen as extending that tradition into a new Zionist stage; his rebellion was not so much in opposition to the legacy of Leopold Zunz as it was directed against the bourgeois values that characterized much of German Jewry. Biale tried to link Scholem with Hermann Cohen in his rational approach, albeit directed toward a "history of irrationalism." As his title indicates, Biale at that time chose to understand Scholem's historiography as a "counter-history," by which he meant that underneath his predecessors' interpretations of Jewish history lay a vital "secret tradition," which for Scholem found expression in the Kabbalah. In his new book, Biale shifts the emphasis from Scholem's historiography and from what he had called his "anarchistic theology" to Scholem's life, an area whose details had remained largely hidden until they came to light in his publicly available archive, his letters, and his diaries. Having earlier focused on his thought, Biale turns his account toward Scholem's humanity, a subject almost as complex as his dialectical thinking. His goal is to understand Scholem "from within." In his youth Scholem was an enfant terrible, scarcely agreeing with anyone on anything for very long. His personality was ironic, and he was an expert poseur. The student of mystery was himself, in many ways—and perhaps purposefully—mysterious. As one would expect of a biography, David Biale organizes his brief volume chronologically. He begins with a description of the Scholem household in which Gerhard (as he was then called) suffered from a father whom Biale compares with the father of Franz Kafka. In rebellion, the son for a time became Orthodox, but that phase soon gave way to a Zionism mostly out of harmony with any other youthful Zionists. Like Theodor Herzl, the young Scholem also secretly believed that he might be "the Chosen One." Like his brother Werner—and unlike Martin Buber and most German Jews —Gerhard opposed World War I; by feigning psychosis he was able to gain a medical discharge from the army and avoid service in combat. Or were there perhaps genuine symptoms of mental illness? Biale at least raises that possibility. [End Page 453] In Berlin, Scholem was able to make the acquaintance of men who played a major role in Hebrew culture, among them Bialik and Agnon. But the only long-term and profound friendship was with Walter Benjamin, with whom he carried on a correspondence until Benjamin's tragic death by suicide in 1940. Benjamin was one of the few—perhaps the only one—whom Scholem regarded as his intellectual equal. The most original chapter in Biale's volume is that titled "Scholem in Love." Here Biale suggests that the Scholem-Benjamin relationship may have contained a homoerotic component. And later he raises the possibility that the reason Scholem had no children with either of his two wives may have been due to impotence. But the young Scholem did have numerous female friends, and, in a 1917 letter to Werner Kraft, he expresses the hope that his future children will speak Hebrew. Scholem's early interest in...

Jay Howard Geller. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp.

Reviewed by: The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller Jerry Z. Muller Jay Howard Geller. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000343 In 1977, five years before his death, Gershom Scholem published a memoir of his youth, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (published in English translation in 1980 as From Berlin to Jerusalem). Though it was not his focus, he touched upon the history of his family: his bourgeois parents, the printer Arthur and his wife Betty, and his three brothers. Reinhold, the eldest, became a German nationalist; the next in age, Erich, was a liberal; Werner was a radical leftist who for a few years was a Communist member of the Reichstag; and then there was Gershom himself—Gerhard until he Hebraicized his name—a committed Zionist from his youth. It no doubt occurred to more than one historian of German Jewry that the Scholems seemed to present a real-life counterpart to the fictional family depicted by Sholem Aleichem in Tevye and His Daughters, in which each child followed a different [End Page 457] and characteristic path of eastern European Jewry. Reconstructing the history of the Scholem family thus offers the possibility of portraying the various paths taken by the children of the turn-of-the-century German Jewish middle class. Jay Howard Geller has now taken up that challenge. His book has two aims. The first is to reconstruct the history of the family from its arrival in Berlin in the early nineteenth century through its dissolution through emigration and destruction during the Third Reich, with a coda surveying the later fate of the brothers and their families. The second is to use the history of the Scholem family to exemplify larger patterns—social, educational, religious, and political—in the history of the Berlin Jewish middle class (entrepreneurial and professional, below the level of the titled and the rich, but above that of the working class). The book largely succeeds in both, though there is a certain tension between the two aims—with the family drama sometimes diluted by historical generalizations. The background political narrative of each period, together with the story of the Scholem family, makes the book accessible to those without a background in modern German history, while even those familiar with German Jewish history will gain additional insights and information. Geller's reconstruction is grounded in assiduous research in archives and obscure published works, from high school yearbooks to government statistical reports. His most important source is the Gershom Scholem archive at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. From very early on in his life, Scholem had a sense of himself as a world historical figure—which he indeed became—and preserved not only his diaries, but also his massive correspondence. A three-volume selection of that correspondence was published in German between 1994–1999, with a one volume selection in English in 2002. Scholem published his correspondence with Walter Benjamin in 1980; an English translation appeared in 1992. In 1999 selections from Scholem's correspondence with his mother, Betty, were published. Since then, his extensive correspondence with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno has also been published. And yet this published correspondence represents only a fraction of the material in the Scholem archive: Scholem was a key node in the international Republic of Letters in the twentieth century, and his papers are a gold mine for the intellectual history of the era. Geller draws on the published as well as unpublished correspondence, primarily that of Scholem with the other members of his family. He also draws on existing biographical studies of Gershom and of Werner. The Scholem family at the center of the book had its origins in Glogau in Silesia. Its founder, Marcus Scholem, moved to Berlin in the early nineteenth century, where his son Siegfried founded a printing business. Siegfried's son, Arthur (Gershom's father), started a printing business of his own, which he ran with help from his wife, Betty—a common pattern among central European Jewish business families. Their...

