German-Jewish Research Articles

Marginalization and Reform of Religion: A Comparative Study of Moses Mendelssohn and Syed Ahmad Khan

The term marginalization is often used for a community or group which is pushed to the edges of the society through certain social, political, and/or religious restrictions. The history of German Jews and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent stands witness that, to varying degrees over time, they were bound to live on the edges of their respective societies. This discrimination was not just because of their different social, cultural, and political status but religion was also a major factor behind it. In such conditions, Moses Mendelssohn and Syed Ahmad Khan worked for the betterment of their respective Jewish and Muslim communities. Although the work of both scholars is a recurring theme of discussion in the academic world, still there is no study available in which their efforts have been compared. By presenting a feature by feature comparison of the works of both scholars, the current paper first figures out their methodology and then explores their motive behind using pure reason to interpret sacred scriptures. It is also argued that there are fewer differences and more commonalities in their works. Their primary aim was to equip their people with modern education, since they thought that through educational reform they would be able to improve the social, political, and economic conditions of their people. Although they achieved noteworthy success, their efforts changed the religious direction of their people. Especially after the reform of Mendelssohn, a significant number of Jews distanced themselves from their ancestral religion.

Philo of Stockholm. The ecumenical heresies of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis


 
 
 
 This paper was presented at the conference ‘The Marrano Phenomenon: Jewish Hidden Tradition and Modernity’, Warsaw, 16–19 September 2019. It considers the case of Marcus Ehrenpreis, chief rabbi of Stockholm (1914–48). Ehrenpreis followed in the tradition from Antiquity of Philo of Alexandria, who expressed his Jewish philosophy in Greek, and Moses Mendelssohn, who attempted to bring the principles of the Englightenment to German Jews and to promote an understanding of Judaism among non­Jews. Ehrenpreis sought to follow a similar path among the Swedes, not least in making Swedish his preferred language of writing. Although the Marrano phenomenon relates primarily to the concept of ‘borderline’ Jewishness, of which Ehrenpreis was not an exponent, it nonetheless proves fruitful to consider him from a Marrano perspective in order to extend our understanding of him as an innovative figure who sought to achieve greater understanding across the religious and cultural boundaries between Judaism and non­-Judaism.
 
 
 

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War Tim Grady

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War Tim Grady

A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman (review)

Reviewed by: A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman Mara H. Benjamin Abigail Gillman. A History of German Jewish Bible Translation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 320 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000722 German Jewish Bible translation, like many other aspects of German Jewish cultural and intellectual production, has long taken up an outsized place in Jewish historiography. All the more striking, then, that Abigail Gillman charts an unusual path in this well-worn terrain. Indeed, her volume defamiliarizes that terrain with an argument that expands and fills in critical gaps in the scholarly consensus. Her work offers a comprehensive understanding of a set of literary and cultural projects that occupied the intellectual energy of so many German Jews. Gillman's volume considers the history of German Jewish Bible translation in four parts. Each of the main chapters juxtaposes several (roughly) contemporaneous Bible translations. The chapters trace what Gillman calls the major "waves" in Jewish Bible translation, starting in the late seventeenth century and ending in the early twentieth. The usual suspects are here, of course: Gillman cannot but include Moses Mendelssohn's Bi'ur (1783) and Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's Die fünf Bücher der Weisung (1925–27). As she tells us in the preface, she initially undertook her study to test Gunther Plaut's famous framing of [End Page 477] these two Bible translations as the symbolic "bookends" of German Jewish Bible translation—an image that was then applied to the course of modern German Jewry as a whole. In the end, Gillman does not completely jettison the metaphor. Instead, by examining the middle of the bookshelf—where sit the translation projects of Leopold Zunz and Joseph Johlson, of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Ludwig Philippson—she brings new complexity to how we read those bookends. Furthermore, Gillman analyzes the literary interlocutors of the famous Bi'ur and the Buber-Rosenzweig translation: two Yiddish translations of the Bible (1678–79) and Bertha Pappenheim's Zeenah u-reenah (1930). Gillman's argument centers on the claim that each wave gains its coherence through the common aesthetic, literary, educational, or cultural orientation characterizing the translations produced in a certain period—even if the resulting works read quite differently. In most cases, the translators she considers rejected or criticized the approach taken by the others in a given wave. But Gillman aims to demonstrate that the historical situation that gave rise to each wave lends a deeper unity to the projects, and that in spite of "conspicuous differences" between the projects, each group shares a "fundamental agenda" (17). The ample and well-chosen images from the Bible translations under consideration, as in the juxtaposition of Philippson's and Hirsch's representations of the menorah in the tabernacle (191–93), offer crucial evidence for and enliven the argument throughout the book. The first chapter, focusing on Jewish Enlightenment Bibles, challenges the long-held preeminence of the first Jewish translation of the Bible into German, Mendelssohn's Bi'ur, by reminding us that it was one in a series of Jewish Enlightenment Bibles. The two late-seventeenth-century Yiddish translations discussed in this chapter, both published in Amsterdam, shaped Mendelssohn's translations, and not always in the ways scholars have accepted. Gillman argues that the Yiddish translations, a century earlier, were in fact less "traditional" than Mendelssohn's: they swept commentary off the printed page, for instance, where Mendelssohn gives ample space to commentary (namely his own). Yet the Yiddish translations under consideration shared the goals that came to be widely associated with the Haskalah. Mendelssohn, even as he moved decisively away from Yiddish, "reclaimed the pedagogical-religious mandate of the Old Yiddish translation tradition" (85). The chapter traces the development of Mendelssohn's translational approach, highlights the importance of German Christian Pietist Bible translations that flourished in the seventeenth century, and meticulously compares each work's translational choices. (This chapter, unlike the others, unfortunately does not include the Hebrew verses alongside the different translations.) The second chapter, "The Emergence of a Bible Industry," considers the proliferation of German translations that appeared in the period 1831–41. These translations, Gillman argues, styled themselves as alternatives to (and...

Kaunas Jewish Gymnasium with the Lithuanian Language of Instruction: A Construct of Confrontation between Germans and Jews

The present study is aimed at exploring the reasons for founding Kaunas Jewish Gymnasium with the Lithuanian language of instruction as well as its wider historical context. The article is based on the materials found in the collections of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Lithuania and available at the Lithuanian Central State Archives; the periodical publications of that time were also made use of. The article draws the reader’s attention to the fact that in the period after the First World War, when the independent state of Lithuania was founded, ethnic minorities were provided with a possibility of establishing their own national schools. Those schools were also attended by students of other nationalities, including Lithuanians. However, that was not typical of Jewish schools, which were attended exclusively by Jewish children. When the German gymnasium was established in Kaunas, it was attended by more than a hundred of Jewish children and a smaller number of children of other nationalities. The tuition fee was the same for all, irrespective of the nationality. However, the situation changed in 1925: the school-supporting society passed into the hands of Germans and issued the regulation that children of other nationalities should pay over three times more. The parents of the students, who were mostly Jews, objected to that regulation though they were not in the capacity to change the discriminating situation. Thus the children continued to attend the gymnasium, and their parents were made to pay the high tuition fee. When national socialists came to power in Germany with their leader Adolf Hitler in the position of the chancellor, the anti-Semitic manifestations became more widespread. The Lithuanian Jewish community expressed solidarity with the Jews in Germany by organizing protest meetings and announcing boycott of Germans in Lithuania. Under the circumstances, with the confrontation between Jews and Germans growing, the tension between Jewish and German students and their parents in Kaunas German gymnasium was also growing. In the spring of 1933, on the demand of the Jewish community, Jewish parents resolved to take their children from the German gymnasium. Jewish students that no longer attended Kaunas German gymnasium could continue studying in other Jewish gymnasiums in Kaunas. However, since the majority did not know the Hebrew language, the decision was made to establish a separate gymnasium with the Lithuanian language of instruction. This privately-supported gymnasium, Kaunas Jewish gymnasium with the Lithuanian language of instruction, opened in September 1933 and survived till the Soviet occupation. As the numbers of students were not big, the gymnasium experienced a constant shortage of resources.

