Donald L. Niewyk - Jews in Weimar Germany

Donald L. Nlewyk
with a new introduction by the author

Originally published in 1980 by Louisiana State University Press.

Published 2001 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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New material in this edition copyright 2001 by Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0692-5 (pbk)

When this book first appeared twenty years ago it was recognized as the first comprehensive history of Weimar Jewry. Naturally it built on the research of many predecessors, and especially those who had published their findings in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbooks and in the Institutes two indispensable anthologies covering the crisis years of the first German Republic: Entscheidungsjahr 1932 (1965), and Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution, 1916-1923 (1971). Although this volume touched briefly on topics related to the Jews economic, religious, and cultural pursuits, it concentrated on their responses to anti-Semitism, debates over Jewish identity, and commitment to German liberalism. It attempted to show that most German Jews clearly (or as clearly as was possible at the time) apprehended the dangers that confronted them and responded realistically to political developments during the Weimar years. In so doing it challenged two alternative views, one holding that they suffered from fatal delusions about the liberalism of their fellow Germans, the other maintaining that their bourgeois class interests prevented them from more promising self-defense strategies in alliance with the political left.

Since 1980 a great many general and specialized studies have enriched our understanding of the Jews in modern Germany. This is particularly true for the Nazi period, for which there is now another excellent anthology from the Leo Baeck Institute, the bilingual Die Juden in Nationalsozialistische Deutschland / The Jews in Nazi Germany 1933-1943 (1986) as well as monographs from Abraham Barkai, Volker Dahm, Esriel Hildesheimer, and Marion A. Kaplan, to mention only a few of the most important. It must be emphasized that this is a very incomplete list. Comprehensive bibliographies may be found in each edition of the invaluable Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook.

Interest in German anti-Semitism has been, if anything, even greater, with research on the subject much enhanced by the establishment in 1982 of the Center for Anti-Semitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin. Thorny problems of continuity and change in Judeophobia and the patrimony of the Nazi variety have been addressed in various ways by Udo Beer, Dietz Bering, Hermann Greive, and Werner Jochmann.

This volume argues that anti-Semitism was widespread in Weimar Germany, but that in most of its manifestations it had little in common with the intense and potentially murderous hatred for the Jews felt by Hitler and his most devoted followers.

In light of the proliferation of research into various aspects of German-Jewish history on the eve of Hitlers seizure of power, it is only natural to speculate on how this book might be different were I writing it now. One topic that would certainly command more attention is the revival of Jewish culture in Weimar Germany. As Judaism declined as a central bonding agent, German Jews increasingly redefined themselves in ethnic terms, exhibiting a search for community that had begun before 1918 and would intensify after 1933. Rather than become fully assimilated and acculturated into German society, many of them recast their Jewishness in secular terms. There was no more significant expression of this trend than the transmission of Jewish knowledge through the promotion of adult education and Jewish scholarship. Audiences emerged for histories of the Jews, translations of Hebrew classics, multivolume Jewish encyclopedias, and poetry and novels on Jewish themes. Reappropriating Jewish knowledge was the mission of the Jewish Lehrhaus (house of study) movement, which under the able leadership of Franz Rosenzweig conveyed learning to thousands, including some Jews who had become alienated from the Jewish community. The presence in Weimar Germany of a sizeable Eastern European Jewish intellectual community revived interest in Hebrew and Yiddish culture, although this was most marked among the Zionist minority. This last point is of some significance, for although a renaissance of Jewish culture certainly occurred in Weimar Germany, it is not clear how broadly it was felt. Certainly the liberal majority and the Zionist minority drew different messages from it. The former viewed Jewish learning as enhancing the German-Jewish symbiosis, whereas the latter studied to establish the limits of their integration into German society. Hence one should not assume the emergence of a new collective Jewish consciousness among German Jews in the 1920s. The profound and chronic divisions among them that are documented in this volume persisted to the end.

In view of the post-World War I renaissance of interest in things Jewish, can we any longer use words such as assimilation, assimilationism, and symbiosis when referring to the Jews in Weimar Germany? That, of course, depends on how these words are defined. This volume points out that most Weimar-era Jews understood assimilation as implying an intimate, mutually satisfying relationship between two distinct entities, a marriage of kindred minds that yet retained their individuality (p. 99). There are those who use the term differently or who argue that it is too easily misunderstood as denoting complete absorption into the host society.

A similar semantic problem surrounds the phrase German-Jewish symbiosis, famously employed in the 1960s and 1970s by the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem to denounce the German Jews for imagining that they were engaged in a meaningful dialogue with Germans before 1933. This volume, on the contrary, documented an authentic but imperfect German-Jewish symbiosis in the Weimar Republic; exchanges between Germans and Jews were both vital and common in German society and culture, even though the Jews had few illusions about their limits. Debates about the existence and meaning of such a symbiosis have grown rather stale in recent years, and the subject would not bear mentioning if Scholems argument had not reappeared recently in modified form in a book by the Italian scholar Enzo Traverso.