A Jewish Italienische Reise during the Nazi period

This article unravels the complexities revealed in the act of traveling to and photographing Fascist Italy in order to consider the intricacies of a particularly German-Jewish engagement with contested and highly politicized spaces and scenes. It examines four specific images in the album: namely, one photo from South Tyrol/Alto Adige along with the three images from a Fascist night-time rally in Venice. Together, they visually capture the Italian celebration of its conquest of Ethiopia in May 1936. I argue that for these German-Jewish tourists Italy served as a means to critically contemplate Fascist politics and to understand their place as German Jews in the contemporary world order. The coincidental timing of Italy’s victory over Ethiopian forces afforded the travelers with an unusual, though not entirely unique opportunity to witness, and participate in, a Fascist spectacle, even as they negotiated its meaning. The timing of their visit also allowed the individual(s) to make both a visual and a brief textual statement about colonialism in its last throes, shortly before the Second World War broke out and before the beginning of decolonization.

Fighting Hatred and Teaching Love in a ‘World that is Common to us all’: Recontextualizing Stefan Zweig’s Pedagogy of Humanism

Abstract In late 1933, Stefan Zweig stood before a committee to aid German Jews, and pleaded for immediate action to help German-Jewish children find new homes abroad. This article examines Zweig’s call to accept refugees within his larger quest to promote a humanist and universalist Europe. His goal was not merely intended to help individual Jewish children enjoy happier childhoods in other parts of the world, but a collective task to combat hatred. Stefan Zweig’s humanism and cosmopolitanism expressed themselves in a pedagogic and educational mission that was based on a particularly Jewish commitment to Bildung and took two major forms—a literary one (as seen in his historical-biographical writings) and an activist one (in his speeches, interviews and newspaper writings). The two expressions worked in tandem and reflected the same message and concerns. Moreover, both reflected his general aim to promote and help realise an alternative, humanist Europe; one in which the healthy and happy future of Jewish youth (and others) would be ensured.

CUMHURİYET’İN İLK YILLARINDA ADANA’DAKİ İNGİLİZ İSTİHBARAT YUVASI: GİLODO NEBATİ YAĞ VE SABUN FABRİKASI

Öz: Rusya’dan Wrangel Ordusu ile gelen ve bu orduda subay olan S.Rafael Gilodo, Mütareke sırasında İstanbul’da İngiliz istihbaratının Beyoğlu ve Kadıköy kısımlarını idare eden Rus Yahudilerindendir. 1924 yılında kardeşi ile birlikte İstanbul’dan Adana’ya gelerek bir süre pamuk ticareti yapmıştır. Adana’ya gelişinden bir yıl sonra İngiltere’den getirdiği makinelerle kendi ismini taşıyan fabrikasını kurmuştur. Fabrika kendi ismini taşımakla birlikte, sermayesi ve idaresi tamamıyla İngilizlerin kontrolündedir. Elindeki maddi imkânlarla ve bazı memurların da desteği ile kısa sürede büyüyen bu fabrika, kuşkulu yabancılarla temasta olan bir yabancı istihbarat yuvası hâline gelmiştir. Fabrika; Adana’da İngilizlerin istihbarat yuvası olduğu, askerî, siyasî ve iktisadi casuslukla meşgul olduğu ihbarı ile emniyet tarafından denetim ve gözetim altına alınmıştır. Fabrikada çalışan tüm üst düzey idareci ve çalışanların, bütün hareket ve faaliyetlerinin takibi yapılmıştır. Bu kapsamda; fabrika dışındaki seyahat ve temasları kontrol altında tutularak casusluklarını ispatlayabilecek tüm şüphe çeken davranış ve vaziyetleri rapor hâline getirilerek Dahiliye Vekâletine bildirilmiştir. Adana’da pamukçuluğu öldürmeyi hedefleyen çalışmaların yanı sıra Yahudi işleri ile alakadar oldukları, Filistin’e gidecek Alman Yahudilerine her hususta yardımcı oldukları tespit edilmiştir. İşte bu çalışmada; Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü Arşivinde 11312-36numaralı dosyada kayıtlı bulunan belgeler ve takip raporları değerlendirilecektir. Abstract: S. Rafael Gilado, who came from Russia with the Wrangel Army and was the Officer in this Army, is one of the Russian Jews who administered the Beyoğlu and Kadiköy sections of British Intelligence in Istanbul during the Armistice. In 1924, he came to Adana from Istanbul with his brother and traded for a while. A year after his arrival in Adana, he established his own factory (by his name) with the machines he brought from England. Besides the factory carries his own name, its fund and administration are completely under the control of the British. This factory, which has grown in a short time with the financial possibilities, it has and the support of some officers has become a foreign intelligence center that is in contact with suspicious foreigners. The factory was taken under control and surveillance by the police with the notice of the British were an intelligence center in Adana and were engaged in military, political and economic espionage. All movements and activities of all senior administrators and employees working at the factory were followed. Within this scope; By keeping the travel and contacts outside the factory under control, all suspicious behaviors and situations that could prove their spying were reported and informed to the ministry of interior In addition to its efforts aimed at killing cotton in Adana, it has been determined that they are interested in Jewish affairs and they help German Jews who will go to Palestine in every respect. Here in this study; Documents and follow-up reports recorded in the file number 11312-36 in the Archives of the Police headquarters will be evaluated.

“Ein poetischer Schleier”: Bildung and Failed Conversion in Fanny Lewald's Jenny (1843)

This article analyzes the intersection of literature and Christian‐Jewish love in Lewald's 1843 novel Jenny, where Bildung is both a medium to transcend the constraints of Jewish identity and a force reinscribing these constraints. Literature is the space in which the novel's protagonist, Jenny, falls for her Christian tutor and pursues conversion. In order to reconcile her secular worldview with the spiritual demands of conversion, Jenny attempts to encode Christian doctrine into a system of understanding shaped by her literary imagination and engagement with Bildung. This strategy fails, ending her romance and reinforcing an identification with her father. Bildung, which in part propelled German Jews into the middle class, ultimately prevents Jenny from escaping her status as a Jewish woman. The Jewish daughter's secular education in conjunction with her romantic rebellion away from the Jewish family stages the limitations of—and anxieties toward—refashioning Jewish identity in the non‐Jewish world.

Returning to Stay? Jews in East and West Germany after the Holocaust

ABSTRACTTo better understand the position of Jews within Germany after the end of World War II, this article analyzes the rebuilding of Jewish communities in East and West Germany from a Jewish perspective. This approach highlights the peculiarities and sometimes sharply contrasting developments within the Jewish communities in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, from the immediate postwar months to the official East-West separation of these increasingly politically divided communities in the early 1960s. Central to the study are the policies of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which exemplify the process of gradual divergence in the relations between East and West German Jewish communities, that, as this article demonstrates, paralleled and mirrored the relations between non-Jewish Germans in the two countries.

Niilismo e tecnologia

O presente artigo analisa a relacao entre niilismo e tecnologia a partir das intuicoes do filosofo judeu-alemao Hans Jonas. Para tanto, partimos de uma consideracao do niilismo na sua forma incompleta como tentativa de negacao da realidade mundana e humana, atitude que doa a tecnologia um papel de retirar o humano do mundo, seja por meio de uma fuga da Terra, seja por meio das hipoteses pos e transumanistas, baseadas na obsolescencia do corpo. Examinam-se as teses que fazem da tecnologia tanto um problema filosofico quanto etico, na perspectiva de que a etica deve ser uma especie de complemento (um “poder sobre o poder”) da tecnologia. Para tanto, ela assumiria um novo papel: por meio da responsabilidade, contribuir para projetar adequadamente o prognostico do futuro e, ao mesmo tempo, promover modos de vida ecologicamente adequados, baseados na frugalidade e na continencia. Palavras-chave: niilismo, tecnologia, responsabilidade, Hans Jonas.

Nazi Germany's Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians

Most Americans and lawyers would probably be shocked to learn that in the early 1930s Nazi Germany’s scholars, lawyers, and party officials were carefully studying United States race laws and Federal law. As part of comparative system, Germans were accustomed to researching the laws and legal systems of other countries to find insights and models. In the 1930s, they were researching how to legally discriminate against Jews and they found their models in United States law. This article expands on preexisting research into how Adolf Hitler, Nazi party officials, and Nazi scholars studied in the process of drafting the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. This article adds to this subject by closely examining how the Nazis also studied and relied on Federal Law. Hitler and many Germans were relatively well-informed about issues and history, and U.S. anti-miscegenation laws, involuntary sterilization laws, citizenship practices, and the Jim Crow laws in general. In fact, in Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned U.S. laws and policies and noted that the United States was racial model for Europe and that it was “the one state” in the world that was creating the kind of racist society the Nazi regime wanted to establish. Obviously, Nazi scholars followed his lead and they researched and wrote numerous articles and books on race laws. This article also addresses how Germans and Nazis analogized the American Frontier and Manifest Destiny, and the treatment of nations and peoples, to the Nazi plans to invade the East to serve the longstanding German policy of Lebensraum and colonization of the East. In regards Federal Law, Heinrich Krieger and other German/Nazi scholars undertook serious and prolonged studies of the subject. They considered Indian to be a racial law and to be unique extra-constitutional situation. They concluded that Indians had been discriminated against for centuries in North America based on race and blood. Consequently, Nazi Germany would be well justified doing the same to Jews and other minorities. In September 1935, Adolf Hitler announced the culmination of the Third Reich’s research into laws and Federal Law in its efforts to racially discriminate against the Jews. The Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and their rights and started Germany on the road to the Holocaust. The Laws criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. There was only one country in the world the Nazis could find that criminalized inter-racial marriage - the United States. In fact, forty-one of the states had anti-miscegenation statutes. The Nazis also studied the numerous state Jim Crow laws and the United States immigration and naturalization laws and policies from 1790-1924. In addition, the United States conquest of nations, ethnic cleansing, and colonization of the Frontier West provided fodder and analogies for the Nazi invasion and colonization of the German East. This article perhaps raises more questions than it answers about Federal Law and its impact on Hitler and Nazi Germany. In the end though, how intriguing, yet at the same time how profoundly disturbing, that and Federal Law played some role, or any role, in the Nazi formulation of Jewish policies and laws.

