Ethnicity, Identity, and History

Essays in Memory of Werner J. Cahnman

Joseph B. Maier

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351318662
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de las minorías

In a wide-ranging analysis of the drama of history, the importance of ethnicity, and Jewish identity, these essays explore areas of political and cultural disciplines fused with elegance in the work of the late eminent sociologist Werner J. Cahnman. The prominence of the American and European historians, philosophers, geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists in this volume represents evidence of the wide effect that Cahnman's work had on scholars in a number of fields in academic work. This volume will make timely and rewarding reading for social scientists and historians, especially those concerned with the religious factor.

Contributors: Joseph B. Maier, Chaim I. Waxman, Louis Dumont, Karl Bosl, K.M. Bolte, Edmund Leites, Lewis S. Feuer, Lester Singer, Harriet D. Lyons, Andrew P. Lyons, Alvin Boskoff, Nathan Glazer, Irving Louis Horowitz, Herbert A. Strauss, William Spinrad, Calvin Goldscheider, Saul B. Cohen, and Emmanuel Maier.

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Werner J. Cahnman: An Introduction to His Life and Work

Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman

Many social scientists regard system-building as the chief mark of genuine scholarship. Werner Cahnman’s 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 Cahnman’s mind in the great maze of his writings.

Cahnman’s 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 Ruppin’s 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. Werner’s 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 Werner’s 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 Werner’s mother were Spinoza and Mendelssohn; her religion had an ethical orientation; she rarely, if ever, attended services. Yet she respected her husband’s 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 1970’s, “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 B’nai B’rith, 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 father’s sister, Clementine Kraemer, has fixed some of these stories in writing. Having inherited my father’s 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 women’s 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 Herzl’s Zionist writings and Davis Trietsch’s Palaestina-Handbuch, and soon knew all the early settlements by heart. There, he thought, the Jew could be entirely himself, a worker and a fighter, a Maccabean. But World War I interfered. “My German patriotism was aroused, the revolution and its aftermath were deeply disturbing and I could not imagine myself running away to the fabled East when my right to live in my country was contested.” University studies in economics, history, political science, and sociology in Berlin and Munich led to a doctorate with a dissertation on Ricardo (1927) sponsored by Professor von Zwiedinek-Suedenhorst, the noted exponent of Sozialpolitik at the University of Munich, and to an ever more intensive absorption in Jewish learning and Jewish political activity. Werner read all there was of Baeck, Buber, Rosenzweig, Brod, Graetz, Dubnow, Achad Haam, Fleg, Beer-Hofmann, including Benno Jacob’s Das erste Buch der Tora, Morris Rosenfeld’s Songs from the Ghetto (in a German translation from Rosen-feld’s Yiddish), as well as Stifter’s Abdias, and the varied antisemitic and philosemitic literature of the time. Buber, who frequently came to Munich, was the great guide in those years. What he meant to him, Werner recorded later in The Reconstructionist (1965). His paper on “Judentum and Volksgemeinschaft” was only the first quintessential expression of what was to become a characteristic Cahnman combination of elements — romantic philosophy and historiography, political democracy, and Jewish ethnicity.

Cahnman’s second period comprises what he has sometimes called his years as a “social worker.” These included his time as research associate at the Berlin Industrie- und Handelskammer and the Institut fuer Weltwirtschaft at the University of Kiel (1928–29), the years as Syndikus for Bavaria of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens (1930–34), and the years as Dozent at the Juedisches Lehrhaus and member of the Kulturbund in Munich, until his escape from Germany in 1939. The position of Syndikus at the Centralverein, the major defense organization of German Jewry, offered the greatest challenge in view of the dark storm clouds gathering on the political horizon. Men in their twenties were, as a rule, hardly considered mature and experienced enough to cope with the responsibilities of the job. When Werner was finally chosen, he accepted enthusiastically, attempting to calm the fears of his elders with the assurance that “at my age, Napoleon won the battle of Arcole.” He knew, alas, that nothing of the kind was in store. The watchword of the day was first defense then survival, of German Jewry.

