In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933

271 Pages·1999·4.902 MB·English

by  Michael Brenner

IN SEARCH OF JEWISH COMMUNITY

In Search of
Jewish
Community
Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria,
1918-1933
Edited by Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
© 1998 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
In search of Jewish community : Jewish identities in Germany and Austria,
1918-1933 / edited by Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-33427-6 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21224-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Jews—Germany—Social conditions—Congresses. 2. Judaism—Germany—
History—20th century—Congresses. 3. Jews—Austria—Social conditions—
Congresses. 4. Germany—Social conditions—1918-1933—Congresses.
5. Austria—History—1918-1938—Congresses. 6. Germany—Ethnic
relations—Congresses. 7. Austria—Ethnic relations—Congresses.
I. Brenner, Michael, n. Penslar, Derek Jonathan.
DS135.G33S35 1998
305.892’4043—dc21 98-8304
1 2 3 4 5 03 02 01 00 99 98
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VU
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL BRENNER & DEREK J. PENSLAR ix
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS XVÜ
1. German Jews between Fulfillment and Disillusion
The Individual and the Community
Shulamit Volkov 1
2. Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde
Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism
Michael A. Meyer 15
3. Gemeindeorthodoxie in Weimar Germany
The Approaches of Nehemiah Anton Nobel and Isak Unna
David Ellenson 36
4. Turning Inward
Jewish Youth in Weimar Germany
Michael Brenner 56
5. Between Deutschtum and Judentum
Ideological Controversies inside the Centralverein
Avraham Barkai 74
6. "Verjudung des Judentums"
Was There a Zionist Subculture in Weimar Germany?
Jacob Borut 92
7. Written Out of History
Bundists in Vienna and the Varieties of Jewish Experience
in the Austrian First Republic
Jack Jacobs 115
VI Contents
8. Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State
The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic
Marsha L. Rozenblit 134
9. Gender, Identity, and Community
Jewish University Women in Germany and Austria
Harriet Pass Freidenreich 154
10. The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany
Social Conditions and Cultural Representations
Sharon Gillerman 176
11. "Youth in Need"
Correctional Education and Family Breakdown in
German Jewish Families
Claudia Prestel 200
12. Decline and Survival of Rural Jewish Communities
Steven M. Lowenstein 223
243
CONTRIBUTORS
245
index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume is the result of several years of planning and effort by a
number of individuals, whom the editors take great pleasure in
thanking at this time. In 1992, Robert Jacobs, Executive Director of
New York's Leo Baeck Institute, began working with Derek Penslar
on the organization of a conference, to be held at Indiana University,
on German-speaking Jews during the Weimar period. An organiza­
tional committee met in New York in May of 1993; the committee
included officers of the LBI (New York President Ismar Schorsch,
International President Michael Meyer, and New York Vice-President
Fred Grubel), noted scholars (Richard Cohen, Harriet Freidenreich,
Marion Kaplan, and Jehuda Reinharz), and representatives from the
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Dr. Dieter Dettke) and the Deutscher Aka­
demischer Austauschdienst (Heidrun Suhr).
There was general agreement that Weimar Jewry and its Austrian
counterpart had too long been studied in isolation from each other
and that their political, economic, and intellectual elites had received
the lion's share of historiographical attention. This conference was
seen as an exciting opportunity to open new pathways to the under­
standing of German-speaking Jews who, although not luminaries,
were articulate and left behind moving testimonies of their thoughts,
feelings, and deeds. With this agenda in mind, the conference, "Circles
of Community: Collective Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria,
1918-1932," was held in March 1996 at Indiana University-Bloom-
ington; it was generously supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung,
DAAD, and Indiana University's Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jew­
ish Studies Program.
The volume before you brings together revised and expanded
papers from that conference. In revising those papers, the authors
benefited from the responses, offered at the conference, by two
Indiana University faculty members, George Alter and Benjamin
Nathans, and three invited guests: Marion Kaplan, Ismar Schorsch,
and Lee Shai Weissbach. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung offered addi­
tional support in the form of a publication subvention, for which the
editors are deeply grateful. The editors also thank Carol Kahn Strauss,
the current Executive Director of the New York Leo Baeck Institute,
for her ongoing interest in this project. And a special expression of
gratitude is reserved for Fred Grubel, a Zeitzeuge of the events dis­
cussed in these papers and a pillar of the Leo Baeck Institute for more
than four decades.
viii Acknowledgments
At Indiana University, the members of the Borns Jewish Studies
Program staff, Patricia Ek, Carolyn Lipson-Walker, and Melissa Deck-
ard, ensured smooth running for the conference and helped ease the
trauma of assembling a book manuscript produced by authors on four
continents. Last, but certainly not least, the editors want to thank the
authors for their prompt and thoughtful responses to the editors'
suggested revisions. From the start, the authors expressed a commit­