The Crisis of Enlightenment: Jewish Discourses on German Cultural Traditions in National Socialist Germany

Abstract This article explores the self-conceptions of German Jews in National Socialist Germany in the context of a critical rereading of 1930s receptions of the German and European Enlightenment. The transformation of the Jewish community and Jewish culture into a part of bourgeois society had taken place in the course of the German and European Enlightenment, from its beginnings to the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. The efforts of the Jewish minority to ‘emancipate’ itself from any form of heteronomy from around 1820—to become self-reliant and responsible citizens in thought and deed—had become a kind of symbol for the progressive reasoning of the Enlightenment. Consequently, given the aggressive antisemitic policies of the National Socialist state, the German-Jewish relationship to the Enlightenment in internal and public debates after 1933 must be viewed as key when exploring the externally damaged self-conceptions of large parts of the German-Jewish minority. For the writers and artists of Jewish descent examined in this article, the relationship to the Enlightenment—and to German and Jewish culture—was once more open to debate.

Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational ed. by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris

Reviewed by: Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational ed. by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris Corey L. Twitchell Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, eds. Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Hardcover $85, ebook $69.95. ISBN 978-0472130122, 0-47213-012-9. Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, edited by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, represents a valuable contribution to German Studies, Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Transnational Studies, and Memory Studies, to name but just the most striking interdisciplinary points of contact in which the fourteen smartly wri en and convincingly argued essays contained in this volume productively engage. As its title suggests, this collection not only delves into the entanglements of German and Jewish in German-Jewish culture and history but also investigates the wider cultural, historical, linguistic, and political ramifications when the "bilateral relationship between German Jews and non-Jewish Germans" is further complicated by a third, far-reaching component: transnationalism. (1) Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin's life and work and with specific reference to his 1928 collection of aphorisms, One-Way Street, Three-Way Street is energized by the German Jewish philosopher's approach to historiography, reflecting "the urgency of collecting the fragments and pieces of the past as they are about to recede and [the insistence] on the necessity of reading history as a collection of fragments, as part of a constellation rather than a chronology of events." (1) Combining the multivalent concept of the "transnational" as formulated by Young-Sun Hong with a Benjaminian impulse toward uncoupling the teleological from the historical, Three-Way Street tells many different stories about real and imagined relationships between Germans, Jews, German Jews, Eastern European Jews, Jewish immigrants to the United States and other countries (to name just a handful of permutations), bringing to the fore the highly complex, crisscrossing nature of history, geography, language, and politics when mapped onto the very real human experiences of exile, immigration, and migration. From within this transnational network, the German-speaking world endures as a literal and figurative point of departure for the essays in this volume, for "Germany was an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture, including religious practice, philosophy, literature, and art beyond Germany." (7) Three-Way Street is divided into three sections. Part 1, "To Germany, from Germany: The Promise of an Unpromised Land?" recalibrates "the discussion about Jews and Germans from one of a static one-way street of emigration and exile to a fuller discussion of the complex and ongoing entanglements of Jews and Germans." (9) To this end, Deborah Her examines the fascinating financial, geographical, and philosophical zigzagging that characterized revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg's life, both public and private. Jeffrey Grossmann "seeks to reverse the optic and to consider the impact of German and German-Jewish culture on Sholem Aleichem, Dovid Bergelson, Anna Margolin, and Der Nister," (10) and Ofer Ashkenazi explores the intersections between photography, filmmaking, and Zionist politics in his essay on Helmar Lerski's 1935 Avodah (Work), a film that takes [End Page 260] inspiration from German classics such as Metropolis to construct a Zionist vision of the future. Alan Levenson discusses what he terms the "triple immersion" that helped shape the lives and work of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals Joseph Soloveitchik, Jacob Ka, Nehama Leibowi, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Part 2, "Germany, the Portable Homeland," engages with "the canonical notion of Jewish culture formulated by German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who famously declared not Germany but rather the Hebrew Bible the 'portable Homeland,' to consider various textual reimaginings of Germany." (11) Jay Geller takes a fresh look at the intricate relationships between Germany and the various members of the Scholem family, looking closely not only at Gershom (Gerhard) and the lingering "Germanness" of his identity after se ling in pre-state Palestine, but also at the fate and ultimately ambivalent a itudes of his brothers Reinhold and Erich. Michael Berkowi discusses the transnational issues that underpinned the photography of Walter and Helmut Gernsheim, German-Jewish émigrés in Britain, while Richard Mc-Cormick offers a tantalizing portrait of the Eastern...

The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller

Reviewed by: The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller Christopher L. Schilling (bio) The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction By Jay Howard Geller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp. plus illus. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction has been described as a "compelling tale" in Kirkus Reviews, and a "richly textured portrait" by George Prochnik. Writing a book about Gershom Scholem and his family is a worthy project and follows other recent publications on Scholem, such as David Biale's interesting Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah (Yale University Press, 2018), and Amir Engel's compelling Gerschom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2017). The Scholems, however, does not provide sufficient insight into the family history of the Scholems, most notably Gershom and his brothers Werner, Reinhold, and Erich. The book is, I am afraid, too uninformed of German and European history, inaccurate in its use of historical terms (Reichspogromnacht, intelligentsia), and is in parts given to a melodramatic style. Geller often elides regional differences within the history of German-speaking countries, including their inherently diverse Jewish experiences and histories. He assumes, for example, that Prussian-Jewish history comprises the experiences of Jews in German-speaking countries such as Saxony, Hesse, Bavaria, and others. While all Jews in Germany had to face the Nazis in 1933, their experiences were not altogether the same prior to Hitler. This emerges as a major flaw of the book, as the notion of a common German history before 1871 is essentially a nationalist fabrication. The reader should, thus, keep in mind that whenever "German" history is invoked, the author actually means Prussian history. Moreover, as Jewish intellectual life does continue in Germany, even [End Page 295] after the Holocaust, the use of "Prussia" rather than Germany in the title would been more valid since Prussian history ended indeed with World War II and its dissolution by the Allied Control Council in 1947. The title should, thus, be "The Scholems: A Story of the Prussian-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction." One should, in short, not forget the significant regional differences between German-speaking parts of Europe. Geller moreover seems not always to be sufficiently aware of the importance of precision of language. This becomes evident in statements like "despite their [the Jews] relatively small proportion of the total German population" (5). In fact, the Jewish population of Germany in 1933 was less than one percent; Jews were actually a tiny part of the German population. Describing this accurately is all the more urgent as it underlines the paranoid nature of Nazi fanaticism regarding this extremely small group of people. Certain controversial figures are presented in much too positive a light. The book mentions West Germany's president Theodor Heuss crediting a Jewish doctor for saving the lives of his wife and new-born son. But there is no word about Heuss voting as a parliamentarian in favour of the notorious Enabling Act [Ermächtigungsgesetz] in 1933, which handed Hitler dictatorial power. And there is no mention about his articles in favor of the Nazi book burnings, Ostjuden propaganda [Jews of the East propaganda], or the "uprooted Jewish literacy" which he meant to fight against. Furthermore, Geller describes nineteenth-century novelist Theodor Fontane as an admirer of the contribution of Jews to "liberty and higher culture" (28), without mentioning his evident antisemitism. There is in fact a vast amount of literature on the topic. The Scholems does mention Prussian king Frederick II, who "acquired" (14) Silesia from Austria and the resulting economic hardships Jews faced under Prussian rule. However, Frederick II was not only the enlightened monarch most people stereotypically associate him with, but also a militarist who, in 1740, surprisingly and without any reason other than his desire for glory, attacked Austria. Again, words matter: "conquered" Silesia [End Page 296] would be much more accurate than "acquired." All subsequent Prussian wars were the logical consequence of this attack on Silesia, culminating in the Seven Years War of 1756, which triggered a worldwide avalanche that reached as...

The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship ed. by Andrew Mein, Nathan Macdonald, and Matthew A. Collins