Living together or in Parallel Societies? German Jews and Gentiles in Urban Everyday Life in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

Die Jahrzehnte zwischen 1870 und 1930 waren mit Blick auf die Geschichte der deutschen Juden von einer gegenläufigen Entwicklung bestimmt: Einerseits vollendete sich deren rechtlicher Emanzipationsprozess; andererseits etablierte sich mit dem biologistischen Rassenantisemitismus eine radikale, eliminatorisch ausgerichtete Ideologie, die Eingang auch in den politischen Diskurs fand. Inwiefern spiegelte sich diese Ambiguität in den jüdisch-nichtjüdischen Alltagsbeziehungen jener Jahre? Wie war es um die Kontakte zwischen Juden und Nichtjuden bestellt? Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht am Beispiel der Hansestadt Hamburg die Verbreitung antijüdischer Stereotype sowie exkludierender wie inkludierender Verhaltensweisen im städtischen Alltag zwischen 1890 und 1914. Neben dem Wohn-, Konsum- und Heiratsverhalten steht das Freizeitverhalten in Vereinen und Gastwirtschaften im Vordergrund. Herausgearbeitet wird, wie sich ungeachtet aller Vorbehalte und Ressentiments gegenüber Juden ein fortschreitender Integrationsprozess vollzog, der jedoch je nach sozialer Schicht höchst unterschiedlich verlief und immer wieder auch an Grenzen stieß. Selbst im Falle engerer jüdisch-nichtjüdischer Kontakte blieb sehr oft ein Rest an sozialer Distanz erhalten.

II.5. Le passage de l’Allemagne vers la Suisse

Switzerland’s refugee policies during the National Socialist era did not comply with international and humanitarian law. In 1938, at the request of Nazi Germany, Swiss authorities agreed to stamp the passports of German Jews separately in accordance with the Nuremberg Race Laws. With respect to Jewish refugees, Switzerland saw itself as a place of transit—not as a country where Jews could be allowed to resettle. After the failure of the Evian Conference in 1938, Switzerland closed its border to refugees, as did other countries. For humanitarian reasons, however, many refugees continued to be admitted.During WWII, border police records indicate that a total of 25,700 refugees were refused entry. At the border with France, 3,000 Jews were expelled, many of whom originally came from Germany, Poland, or the Benelux Countries. In 1995, President Kaspar Villiger apologised for the suffering Jewish refugees experienced because of Swiss regulations. He recalled that Switzerland had taken in a total of around 296,000 refugees, specifically 104,000 military and 192,000 civilian refugees, including 22,000 Jews fleeing persecution. In Switzerland, the scientific and public debate about the country’s refugee policies during the Holocaust continues. The various parties involved in the debate are still struggling to call attention to their perspectives.

History of cerebral localization and the emigration plight of three neuroscience giants from Nazi Germany: Josef Gerstmann, Adolf Wallenberg, and Franz Josef Kallmann.