ment to this volume and its goal: to encourage new ways of perceiving
Austro-German Jewish history of the 1920s, a period that, although
appearing from our perspective to have been one of impending
twilight, seemed to many who lived through it to be the breaking of
dawn.
Michael Brenner, Munich
Derek J. Penslar, Toronto
INTRODUCTION
The history of Jews in interwar Germany and Austria is often viewed
either as the culmination of tremendous success in the economic and
cultural realms, or as the prologue to the road that led to Auschwitz.
Some historians point to the significant role individual Jews, such
as Max Liebermann, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Walther
Rathenau, played in culture, science, politics, and the economy; and
they emphasize the far-reaching integration of Jews into German
society. In the words of Peter Gay, himself both a product and a
chronicler of Weimar Germany, "despite the occasional surfacing of
antisemitism Jews felt 'at home' in Germany. This was true in the
Weimar Republic as well as in the Kaiserreich. There existed an
irresistible mixture of a promising historical past and an exciting, and
not at all hopeless, present.... Jews were, after all, able to realise
their ambitions, more or less, without difficulty."1
Others stress the dark shadows looming over Weimar Germany.
Representing such a view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen writes in his
controversial study of the Holocaust: "Antisemitism was endemic to
Weimar Germany, so widespread that nearly every political group in
the country shunned the Jews. Jews, though ferociously attacked,
found virtually no defenders in German society. The public conversa­
tion about Jews was almost wholly negative."2
While those approaches focus mainly on the position of Jews
within the largely non-Jewish society, the authors of this volume have
chosen a different emphasis. They have elected to treat the German
and Austrian Jewish communities of the interwar period in their own
right, without, however, neglecting the social and political context. In
contrast to the plethora of valuable studies on the Jewish communi­
ties of Imperial Germany and Austria, not to mention those on the
Nazi period, a list of publications on Weimar Germany and the First
Austrian Republic is quite brief.3 Studies in this field have tended to
concentrate heavily on the fate of individual Jews and the threat of
antisemitism. Only in recent years has the internal development of
the German-speaking Jewish community in the two decades after
World War One become a focus of scholarly attention. In these works,
mostly by younger scholars, the centrality of a reemerging sense of
community becomes evident.4
The strengthening of communal ties found its expression on two
different levels, which are reflected in the German terms Gemeinde and
Gemeinschaft. On one level, there is the expansion and intensification
X Introduction
of activities within the framework of the local Jewish communities
(Gemeinden). In contrast to the United States and most West European
countries, Jewish communities—like Christian churches in Germany
and Austria—remained (and remain until today) publicly constituted
corporations. They embraced the vast majority of the Jews in any one
place of residence and collected from the states tax revenues that Jews
were compelled to pay for the maintenance of their religious institu­
tions and services. By the 1920s, large Gemeinden, such as Berlin and
Vienna, with almost two hundred thousand members each, repre­
sented urban administrations with a dense network of social, eco­
nomic, and cultural institutions, thus reaching far beyond the nine­
teenth-century limitations of a religious congregation.
On another level, German and Austrian Jews renewed and rede­
fined their identification with the Jewish community at large (Gemein­
schaft). In the process of acculturation and religious reform during the
nineteenth century, many German Jews had restricted their Jew­
ishness to the private expression of their individual religious faith.
German or Austrian citizens of the Jewish faith would differ from
their non-Jewish neighbors only in their religious belief and practice.
This definition was valid as long as most Jews felt strong ties to their
religion. In an increasingly secularized society, however, religion was
no longer a unifying factor but a divisive one. Therefore, not only
Zionists and the Orthodox, but also Liberal (i.e.. Reform and Conser­
vative) Jews looked for new definitions that would include the entire
Jewish community. Among the most popular terms employed by
Liberal Jews were Stammesgemeinschaft (community of common de­
scent) and Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of common fate), both
emphasizing ethnic rather than religious community.
As German Jewry was no isolated entity, this search for Gemeinschaft
must be seen in the broader cultural context, in particular in connec­
tion with the enormous impact of Ferdinand Tönnies's sociological
study Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and society, 1887) of
the years preceding and following World War One. For Tönnies,
Gemeinschaft represented "organic" relationships, such as families,
neighborly relations, and village communities, whereas Gesellschaft
expressed itself in "mechanical" relationships, such as business asso­
ciations or urban administrations. Even a critic of this development
like sociologist Helmuth Plessner had to admit that "Gemeinschaft is the
ideal of our times."5 For some this ideal meant the search for a
revolutionary socialist Völkergemeinschaft (community of nations), for
others that of a nationalist German Volksgemeinschaft (community of
the German nation).