The Jews and Germans of Hamburg

The Destruction of a Civilization 1790-1945

J A S Grenville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135745837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Based on more than thirty years archival research, this history of the Jewish and German-Jewish community of Hamburg is a unique and vivid piece of work by one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. The history of the Holocaust here is fully integrated into the full history of the Jewish community in Hamburg from the late eighteenth century onwards. J.A.S. Grenville draws on a vast quantity of diaries, letters and records to provide a macro level history of Hamburg interspersed with many personal stories that bring it vividly to life. In the concluding chapter the discussion is widened to talk about Hamburg as a case study in the wider world.

This book will be a key work in European history, charting and explaining the complexities of how a long established and well integrated German-Jewish community became, within the space of a generation, victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

1
EARLIER TIMES

Immanuel Wohlwill and the early reformers

A hundred years earlier, Heinrich Wohlwill's great-grandfather had settled in Hamburg on the Elbe, a jewel among the cities of Germany, with its canals and lakes, medieval streets and thriving port, looking back on more than a millennium of cultured tradition. Once famed as a prosperous member of the Hanseatic League, a republic ruled not by princes but by an elite of merchants, it was surely the last place on earth to descend to barbarity. Nowhere did Jews feel more at home.

They had reached Hamburg relatively late. The first, towards the close of the sixteenth century, were the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, known in Hamburg as the Portuguese ‘nation’.¹ Expelled from Spain and Portugal, they settled in Hamburg, London and Amsterdam. Superficially converted to Catholicism, they secretly practised Jewish worship. They were not poor refugees but brought with them money, skills, mercantile experience and commercial contacts elsewhere in Europe and overseas.

Among them, already settled in Hamburg in 1591, was Rodrigo de Castro, a doctor of great renown who had treated King Christian IV of Denmark and the nobility. When the Black Death threatened to decimate the people, the senate turned to him to master the outbreak. In gratitude, he was freed from the restrictions placed on Jews and lived in a fine house in the best quarter of the city, visited there by the good and the great. Hamburg's senate, dominated by the powerful merchants, were happy to admit the ‘Catholics’ and to close its eyes to their Jewish faith. In 1612, the senate listed 125 of them. They had to pay a substantial annual tax of 1,000 marks, doubled in 1617. For more than a century the senate protected them from the envy of the less successful and from the preaching of the clergy, who incited the people against them. The Sephardic Jews helped to develop Hamburg into a major trading port, until the senate in 1697 gave in to popular pressure and began to levy a punitive annual tax of 6,000 marks. The wealthier Jews emigrated to Amsterdam and London. A small community of Portuguese Jews with their own rites and synagogue survived.

The nineteenth century was dominated by the Ashkenazi, the ‘German’ Jews.² The largest and most important community was that of neighbouring Altona. The Altona Jews under Danish suzerainty enjoyed more freedom than the Sephardic Jews in Hamburg. They could worship openly, own houses, and engage in crafts, business and the professions. They built a large synagogue and had their own burial ground. To overcome religious restrictions, Hamburg Jews formed in 1669 with the Altona Jews a ‘dual community’, and two years later, when Prussian Wandsbek joined, the ‘triple community’, uniquely spanning three states. In 1812, at the time of the French occupation, the Hamburg Jewish community, with 6,299 Ashkenazi and 130 Portugese Jews, became independent, with their own synagogue in the Elbstraße hidden from public view behind residential houses.³

I

Early in the century, the majority of Jews earned a scant living as street traders or small shopkeepers. By dress and religious practice they were distinct. They observed a day of rest not on Sundays but the Sabbath, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. While following their own laws and ways, Jews were not isolated from German culture. They spoke the same language, though continuing to converse in Yiddish among themselves. The more educated were better acquainted with literature than the majority of Christians. The Enlightenment era had set in motion the process of emancipation and acculturation. The dramas of Friedrich Schiller, apostle of freedom, adorned their library shelves. But there were still barriers. They were excluded from the guilds and all positions related to the state. A wide range of careers was thus closed to them. The Jews were only able to enter the ‘free professions’, medicine and journalism and engage in commerce.

For a few, as craftsmen, administrators, architects, builders and teachers, the Jewish community provided opportunities.⁴ Teaching Hebrew and arithmetic to poor Jewish boys, however, was neither highly regarded nor well rewarded. That was the profession of Joel Wolf. His son Immanuel grew up in this poor orthodox family. At the age of eight he was an orphan. By good fortune Immanuel was accepted as a ‘free pupil’ in the school in Seesen founded by Israel Jacobson, one of the remarkable early Jewish reformers, a member of the elite who helped to transform German-Jewish relationships.

