Joseph B. Maier - Ethnicity, Identity, and History

The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Cahnman family and the Midgard Foundation in the publication of this volume.

First published 1983 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 82-6928

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:

Ethnicity, identity, and history.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. SociologyAddresses, essays, lectures. 2. Cahnman, Werner Jacob, 1902- Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. JewsUnited StatesAddresses, essays, lectures. 4. United StatesEthnic relations Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Cahnman, Werner Jacob, 1902- II. Maier, Joseph, 1911- . III. Waxman, Chaim Isaac.
HM19.E85 301 826928
ISBN 0878554610 AACR2

ISBN 13: 978-0-87855-461-4 (hbk)

Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman

Many social scientists regard system-building as the chief mark of genuine scholarship. Werner Cahnmans achievement was of a different sort; it lay, above all, in his superb ability to sift from the multitude of data furnished by history and experience that which is significant, and to analyze it in such a way as to enhance our knowledge and understanding. His rich lifework, written in German and English, mirrored his fate as a wanderer between worlds and cultures and as a mediator between them. The chief purpose of this Introduction is to sketch the development of Cahnmans mind in the great maze of his writings.

Cahnmans specific talent, his sensitivity to the historically relevant and sociologically significant, can be observed throughout his life. In trying to discern stages of his development we may perhaps distinguish four periods. The first would naturally be his German period, the springtime of his life as a young intellectual becoming aware of the breaks and fissures in the German/Jewish symbiosis, on the one hand, and the decisive importance of the enduring forms of human existence, such as family and people, on the other. It comprises the thirteen years from 1914 the year World War I began and he read Arthur Ruppins Juden der Gegenwart to 1926, when his first paper, Judentum und Volksgemeinschaft, was published (Der Morgen, 1926). That paper exudes an uncommon freshness and flavor of commitment and enthusiasm. It deals, after all, with the life and death questions of an old and tried people, with what is truly their own, their habits, outlook, memories, traditions; in fine, their history both individual and collective.

Werner Jacob Cahnman was born in Munich on September 30, 1902, the first son of an old German Jewish family. His paternal and maternal families were quite different. His father was born in a village, Rheinbischofsheim, and so were almost all of his relatives. Their Judaism was rustic and folksy, sentimentally attached to family and community, but without Jewish learning. Werners maternal family, on the other hand, was almost entirely concentrated in Munich and Nuremberg. They belonged to the haute bourgeoisie, were real estate operators, bankers, industrialists and jurists, not retailers. Their sons and daughters were interested in art and music or literature and philosophy. Kultur was their religion. Julius Schuelein, the famous Munich painter, was Werners uncle. They thought of themselves as good Jews, but their Judaism was either declaratory or cast in a free-thinking vein. The Jewish heroes of Werners mother were Spinoza and Mendelssohn; her religion had an ethical orientation; she rarely, if ever, attended services. Yet she respected her husbands adherence to traditional values, helped in her matter-of-fact way in the observance of the Friday Eve and Passover Seder rituals, but disregarded the dietary laws. The main idea of my mother, Werner recalled in the 1970s, was that everybody, but especially a Jew, should promote justice in the world. She died in Piaski, Poland, in unimaginably terrible circumstances and in a situation of utmost injustice.

While Werner was always nearer to the female line in his maternal as well as his paternal families, it is from his father that he inherited the perspective of participant observer, the emotional attachment to places of his youth, and Jewishness as a matter of unquestioned belongingness or Gemeinschaft. Father Cahnman had been deeply interested in all aspects of Jewish life. Several times vice-president and president of the Munich Loge in Bnai Brith, not a Zionist nor any kind of ideologue, but what Werner called an adherent of Jewish peoplehood, he was an inveterate story-teller. Thanks to him, Werner explained in a Methodological Note to a typological study of Village and Small Town Jews in Germany (1974), my memory reaches three or four generations back into the past. My fathers sister, Clementine Kraemer, has fixed some of these stories in writing. Having inherited my fathers historical enthusiasm, I have collected many family-related data since early youth, partly by consulting archives, but chiefly by interviewing older relatives. The house of his parents in Munich was a meeting place for notables of all persuasions. Zionism, socialism, and womens problems were frequently discussed. While Werner got thus exposed to a variety of Jewish and political viewpoints, he felt that, on the whole, the Jews of Munich were bourgeois liberals. The Judaism of most of them was satisfied with the fact as such. They were neither religiously, nor philosophically, nor politically (Zionist) oriented, though possibly kind and generous in giving money to those in need. When they said, I do not deny being Jewish that was as far as they would go.

In this situation Werner decided, I must be Jewish in a much more genuine sense and that the way of moving along that path was Jewish learning. The decision had nothing to do with disagreeable experiences in school. On the contrary, my classmates liked me, but they were aware that I was Jewish and I was aware of their awareness. Strangely enough for a teenager, he began with an excursion into Jewish demography by reading one of the first and best studies of the time, to be sure, the above-mentioned Juden der Gegenwart by Arthur Ruppin. Thenceforth, facts and figures about baptism, intermarriage, nonmarriage, declining birthrates and what they seemed to augur about Jewish continuity, became an abiding concern to him. He read Theodor Herzls Zionist writings and Davis Trietschs