The Nazi regime held power for well over a decade in Germany and were steadfast in their anti-Semitic agenda. Among the massive cohort of immigrants to America were approximately 5056 Jewish physicians, including several highly esteemed neurologists and neuroscientists of the time. Emigrating to a new world proved difficult and provided new challenges by way of language barriers, roadblocks in medical careers, and problems integrating into an alien system of medical training and clinical practice. In this article, the authors examine the tumultuous and accomplished lives of three Jewish German and Austrian neurologists and neuroscientists during the time of the Third Reich who shaped the foundations of neuroanatomy and neuropsychology: Josef Gerstmann, Adolf Wallenberg, and Franz Josef Kallmann. The authors first examine the successful careers of these individuals in Germany and Austria prior to the Third Reich, followed by their journeys to and lives in the United States, to demonstrate the challenges an émigré physician faces for career opportunities and a chance at a new life. This account culminates in a description of these scientists' eponymous syndromes.Although their stories are a testimony to the struggles in Nazi Germany, there are intriguing and notable differences in their ages, ideologies, and religious beliefs, which highlight a spectrum of unique circumstances that impacted their success in the United States. Furthermore, in this account the authors bring to light the original syndromic descriptions: Gerstmann discovered contralateral agraphia and acalculia, right-left confusion, and finger agnosia in patients with dominant angular gyrus damage; Wallenberg described a constellation of symptoms in a patient with stenosis of the posterior inferior cerebellar artery; and Kallmann identified an association between hypogonadotropic hypogonadism and anosmia based on family studies. The article also highlights the unresolved confusions and international controversies about these syndromic descriptions. Still, these unique cerebral syndromes continue to fascinate neurologists and neurosurgeons across the world, from residents in training to practicing clinicians and neuroscientists alike.

German Jews between Freud, Marx, and Halakha: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Erich Fromm, and the Psychoanalysis of Jewish Ritual in 1920s Heidelberg1

Abstract This essay explores the psychoanalytic sanitarium (Therapeutikum) directed by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Erich Fromm in Heidelberg from 1924 to 1928. The Therapeutikum aimed to combine adherence to Jewish ritual with psychoanalytic practice and radical politics for a group of German Jews who were rethinking their Orthodox backgrounds in light of new intellectual and political currents and modern sensibilities. Visitors to the sanitarium included many leading German-Jewish thinkers, and Heidelberg’s proximity to Frankfurt placed the Therapeutikum in the orbit of the Institute for Social Research and near a major hub in the renaissance of Jewish learning then occurring. At the centre of the article is a discussion of essays by Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm that subjected Jewish ritual (kashrut and shabbat) to psychoanalytic investigation. Appearing in Imago in 1927, the articles marked the two writers’ public break with Orthodox Judaism. This essay argues that the Imago articles marked a crucial moment in the political, intellectual, and religious history of German Jewry. Even if the Fromms’ synthesis of Freudianism, radical politics, and Judaism was conceptually shaky, their sanitarium illustrates the centrality of psychoanalysis—as a sensibility, a hermeneutic and above all a way of creating social and communal bonds—to a generation of German Jews navigating the challenges of German and Jewish modernity.

Cute Jews: Modernist Photographic Forms and Minor Aesthetic Categories in ‘Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel. Ein Fotobuch’

Abstract Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel was the last overtly Jewish-themed photobook published in Germany before the Holocaust. Although it consists only of a six-page introduction by the scholar-activist Bertha Badt-Strauß, one page of captions, and twenty-one photographs by photographer Nachum ‘Tim’ Gidal of adorable young children in Mandatory Palestine, its propaganda mission transcends its diminutive size and surface superficiality. This article interprets this photobook as an example of the photo essay, a modernist form that emerged from Weimar Germany’s unique media environment, in which photographs assumed rhetorical and argumentative functions generally associated with written language. To encourage German Jews and particularly German-Jewish women to emigrate, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel creates an allegory of the children’s vulnerability by eliciting responses associated with the minor aesthetic category of ‘cuteness’. To this end, it draws on two important photo essay genres of interwar Germany: photobooks and illustrated magazine photostories about cute children and about Palestine. By synthesizing these discourses, Gidal and Badt-Strauß create a cultural artifact that aims to establish positive, affective relationships between German-Jewish readers and Mandatory Palestine, and to convince the former to visualize and embrace the latter as they might imagine their own children. In this way, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel broadens our understandings of both the media constellation from which photo essays emerged, and how this form helped broaden the visual lexicon and aesthetic strategies central to the project of Jewish cultural and political regeneration.

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, by Tim Grady

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, by Tim Grady

Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War. London, Yale University Press 2017

Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War. London, Yale University Press 2017

Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 304 pp.