Jacobson was a banker and court Jew to the Duke of Brunswick. In 1807 the duchy was incorporated into the kingdom of Westphalia. The Jews were granted equality as citizens. Jacobson was held in high regard, a knight of the royal order of Westphalia and a member of the Westphalian Reichstag. He was also appointed head of the Jewish Consistory. A Maskilim follower of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, Jacobson was determined to free Jews from external discrimination and from what he believed were their self-imposed shackles. Jews would be encouraged to abandon unnecessary differentiation from their Christian neighbours without having to stop being Jews. Synagogue services would be modernised, with sermons delivered in German, just as in Christian churches.

The best hope for change lay with the young. And so he founded the Jacobson School for poor Jewish children. In 1810 a ‘temple’, like a Christian chapel, was attached to the school, with an organ; bells summoned the boys to service. German as well as Hebrew was taught. The boys were to be brought up as Germans and Jews. The school shaped Immanuel's outlook in later life. Aged fifteen, he left Seesen for Berlin.

These were years of hope and excitement for educated Jews. The celebrated German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, friend of Moses Mendelssohn, philosopher and leading light of Haskalah, preached toleration, and in 1779 his play Nathan der Weise was published. In it he proclaimed that true religion is love in the service of mankind and that, of the representatives of the three great religions of the world — Islam, Christianity and Judaism — only Nathan, the Jew, lived up to the full ideals of humanity. Such civilised attitudes were not common in the German lands or in Europe, but German society was not uniquely hostile to Jews or to their emancipation.

When Immanuel entered the University of Berlin, Hegel occupied the chair of philosophy. Hegel's philosophy appealed to Jewish reformers for its promise to end Jewish separateness in a state based on morality, in an idealised Prussian kingdom. Philosophy, the Jewish reformers believed, would destroy the myths and vicious lies about Jews and the falsehoods spread for centuries by the churches. Immanuel expressed his positive outlook by changing his name to Wohlwill, to indicate his faith in harmony.

Jewish reformers took heart from the revolution of thought among the educated elite. Enlightenment would spread from the top to the masses. But the reformers were not prepared just to wait. They were determined to play an active part. One new approach early in the century was ‘scientific study’.⁵ Scholarly Jews founded the Wissenschaft des Judentums, ‘the scientific study of Judaism’, among them Dr Leopold Zunz, who befriended the young Wohlwill and furthered his reforming zeal. The study of Judaism would show that Jewish ethical values were universal.

A fierce debate ensued among Jews about the future.⁶ The Jewish reformers wanted to get rid of outworn traditions, of all ‘otherness’, abandon making claims for exclusive truth and become a part of German society. ‘We are and want to be solely Germans!’, declared Ludwig Philippson, the publisher of the progressive Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1848. ‘We possess and desire no fatherland other than the German. Only in our faith are we Israelites; in every other respect, with our innermost feelings, we belong to the state in which we live.’⁷ It will always be a minority who spearhead change. The liberal reformers believed that only by adapting to modern times and the wider society among whom they lived could the essence of their Jewish faith be preserved. Traditionalists feared that so-called reform would end with the abandonment of Jewish observance altogether, but accepted just as enthusiastically the mission of adoption of the German fatherland and immersion in German culture.

The Jewish community of Hamburg was the largest in Germany until the mid-century, when it was overtaken by the rapid growth of Berlin's Jewish population.⁸ To signify its German loyalty, with the consent of the senate, the government of Hamburg, the community changed its name to Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde (German Israelite Community). The community, overseen by a board which derived its authority from the senate, was accorded a legal status and exercised delegated powers of taxation and supervision of welfare, Jewish schools and religious affairs, including the appointment of rabbis, but ultimate approval remained with the senate. Relationships between the Jewish board and the Christian senate were cordial and supportive for more than a hundred years, the board not infrequently turning to the senate for advice. This throws another light on Christian—Jewish relations deriving from accounts only emphasising the growth of anti-Judaistic animosities. These were, however, troublesome times of dispute among Jews, as communities adopted different ways of bringing worship closer in line with their changing status in German society. Hamburg played a leading role in these controversies surrounding reform.

On 18 October 1818, the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig freeing Germany from Napoleon's rule, a group of liberal Jews consecrated a new synagogue, the Tempel, and introduced a prayer book with prayers in Hebrew and German. This outraged Hamburg's orthodox rabbis and the majority of the board, who were just then looking for a leading reforming but orthodox rabbi. He should be learned in the Talmud while also benefiting from a German secular university education. For orthodox Jews, prayers in German and an organ, as in Christian churches, was anathema. The board's choice fell on Isaak Bernays, who vehemently opposed the changes of ritual made by the Tempel. The senate, mean-while, mindful of Hamburg's interests, worked to maintain peace in the community. It did not escape their notice either that the Tempel congregation was composed of the more prosperous Jews whose commercial talents were valuable to the state. The senate now played a moderating role in setting out the terms of Bernays's appointment. He would, after all, not only be Hamburg's leading rabbi but at the same time occupy the position of a geistlicher Beamter (spiritual senior servant of the state), thus being subordinate both to the board and to the senate. Bernays's adoption of the Sephardic title of chacham (sage) rather than rabbi met with no objection, but a clause was inserted in his contract which forbade him to ‘harass the Tempel’. Bernays nevertheless over the years frequently overstepped this injunction in his disputes with the Tempel congregation.

The confrontation once more came to a head in 1841, when the Tempel introduced a second edition of their prayer book and asked the senate for permission to construct a new Tempel building in the Poolstrassße. The board and Bernays were opposed. The Lutheran senate, however, adjudicated in the Tempel's favour both on the issue of the prayer book and the building plans, meantime calling on the Jewish community to exercise tolerance. In 1844 the Poolstraße synagogue for the enlarged 800-strong congregation was consecrated. Bernays's death in 1849 and a succession of less belligerent chief rabbis reduced tensions. However, they resurfaced from time to time until Nazi persecution brought the community close together.

Bernays's influence and legacy extended beyond Hamburg. He belonged to the founders of ‘modern orthodoxy’ who believed that the rabbi should play a central role in worship and in the community. Religious services were to bring the congregation together in Hebrew prayer. A charismatic rabbi would also deliver a sermon in German. Modern orthodox rabbis, moreover, saw no conflict in following orthodox Judaism and embracing German culture.

Orthodox Jews sent their children to religious schools. One of these in Hamburg was the Talmud Tora Schule, founded in 1805. Apart from arithmetic, study was devoted to religious subjects. Under Bernays's influence in the 1820s and 1830s, despite some vehement opposition, history, German and the natural sciences were added to the curriculum. The combination of a strictly orthodox upbringing and a secular German education became the hallmark of this renowned school down the centuries.

Reformers, orthodox and liberal, in the nineteenth century urged that Jews should become ‘normal’ Germans. The children of the poor, of hawkers and street traders, should be taught skills and the German language to enable them to move up the social scale and be trained as craftsmen, even though membership of the craft guilds was closed to them, preventing their rise to the status of mastercraftsmen. For gifted boys, the way to social progress might eventually be opened by higher education. Jews also began to attend Christian schools. The most elitist was the Johanneum, with close ties to the clergy. Johannes Gurlitt, the enlightened headmaster, fought and overcame the opposition of the school's guardians to accepting Jews. That he was a keen advocate of trying to convert Jewish boys does not lessen his example of tolerance. Here, for more than a century, many of Hamburg's Jewish leaders in politics, commerce and the professions were educated and formed ties with gentiles.

Hamburg's Jews were among the pioneers in promoting the education of the community's poor children. The Israelitische Freischule, the Free School for boys, was founded in 1815. The school taught German and, by example, ‘elimination of all peculiarities in custom, speech and public behaviour’. A school for poor Jewish girls was also established. All this happened long before compulsory elementary education was a requirement in Hamburg.

II

When the community was looking for a teacher for the Free School, their choice fell on the well-educated young doctor of philosophy Immanuel Wohlwill.⁹ He did not wish to limit education to an elementary level suitable for the positions Jews were able to fill. He wanted to prepare those boys capable of a higher education for the professions which he was sure they would be allowed to enter when they reached adulthood, but at the time were still closed to Jews. Wohlwill soon felt at home in Hamburg. Young and full of the joys of life, he set out on journeys through the countryside and described his wanderings in glowing terms. In the city, Jews and Christians could meet on equal terms at the Harmony club, which welcomed him as a member.¹⁰ They gathered for good conversation, relaxation or a game of billiards, and ladies joined on social occasions. Wohlwill describes meeting there members of the Hamburg elite and a fellow Jew, Dr Hertz, who contributed much to institutions for the poor. Here, Wohlwill felt completely at ease: ‘The atmosphere of the Harmonie I like very much. Officers, the nobility, scholars and Hamburg citizens all live together here on the most cordial footing.’

He preached for a time in the Tempel, but his reforming zeal went too far for the liberal-minded congregation. He was one of a group of intellectual reformers who wished Jews to abandon Talmudic thinking and distinctive external Jewish practices while preserving the universality of Jewish ethics. Harmony was his guiding passion. In the search for truth, Jews and Christians would come together sharing a common ‘church’ under one God for all. But his critics believed that such a vision would lead to the loss of Jewish ident...