There is no need to write here in detail about Cahnman’s work in the Centralverein and the six years he spent under Nazi rule. He described and analyzed the events of that time in two incisive papers, “Die Juden in Muenchen 1918–1943” (Zeitschrift fuer Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1979), and “The Decline of the Munich Jewish Community, 1933–1938” (Jewish Social Studies, 1941). It must be left to a future historian to mine properly the riches of Werner’s Centralverein files. There is no doubt, the work demanded real courage and energy on the part of leaders and followers alike. Werner came to appreciate the Jews in the antisemitic small towns of Franconia and Suebia (also in Regensburg, Straubing, Weiden, and Ingolstadt). He discovered in them, especially the Jewish teachers among them, a degree of sensitivity, patience, perseverance in adversity and Jewish loyalty which he could not find in the big city Jews of Munich, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. Two late sociological harvestings of that period he presented in “Role and Significance of the Jewish Artisan Class” (The Jewish Journal of Sociology, 1965) and “Village and Small Town Jews in Germany” (Leo Baeck Yearbook, 1974). The Berlin leadership, Werner felt, never fully comprehended what was happening in Bavaria, and “when the catastrophe was upon us, the initial attitude of incomprehension and vain hope gradually changed (after 1935, surely after 1938) into an urge to flee.”

Cahnman could not share the hyperpatriotic position of the Jewish war veterans’ organization because it was so utterly unrealistic and at times even callous and undignified. Unlike most other Centralverein leaders, he made common cause with the Zionists, the Zionist youth associations, and the Ostjuden, Jews of East European descent, who then constituted 25 percent of the Jews of Munich — now, in the 1980s, they are 85 percent. He met and taught them at the Lehrhaus, even as he was a fellow student with them in the Hebrew language courses and came to love Hebrew as a link “connecting us over the generations, something that binds and strengthens us.” Werner published many papers, journal articles, and book reviews at that time, including a piece titled “Warum Hebraeisch lernen?” (Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt, 1937). Most of them are oeuvres d’occasion, reflecting the fact that he could no longer choose his topics as freely as before. He continued his work even after the Centralverein office was closed down and he was briefly thrown into the Munich police prison as “a leader of an illegal organization.”

In the spring of 1937 Werner visited Palestine. “The sacredness of its soil could still be experienced,” he said. He met many Jewish leaders. The Arab riots lasted throughout his stay in the Holy Land. When he saw Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, on Mount Scopus, he commented that, unlike others, he thought the unrest might last a long time. Magnes replied: “A very long time.” Cahnman abandoned original plans of permanent settlement. He strongly felt that his place was still in Munich — “I had been a Jewish official, after all” — in order to help where help was needed. In a report to the non-Zionist members of the Jewish Agency, which he wrote after his return to his native city, Munich, he stressed two weak spots of the Yishuv: the lack of a post-medieval religious movement and the inability of many Jews to understand that they must share the land with the Arabs. He concluded by saying that “only deep anxiety for what we love can give us the strength to confront both raging hostility from the outside and blind partisanship in our own midst.”

Werner was confident that his luck would not desert him and that he would be able to catch the right moment to leave Germany. That moment came when Hitler marched into Vienna. He was sure that World War II was now imminent. His number on the waiting list for an immigration visa to the USA would not be called so soon. He knew he could not wait for two or three more years. Fortunately, an elderly lady cousin in London underwrote his stay in England and Werner was able to emigrate in June 1939, just a few short weeks before the outbreak of the war. But first he had to go through the trials and tribulations of the concentration camp in Dachau, with torture and death ever before his very eyes. Werner’s description of his two months in Dachau, November and December 1938, is still a moving document (Chicago Jewish Forum, 1964).

America opened an entirely new chapter in Werner Cahnman’s life story. Before moving on to the American scene, however, a few words must be said about Austria, especially Vienna. There is, first, the obvious fact of Munich’s geographical propinquity to the Austrian border. More importantly, Werner’s principal teacher at the University of Munich, Professor von Zwiedineck, was an Austrian and hence sensitive to questions of nationality. Werner was in touch with Erich von Kahler, the noted humanist. In the Centralverein, he had been charged with maintaining contact with the Austrian sister organization, the Oesterreichisch-Israelitische Union. He had visited Vienna in 1932 to see his opposite numbers at the Union and some Catholic leaders, especially Eugen Kogon and Father Bichlmaier, even Professor Joseph Nadler. The decisive contacts, however, were established in 1937, when Werner went to Vienna illegally. On that occasion he met with a sizable number of Jewish religious leaders and scholars, Austrian Zionists della prima hora, and others closely connected with Jewish national movements.

Without the help of these men, Werner tells us in an unpublished manuscript, “My Relation to Jews and Judaism” (1979), “I could neither have started nor completed my researches into the reasons for the rise of the Jewish national movement in Austria which I centered around the person of Adolph Fischhof and his pamphlet, Oesterreich und die Buergschaften seines Bestandes (1869).” He had to delay work on these topics, he adds, for twenty turbulent and distressing years, until he received support from the “Conference on Material Claims against Germany” in the 1950’s. He published four papers on Fischhof, two in English, two in German, which “clearly establish Fischhof as the fountainhead not only of federal thinking, but also of the Jewish national movement in Austria.”

