Brothers and Strangers

The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923

Steven E. Aschheim

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 1982
• Print ISBN: 9780299091149, 9780299091101
• eBook ISBN: 9780299091132
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1. GERMAN JEWRY AND THE MAKING OF THE OSTJUDE, 1800–1880
• 2. THE AMBIVALENT HERITAGE: Liberal Jews and the Ostjuden, 1880–1914
• 3. CAFTAN AND CRAVAT: “Old” Jews, “New” Jews, and Pre-World War I Anti-Semitism
• 4. ZIONISM AND THE OSTJUDEN: The Ambiguity of Nationalization
• 5. IDENTITY AND CULTURE: The Ostjude as Counter-Myth
• 6. FROM RATIONALISM TO MYTH: Martin Buber and the Reception of Hasidism
• 7. STRANGE ENCOUNTER: Germany, World War I, and the Ostjuden
• 8. THE CULT OF THE OSTJUDEN: The War and Beyond
• 9. JEWISH IDENTITY, OSTJUDEN, AND ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
• 10. THE INVERTED IMAGE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX