Germans into Jews

Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic

Sharon Gillerman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804771405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia ebraica

Germans into Jews turns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish history—the years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline during the Weimar Republic. But, Sharon Gillerman demonstrates that Weimar Jews sought to rejuvenate and reconfigure their community as a means both of strengthening the German nation and of creating a more expansive and autonomous Jewish entity within the German state. These ambitious projects to increase fertility, expand welfare, and strengthen the family transcended the ideological and religious divisions that have traditionally characterized Jewish communal life. Integrating Jewish history, German history, gender history, and social history, this book highlights the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar Jews to reassert a new Jewish particularism while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to Germanness.

Notes

Introduction

1

Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik. Bericht über die Tagung des Bevölkerungspolitischen Ausschusses des Preussischen Landesverbandes Jüdischer Gemeinden vom 24. Februar 1929 (Berlin: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, 1929), 5.

2

Ibid.

3

This quotation comes from Peter Fritzsche, “Landscapes of Danger, Landscapes of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany,” in Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, ed. Thomas Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), 44. For an important set of critical reflections on the use and conceptualization of crisis by scholars of the Weimar Republic, see Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, eds., Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (New York: Campus Verlag, 2005).

4

Detlev Peukert develops the notion of a “paradox of Weimar” in The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), xiii.

5

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 166–182; Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.

6

I use the term Liberal Jews or Judaism to refer to the dominant form of Judaism in Germany, Judaism that emerged out of the Reform movement of the nineteenth century and that stands in opposition to Orthodox interpretations of Judaism. When I use the term “liberalism” with a small “l,” I am referring to a combination of cultural, political, and economic attitudes and orientations that include personal freedom, individualism, tolerance, and representative government.

7

On the social body in Germany, see also Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History 68 (September 1996): 647–654. For France, Italy, and Britain, see Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Sexual Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 4–5; David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On organic metaphors in discourses of the nation, see Robert Nye, “Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in the French Belle Époque,” in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Alan Sharlin (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1982), 19–41.

8

Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), 178. Shulamit Volkov called attention to the unity in ideologically diverse efforts to innovate in Jewish life in her important article, “Die Erfindung einer Tradition: Zur Entstehung des modernen Judentums in Deutschland,” Historische Zeitschrift 253 (1991): 603–628 and Shulamit Volkov, “Jews and Judaism in the Age of Emancipation: Unity and Variety,” in The Jews in European History: Seven Lectures, ed. Wolfgang Beck (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1994), 73–93.

9

Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (1995): 11.

10

I refer to the title by Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

11

The work of Shulamit Volkov has been central in charting this new direction within German and German-Jewish historiography. Among her many essays on this theme, see “Die Dynamik der Dissimilation: Deutsche Juden und die ostjüdischen Einwanderer,” in Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Zehn Essays (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), 166–181, and “Erfolgreiche Assimilation oder Erfolg und Assimilation: Die deutsch-jüdische Familie im Kaiserreich,” Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Jahrbuch 2 (1982/83): 373–387. Her recent book in English further develops the notion of dialectical assimilation: Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (New York: Cambridge, 2006). Till van Rahden’s work has also substantively revised and complicated notions of assimilation in Juden und andere Breslauer: die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grosstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); “Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community Between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850–1933,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, an...