Reviewed by: The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship ed. by Andrew Mein, Nathan Macdonald, and Matthew A. Collins Philip Jenkins andrew mein, nathan macdonald, and matthew a. collins (eds.), The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship (LHBOTS 691; Scriptural Traces 15; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Pp. x + 307. $91.80. When the First World War broke out, clergy and religious intellectuals in the main combatant nations were enthusiastically involved in patriotic propaganda, to a degree that attracted the scorn of later generations. That fact is very familiar in the historical literature, which commonly draws illustrations from sermons and pamphlets from the genre mockingly characterized as "Hurrah and Hallelujah!" Far less studied is the role of such sentiment in shaping the world of biblical scholarship, which was then in such a flourishing state across much of Europe. The present book makes a well-conceived and indeed groundbreaking contribution that tells us as much about the history of biblical scholarship as it does about political religion. The result is multiply interesting and rewarding. [End Page 344] Except in passing, the book makes no attempt to discuss the use of the Bible, or of particular biblical books, among ordinary believers, whether soldiers or civilians seeking consolation in a time of catastrophe. Other writings dealing with that theme would, for instance, highlight such texts as the Gospel of John, and the ubiquitous protective psalms—above all, Psalm 91. Rather, the book explicitly focuses on academic and intellectual approaches, on how ivory tower scholars allowed themselves to be so comprehensively "mobilized." The present book is a collection of fourteen essays by academics chiefly drawn from Great Britain and the United States, and the level of contributions is uniformly high. Following the introduction by Andrew Mein ("Biblical Scholarship at War 1914–1918"), a section entitled "Individuals and Institutions" offers the following studies: "Maintaining the Light of Truth? The Mobilization of University Academics, 1914–1918," by Tomás Irish; "For Christ and Kaiser: Caspar René Gregory and the First World War," by Timothy J. Demy; "Between Prophetic Critique and Raison d'État: Rudolf Kittel on German Jews during the Great War and on Old Testament Hebrews in Biblical Wars," by Lukas Bormann; "William Sanday, Modernism and the First World War," by Mark D. Chapman; and "SOTS, SBL, and WWI: Anglo-American Scholarly Societies and the Great War," by Matthew A. Collins. These studies address the issue of mobilization, showing how groups and institutions responded to the global crisis. As we quickly learn, few scholars needed much prodding to join the patriotic cause wholeheartedly, and that was true of liberal and modernist thinkers as well as the more conservative. Most influential was Adolf von Harnack, who played a critical role in galvanizing German intellectual support for the Kaiser's cause, and indeed formulating imperial propaganda. The following essays constitute a section entitled "Biblical Texts and Themes": "Thou Shalt Not Kill, Unless …: The Decalogue in a Kaiserreich at War," by Paul Michael Kurtz; "Holy War and the Great War in German Protestant Scholarship on the Old Testament," by Nathan MacDonald; "Psalms, Patriotism and Propaganda: A Favourite Book in Wartime Biblical Scholarship," by Andrew Mein; "Ecstasy versus Ethics: The Impact of the First World War on German Biblical Scholarship on the Hebrew Prophets," by Susannah Heschel; "Martyr: Title and First World War Context," by Jan Willem van Henten; "The First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Fate of Social-Scientific Approaches to the New Testament and Christian Origins," by James Crossley; and "A Disconnected Dialogue: Adolf von Harnack, C. J. Cadoux and the Biblical Case for Peace at the Outbreak of the First World War," by Hugh S. Pyper. These studies address such topics as the concept of holy war in German scholarship of the time; German thought on the Hebrew prophets; the role of the Psalms in wartime scholarship; and the application of the idea of martyrdom to the modern-day struggle. After the barrage of sentiments justifying war and slaughter, we are almost startled to find scholars excavating biblical texts to justify peace and reconciliation, but such did occur. Although the subject matter is so rich and varied...

Mirror of Competing Claims: Antisemitism and Citizenship in Vormärz Germany

The Haber Affair of 1843 became a cause célèbre within German society as it pitted the traditional elites against more liberal groups who sought inclusion of outsiders and a fundamental re-organization of society along bourgeois lines. Caught between these groups was Moritz von Haber, the son of an ennobled court banker. These groups viewed the Haber Affair through their personal views of Haber and his perceived transgressions, but ultimately as a litmus test of the limits of Jewish integration and whether or not German Jews deserved full emancipation. The Haber Affair also demonstrated how latent Jew-hatred could be re-activated quickly in society and how the German State participated in fomenting this violence.

Life Paths of German-Jewish Doctors: Professional and Personal

The doctors presented here - Max Marcus, Julius Kleeberg and Siegfried Rosenbaum - belonged to an age group of highly qualified German Jews who had fled to Palestine/ Israel because of the Nazi persecution. There, they set standards in surgery, pediatrics and internal medicine and contributed to the international reputation of private and university-academic healthcare in Israel. From this point of view, they were extremely successful, but their biographies are overshadowed by traumatic experiences in Germany. They all had a lifelong feeling of ambiguity, of not belonging, or of the impression of living in several worlds. On the basis of extensive research, this article focuses on questions about the individual and exemplary of their life paths.

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of On War by Vanya Eftimova Bellinger