Reviewed by: A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady Jessica Cooperman Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 304 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000266 In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, Tim Grady offers a powerful study of the lives of German Jews during the First World War and raises important questions about how scholars situate the actions and attitudes of members of minority populations within larger national contexts. Grady places the experiences of German Jewish soldiers and citizens firmly within the [End Page 232] context of German culture, and he reaches conclusions that are both compelling and unsettling. Looking backward through the lens of the Holocaust, we may be most inclined to see the ways that the violence and destruction of the First World War led to the rise of Nazism and the total exclusion of Jews from German society. Grady demonstrates, however, that during World War I German Jews were active participants in the wartime culture that ultimately turned against them. They were, Grady argues, "co-constitutive" in shaping German wartime culture. Their Jewishness may have colored some of their experiences, and ultimately determined their fate in Germany, but Grady convincingly shows that it did not overshadow their deeply held commitments to kaiser and country, or to the wartime cultural norms that Jews and other Germans helped to construct during World War I. Grady identifies seven main aspects of the German war effort: war enthusiasm, total war, a culture of destruction, cases made for annexation and territorial expansion, the denigration of both internal and external minorities, divisions at home and among the troops, and the infamous "stab in the back" myth as means of explaining Germany's seemingly inexplicable defeat. Grady explores Jewish engagement with each of these aspects of wartime German culture, persuasively describing how German Jews bought into both the promise of 1914 and the violent and destructive path on which World War I set their country. In chapter 1, Grady explores the forces that led Germany to enter the war and describes the somewhat tenuous position of Jews in prewar German society, where they were enfranchised citizens but still on the margins of many German institutions, particularly the military. For all Germans, but perhaps especially for Jews, the war seemed to offer a chance to create a stronger and more united national future. Following Kaiser Wilhelm II's announcement of a "civic truce," in which differences of religion and political conviction would be set aside so that the country could unite in national defense, the vast majority of German Jews fully embraced the war. They did so, Grady argues, both as Germans supporting their country and as Jews imagining that this civic truce would establish their value and valor as German citizens and soldiers while simultaneously positioning them as the liberators of east European Jews oppressed by the antisemitic regime of the Russian tsar. The first weeks of the war did not disappoint, as Grady shows in chapter 2. Jews and other Germans embraced war enthusiasm and rushed to volunteer for military service in order to hasten Germany's triumph and the establishment of a new German-controlled Mitteleuropa. Chapters 3 through 6 explore different aspects of the culture of total war, German superiority, and destruction that took hold as the war ground on in 1915 and 1916. In each of these chapters, Grady focuses on the roles that both average and influential German Jews played in shaping this culture. In highlighting the work done by Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, industrialist Walther Rathenau, and others to bring food production, industry, labor, and chemical research into the service of an ever more deadly war effort; the promotion of German annexation and colonization projects in eastern Europe; the exploitation of defeated civilian populations as laborers; the celebration of death and brutality; suspicion of domestic and foreign Others; and highly [End Page 233] racialized depictions of prisoners of war, Grady makes it clear that Jews were active participants in all aspects of Germany's war. At times, as when the Jewish Committee for the East proposed that Yiddish...

Kerry Wallach. Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 276 pp.

Reviewed by: Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany by Kerry Wallach Jill S. Smith Kerry Wallach. Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 276 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000370 In her book about Jewish visibility in Weimar Germany, Kerry Wallach engages in a project that makes visible what had previously remained invisible in scholarship on German Jews in the 1920s and 30s: the numerous racialized and gendered codes of passing as non-Jewish that Jews themselves negotiated and debated. Passing Illusions deftly reveals the tensions felt by many German Jews during the Weimar era—tensions between the desire to fit in to mainstream German society and thereby gain personal benefits, versus the desire to be part of a distinct cultural, ethnic, or religious community and express pride in this affiliation. Wallach's work sets itself apart from other scholarly analyses in two key ways. First, the book counters other scholars and theorists of Jewish passing who contend that to pass is to betray one's community and thereby to irreparably separate oneself from that community. As Wallach convincingly argues, many Jews in Germany passed as non-Jewish in certain circumstances or in certain spaces, yet they also sought out the community as a refuge or even proudly displayed their Jewish identities in other contexts, be that by wearing the badge of a Jewish organization or by reading a Jewish newspaper in public. She writes in her introduction, "It became possible, even desirable, to perform Jewishness without effacing it, and to be recognizably Jewish without standing out from the crowd" (3). The broader implications of Wallach's intervention into the historiography on Jews in Weimar Germany is perhaps best articulated on the final page of the book, where she contends that her focus on "chances to be open about Jewishness in public" gives readers a necessarily more complex view of the Weimar Republic and shows them that it "was more than a brief period in which certain discriminatory measures anticipated far more extreme Nazi acts of persecutions and violence" (175). Without ignoring Jewish anxiety and vulnerability in Weimar Germany, Wallach takes great care to provide her readers with an array of examples of how Jews showed their awareness of that vulnerability and actively took steps to work through it and even combat it. When writing about the phenomenon of passing, she does not indulge in the discourse of Jewish self-hatred, but she does present Jews as fallible human beings who truly struggled with dominant ideas of race and "the visual grammar of Jewish difference" (28). Despite their resistance to racialized stereotyping, Jews in Weimar Germany "nevertheless relied heavily on similar forms of [End Page 256] racial, ethnic, and cultural profiling" (29) and were sometimes caught in the faulty logic of such profiling. More often than not, the discourses on Jewishness analyzed in Wallach's book present Jewish identity as situational rather than essential. Second, Wallach's book reveals and corrects a problematic gender bias in the existing scholarship on Jewish visibility and embodied difference by focusing on Jewish women. It makes visible Jewish women and their own subtle strategies of covering or revealing Jewishness, just as it calls attention to the myriad ways that women were at the time and still often are rendered invisible by members of their own community or by contemporary scholars. As Wallach rightly points out in her introduction, prominent scholars of gender and Jewishness, such as Daniel Boyarin and Sander Gilman, assume their subjects to be Jewish men. What Wallach's book demonstrates is that Jewish women were central figures in the multifaceted discourse on passing, for the desires and fears of the German Jewish community were often projected on them via their representations in the visual and print media of the time. Through her many examples, Wallach shows readers the myriad ways in which Jewish women—both historical figures and fictional characters—negotiated their own images and those projected on them. Taking these crucial interventions into account, it is clear that this book will have equal impact on German, Jewish, and gender studies. That said, I did find myself wanting a clearer, more focused discussion on...

Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War; Tracey Hayes Norrell. For the Honor of Our Fatherland: German Jews on the Eastern Front during the Great War.

Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War; Tracey Hayes Norrell. For the Honor of Our Fatherland: German Jews on the Eastern Front during the Great War.

Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935–1945

Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935–1945

Despite the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany after 1945*

Abstract In 1945, the return of Jewish life to Germany was by no means a foregone conclusion. Aiming to understand the developments that laid the groundwork for a long-term continuation of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany, this paper discusses the difficult process of rebuilding Jewish institutions in ‘the land of the perpetrators’ during the first two decades after the Second World War. Particularly significant are the essential contributions of two high-profile representatives of this minority to the process of renewing Jewish life in Germany following the Holocaust. By creating a sense of unity among the different Jewish groups and securing financial and practical support essential to the revival of Jewish life in the Federal Republic, the first General Secretary of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), Dr Hendrik G. van Dam, and the journalist and chief editor of the German-Jewish newspaper known today as Jüdische Allgemeine, Karl Marx, played a key role in establishing Jewish institutions. These helped to convey a sense of permanency—a central factor for ensuring a continuation of Jewish life in the years and decades to come.

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady

Reviewed by: A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady Jessica Cooperman Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 304 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000266 In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, Tim Grady offers a powerful study of the lives of German Jews during the First World War and raises important questions about how scholars situate the actions and attitudes of members of minority populations within larger national contexts. Grady places the experiences of German Jewish soldiers and citizens firmly within the [End Page 232] context of German culture, and he reaches conclusions that are both compelling and unsettling. Looking backward through the lens of the Holocaust, we may be most inclined to see the ways that the violence and destruction of the First World War led to the rise of Nazism and the total exclusion of Jews from German society. Grady demonstrates, however, that during World War I German Jews were active participants in the wartime culture that ultimately turned against them. They were, Grady argues, "co-constitutive" in shaping German wartime culture. Their Jewishness may have colored some of their experiences, and ultimately determined their fate in Germany, but Grady convincingly shows that it did not overshadow their deeply held commitments to kaiser and country, or to the wartime cultural norms that Jews and other Germans helped to construct during World War I. Grady identifies seven main aspects of the German war effort: war enthusiasm, total war, a culture of destruction, cases made for annexation and territorial expansion, the denigration of both internal and external minorities, divisions at home and among the troops, and the infamous "stab in the back" myth as means of explaining Germany's seemingly inexplicable defeat. Grady explores Jewish engagement with each of these aspects of wartime German culture, persuasively describing how German Jews bought into both the promise of 1914 and the violent and destructive path on which World War I set their country. In chapter 1, Grady explores the forces that led Germany to enter the war and describes the somewhat tenuous position of Jews in prewar German society, where they were enfranchised citizens but still on the margins of many German institutions, particularly the military. For all Germans, but perhaps especially for Jews, the war seemed to offer a chance to create a stronger and more united national future. Following Kaiser Wilhelm II's announcement of a "civic truce," in which differences of religion and political conviction would be set aside so that the country could unite in national defense, the vast majority of German Jews fully embraced the war. They did so, Grady argues, both as Germans supporting their country and as Jews imagining that this civic truce would establish their value and valor as German citizens and soldiers while simultaneously positioning them as the liberators of east European Jews oppressed by the antisemitic regime of the Russian tsar. The first weeks of the war did not disappoint, as Grady shows in chapter 2. Jews and other Germans embraced war enthusiasm and rushed to volunteer for military service in order to hasten Germany's triumph and the establishment of a new German-controlled Mitteleuropa. Chapters 3 through 6 explore different aspects of the culture of total war, German superiority, and destruction that took hold as the war ground on in 1915 and 1916. In each of these chapters, Grady focuses on the roles that both average and influential German Jews played in shaping this culture. In highlighting the work done by Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, industrialist Walther Rathenau, and others to bring food production, industry, labor, and chemical research into the service of an ever more deadly war effort; the promotion of German annexation and colonization projects in eastern Europe; the exploitation of defeated civilian populations as laborers; the celebration of death and brutality; suspicion of domestic and foreign Others; and highly [End Page 233] racialized depictions of prisoners of war, Grady makes it clear that Jews were active participants in all aspects of Germany's war. At times, as when the Jewish Committee for the East proposed that Yiddish...

The Home Experience of German Jews Under the Nazi Regime*

The Home Experience of German Jews Under the Nazi Regime*

Orientalist Body Politics. Intermedia Encounters between German and Polish Jews around 1800

ABSTRACTIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the transformation of the German Jews’ appearance was often defined in terms of Europeanization and modernization, whereas the so-called Polish Jews were reproached for clinging to their outdated ‘Oriental’ caftans, beards, and head coverings. Inner-Jewish differences were moulded in the terms of a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, as Polish Jews were stylized into anachronistic, semi-Oriental figures by their German peers. The paper retraces the genesis of this pattern of thought and analyses its functions. Bringing together a disparate range of textual and pictorial evidence, it asks how and why the spatial-temporal divide of West/Present and East/Past came to be established in late-eighteenth-century debates about Jewish Emancipation and in what ways it helped Christians and Jews alike to stylize the European Enlightenment into a civilizing mission which had to be enforced by means of a ‘Western’ body regime. In sum, it argues that the body politics which helped organize the sociocultural changes of Jewish life around 1800 were premised on modern Orientalism and on modern concepts of history, including emphatic notions of progress and perfectibility.