Work on another topic conceived at that time but completed much later — in three versions, the latest in 1969 — deals with “The Three Regions of German Jewry,” showing that a unified and uniform German Jewry never existed. There was southwest German Jewry, northeast German Jewry, and the Jews of the Austrian-Bohemian region. Werner further assembled materials, which were never published, demonstrating from biographical data that German Jewry was a branch of Ashkenazic Jewry, not a separate entity.

Cahnman came to the United States in 1940. His first feeling on American soil was one of immense relief, of joy that he had succeeded in getting a spot on Noah’s Ark to the land of freedom. The country’s English origins were still alive, and not merely in the history books. The English past was then only beginning to recede, decade after decade, until the English heritage became what it is today — a mere component in the ethnic multiplicity of America. Werner’s Americanization began almost immediately in a summer seminar for foreign scholars and teachers at the Brewster Free Academy, a Quaker institution in Wolfboro, New Hampshire. The guiding spirit of the seminar was Herbert A. Miller, “a wise old scholar” and longtime friend and colleague of Robert E. Park in the sociology department of the University of Chicago. He told the newcomers: “This is the land of the free and the home of the brave, where everybody can do as he likes — and if he doesn’t, you make him. One must quickly learn to howl with the wolves. The pressure to conform is relentless. You are welcome, provided you do not object; if you do, you are not punished, you are merely ignored.”

Werner tried all along not to surrender his liberty, but he paid a price. The University of Munich had certified him as Doctor oeconomiae publicae, something of a cross between an economist, economic historian, jurist, and political scientist, but Professor Miller evaluated his Jewish, Bavarian, German, Austrian, and near Eastern antecedents, as far as intellectual interests were concerned, in such a way as to define and designate him as a race and culture specialist in sociology. He recommended him as a “visiting Ph.D.” to the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. In due course, “I became a Chicago sociologist,” Werner recalled, “very near to Everett Hughes; through Redfield something of an anthropologist; through Blumer something of a social psychologist,” but chiefly indebted to Robert E. Park who “influenced my thinking very much.” Without that particular association, he believed, a number of papers that still make exciting reading “could not have been written,” among them “Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contacts” (Social Forces, 1943), “Religion and Nationality” (American Journal of Sociology, 1944), “The Concept of Raum and the Theory of Regionalism” (American Sociological Review, 1944), “France in Algeria” (Review of Politics, 1945).

It was in Chicago, too, that Cahnman met Louis Wirth, one of the few and certainly the best known Jewish sociologist in the country at the time. Their common interest in things Jewish did not, however, make for a warm relationship between them, if for no other reason than their opposing perspectives on ethnicity in general, and Jewish ethnicity in particular. Werner maintained his strong survivalist perspective, projecting the survival of ethnic groups from both normative and empirical viewpoints. Wirth, on the other hand, insisted on a strong assimilationist outlook. He was, to be sure, very much interested in Jewish themes, but on the condition that the student demonstrate the inevitability of the absorption of the Jews, as of any other group, into the mainstream of the larger society. While their conflicting stance did not permit them to become friends, it allowed the development of a formal relationship. After Werner had spent several years as an instructor at Fisk and Atlanta Universities, Wirth even helped him get the position of research associate to Oscar Janowsky, director of the Jewish Community Center Study of the National Jewish Welfare Board. In a way, Werner wistfully remarked, “I was thus relegated to an (academic) backwater.”

On the Jewish scene in America, meanwhile, Cahnman encountered pitfalls as well as compensations. From Munich he had brought with him two sets of data which he hoped to publish. One was the statistics on Jewish emigration from Munich 1933–39. In undertaking the study, his idea was to not let that Jewish community go under without a song, to retain a document of its existence. Salo W. Baron, Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, accepted the paper immediately for the Journal of Jewish Studies, even as Werner never forgot that the great historian, himself of Austrian birth, had always been hospitable to Jewish refugee scholars. It was different with another paper, “Herzl and the Munich Jewish Community,” which he had saved from the community’s archives. Strangely enough, Zionist leaders were not interested. Even after Professor Guido Kisch, himself an immigrant, had published it in his Historia Judaica, the Zionist Organization of America took no notice of the story which elucidates an important chapter in the history of the Zionist movement.

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