Reviewed by: Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of On War by Vanya Eftimova Bellinger Elisabeth Krimmer Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of On War. By Vanya Eftimova Bellinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 312. Cloth $31.95. ISBN 978-0190225438. It is well known that Carl von Clausewitz's On War was published posthumously by the author's wife, who also edited the unfinished work. And yet, though her involvement has been acknowledged—the first biography of Carl von Clausewitz by Karl Schwartz is, in fact, devoted to the couple rather than to the famous theorist alone—little has been written about Marie von Clausewitz's life. Bellinger's groundbreaking biography sets out to remedy this by drawing on a treasure trove of letters that has recently come to light. In 2012, the Buttlar family bequeathed its papers to the Prussian Privy State Archives. These papers contained the correspondence between Carl and Marie von Clausewitz, including 283 letters by Marie that had never been published before. In addition, Bellinger also had access to Marie's diary from 1813 and her journal from 1831 through 1836. Born Countess von Brühl on June 3, 1779, Marie was from an aristocratic dynasty with direct links to the royal family. Her mother Sophie Gomm was the daughter of a leading British merchant who prospered as court banker in St. Petersburg. Her father Carl Adolph von Brühl served as the governor of the Protestant Prussian crown prince, even though he was Catholic. At age 18, Marie became a lady-in-waiting to Friederike Luise, the widow of Friedrich Wilhelm II. In 1809, she became lady-in-waiting to the king's oldest daughter Princess Charlotte. Marie also took care of her own niece after [End Page 165] the death of her sister, who had been married to Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz. While the family remained prominent, its financial fortune declined. Marie lived off a modest annuity that made it difficult for her to afford the lifestyle expected at court. Highly educated, she found comfort in art and literature and was a practicing artist herself—though, with the exception of a portrait of General Gneisenau in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, many of her paintings are considered lost. Bellinger argues that Marie was drawn to the impecunious Carl, whose social standing was decidedly below her own, because of the promise of an intellectual partnership. The couple first met in 1803 when Carl served as adjutant to Prince Ferdinand's youngest son. After a prolonged courtship and in spite of her mother's disapproval, Marie married Carl in 1810. To their great disappointment, the couple was unable to have children. Bellinger portrays Marie and Carl as a "power couple." She argues convincingly that Marie used her social connections to help her husband rise and that her disappointment at his failure to achieve public recognition was greater even than that of Carl himself. After her husband's death, Marie retained an important position at court and was even appointed chief lady-in-waiting to Augusta, wife of the future Emperor Wilhelm I. Bellinger depicts Marie as an outspoken woman whose passion for politics frequently met with disapproval. Marie resented the French occupation with all her heart and was an ardent supporter of Major von Schill's insurrection against the French. While her antipathy to the French is clearly motivated by Napoleon's expansionist campaign, she also appears to have shared her husband's antisemitism, his contempt for Poland in general, and Poland's "dirty German Jews, swarming like vermin in the dirt and misery" (114), in particular. Furthermore, Marie supported Carl's decision to leave the Prussian service and join the Russian army's fight against Napoleon. Subsequently, he was accused of having done so without permission. Since the couple stood to lose their property if Carl was convicted, Marie took the precaution of transferring her property to her cousin, though in the end the government decided not to prosecute. While the Russian campaign involved a long period of separation for the couple, the Wars of Liberation not only forced Marie to leave Berlin but...

Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe ed. by Jason Crouthamel et al.

Reviewed by: Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe ed. by Jason Crouthamel et al. Judith Szapor Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, Julia Barbara Köhne, eds., Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 407 pp. In November 2014, at the start of a long line of scholarly events commemorating the centennial of the First World War, the Center for Jewish History in New York City hosted a conference; the resulting volume, World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Oxford UP, 2017) was, as its editors, Jonathan Karp and Marsha L. Rozenblit stated, "one of the first academic works devoted expressly to the subject of World War I and the Jews." (17) Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion; Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe continues this exploration with a tighter scope but deeper reach. Three of the volume's four editors have contributed important monographs to the history of World War I in Germany, on topics ranging from the military, gender, and sexuality to memory and trauma, and the volume offers an even more wide-ranging survey of German Jewish war experiences. The four sections of the collection focus on Jews in the military, contested identities in the settings of front and home front, and two papers each on the representation of the war experience in film and literature and on postwar narratives, both in psychological discourse and nationalist war literature. Together, the articles offer an admirable range of disciplinary and methodological approaches with the aim of highlighting Jewish experiences and responses to anti-Semitism and introducing new sources that add nuance to Jewish and German narratives in an effort to inform but also reflect the subtle shifts in Jewish-German relationships. Any claim of a lack of studies centered on Jews and World War I should be understood in relative terms, in comparison to the still-growing scholarship on what came after—and what made most scholars see the First World [End Page 106] War as merely a prequel to—the Shoah. The significance of the war was never questioned by scholars or in popular memory; it was a paramount historical event that fundamentally affected the lives of European Jews and Jewish communities. Among the most significant of the often contradictory changes the war ushered in, it destroyed the empires the majority of Jews lived in but gave them, in the Balfour Declaration, the right to self-determination, at least in principle. Through military service and, for women, service on the home front, the war offered Jewish citizens the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the state and earn full acceptance; at the same time, by displacement on a massive scale and rising anti-Semitism, it brought their identity and belonging into question. Scholarship from the 1960s until quite recently tended to approach German Jewish experiences during the First World War and in the postwar period with this hindsight understanding, and it described Jewish-German relations in the binaries of assimilation/anti-Semitism, exclusion/inclusion. Scholars highlighted the role of the 1916 Judenzählung initiated by the Prussian War Ministry as the decisive moment in the breakdown of these relations, leading to toxic anti-Semitism, and, eventually, the Holocaust. A stellar lineup of recent studies by, among others, Marsha Rozenblit, Derek Penslar, Tim Grady, and David Fine, presented a more nuanced, fluid, and complicated view of identity and Jewish experiences as well as Jewish and non-Jewish responses to and during the war, offering major corrections to this long-reigning narrative. The volume takes a firm position on the revisionist side of this debate, and most of the chapters argue that anti-Semitism was not the decisive factor in the everyday front and home front experience of German Jews. Anchoring the volume, Jason Crouthamel's chapter on Jewish and non-Jewish front soldiers supports this view by presenting their experience as a shared one and argues for an interpretation of the trends of wartime Jewish– non-Jewish relations within its own context—and with more emphasis on the testimonies...

Journaling Displacement. Jewish Refugee Accounts 1933-1945

As Nazi persecution of Jews intensified in the 1930s and 40s, many Jewish Germans sought to save their lives through emigration from continental Europe. Their journeys are meticulously documented in hundreds of diaries written by a broad spectrum of society. This article argues that the practice of diary writing had an important function in survival, as the diary helped refugees gain a sense of agency as survivornarrators of their stories of escape. Reading these sources enables us to see how Jews reacted to the brutal violence of antisemitism, and how they sought to make sense of the incredible loss that came with emigration. By surveying diaries of refugees who came to the United States, this essay explores how diarists shape their writing “ I” as they bear witness to stories of displacement. Furthermore, I argue that the material diary represents a site of writing home, as diarists cope with the loss of family, friends, and a sense of belonging.

Witness between Languages: The Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context by Peter Davies

 Reviews Goethe specialists, but to all of us who are inclined to hope that literature might make things better. M E C, C C L Witness between Languages: e Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context. By P D. (Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature , Culture, and ought) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. Tantalizingly written and dely argued, this monograph by Peter Davies offers a fresh perspective on the study of testimonies of the Holocaust through the lens of translation. In the Introduction, Davies argues that ‘without translation there would be no Holocaust’ (p. , author’s emphasis), by which he means that the proliferation of knowledge about the Holocaust, as we understand it today, influenced to great extent by eyewitness accounts, would be unthinkable without the oen occluded or de-emphasized work done by translators. Davies’s argument works from a central tenet, namely that the work of translation entails a highly dialogic practice. Translations, and the translators that make them possible, form an important part of the larger transnational, multilingual conversation connected to source texts. To put it another way, translators are active participants, key players in the discrete intertextual networks that arise out of the translation of source texts into other languages. Indeed, this study’s principal strength lies in its tightly interwoven combination of close textual analysis with the insightful exploration of how social and political expectations regarding Holocaust representation within specific historical contexts have affected the translation of Holocaust testimonies. is study takes care to document how authors and translators interact with varying practices of Holocaust memory at particular historical moments and in particular geographic areas. As one might expect from a study of this scope, Davies explores a wide variety of Holocaust testimonies, including texts originally penned in Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. In Chapter , ‘Translation and the Witness Text’, Davies situates his study as a ‘mediati[on] between Holocaust studies and translation studies’, which ‘will discuss methods that offer points of contact between descriptions of translations and the philosophical, literary, ethical, and political concerns of Holocaust scholars, and that take into account the agency of the translator and the expectations placed on a Holocaust testimony in particular cultural and historical circumstances’ (p. ). Chapter , ‘Making Translation Visible’, explores how translators treat the question of voice, specifically translating the ‘voice’ of a Holocaust survivor and eyewitness from one linguistic and cultural context to another. Using the theoretical framework established in the first two chapters as a point of departure, the third chapter reconsiders the complex, to some extent controversial, translation history surrounding Elie Wiesel’s Night () by analysing the German and two separate English translations that orbit to varying degrees around the iconic  French La Nuit, which MLR, .,   has until more recently overshadowed its textual predecessor, the  . . . un di velt hot geshvign. In Chapter  Davies switches gears from Holocaust memory in the West, exploring the question of Soviet memory in Vasily Grossman’s ‘e Hell of Treblinka’ () and Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babii Yar (). Using these two accounts as his primary examples, Davies investigates the effects the Cold War had on the translation and dissemination of Holocaust texts from East to West. Krstyna Żywulska’s Auschwitz testimony and the question of self-translation form the focal point of Chapter . Davies traces Żywulska’s conscious articulation of herself as a Polish anti-Fascist resistance fighter in her  autobiographical account Przeżyłam Oświęcim (I Survived Auschwitz), and her attempt to maintain this identity in the German translation (Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau), which she prepared and published in  aer resettling in West Germany. Davies demonstrates how Żywulska’s selftranslation , both as the literal act of translating her own text from one language to another (i.e. Polish to German) and as the metaphorical cultivation of a particular narrating persona, had to contend with ‘quite incompatible “victim cultures”’, at one end of the spectrum, ‘a postwar Polish Stalinist culture that stressed the martyrdom of the nation as a whole’, and at the other end ‘a West German society that [. . .] was in the process of renegotiating its...

German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy by Vivian Liska

German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy by Vivian Liska