The Boston Globe this morning has a front-page article about Jewish immigration in Germany and the rapidly growing community of Jews in Berlin:
Most newcomers are from Russia, Jews seeking a better life in a more prosperous place, but also escaping the anti-Semitism that seethes in many parts of the former Soviet Union. The ”Russian Jews" — the term embraces the thousands arriving from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states — are joined by a small but significant wave of young Jews from Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The Westerners flock mainly to Berlin, attracted by the capital’s easy-going style and vibrant cultural scene.
Before the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall, Germany’s Jewish population stood at barely 25,000, mostly survivors of the World War II era and their offspring. Since then, encouraged by liberal immigration laws, the number has swelled to more than 200,000, according to estimates by the government and Jewish groups. Last year, twice as many Jews — 20,000 — settled in Germany as in Israel, according to Jewish groups.
And Berlin is not the only beneficiary of this Jewish migration:
In Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, small but well-attended Jewish schools and kindergartens have opened over the past several years, intended to expose children to the Hebrew language, Torah studies, and the spiritual ideas behind ritual practices. Attendance often marks the first time Jewish youngsters from the East have received formal religious instruction. A Jewish academy in Frankfurt trains girls and young women in ancient texts.
Still, there is tension and some measure of guilt among Jews that Germany – with its terrible history – would be preferred as a destination rather than the Jewish state of Israel. The Netzeitung has an excellent ongoing series on Juden in Deutschland; recently the online newspaper reported on comments made by Schimon Stein – Israel’s ambassador to Germany – concerning Jews "unpacking their suitcases" and calling Germany home:
Solche Äußerungen enttäuschen Schimon Stein, den israelischen Botschafter in Deutschland, offensichtlich sehr. «Da haben Sie von Frau Knobloch die Antwort auf die Frage, was sie über Israel als Heimat denkt,» sagte er über ihr Bekenntnis zum Auspacken der Koffer. Als offizieller Vertreter eines zionistischen Staats sei Israel für ihn die Heimat aller Juden, und er erwarte sie alle dort «eines Tages», wenn auch «nicht in absehbarer Zukunft.» Im zionistischen Israel stelle man sich, so Stein, übrigens immer noch die Frage: Was haben Juden überhaupt in Deutschland zu suchen? Ihre Koffer vielleicht.
Also, in this month’s Atlantic Times (monthly paper put out by the German Embassy in Washington D.C.) Michel Friedman calls for the Jewish community in Germany to become much more vocal (not available online):
It’s true that quantitatively, Judaism in Germnay seems to be a success story. But are the numbers enough to turn around qualitative failings? The coming years will decide what direction the Jewish comunity in Germany takes. It will be a lot of work, requiring a lot of commitment, as well as intelligent leadership. But no accommploishment within the Jewish community can bear fruit if the macrocosm that is the German Republic doesn’t aspire to become a global, mulit-cultural and multi-religious society. Because every time a Jewish cemetery is defaced and every time neo-Nazis take to the streets to demonstrate, we end up asking ourselves the same question we did 60 years ago: How can Jews even live in Germany?
Every time German politicians (primarily from the CDU/CSU) reignite the debate over a German Leitkultur, they only succeed in marginalizing not only the growing Jewish community as well as the much larger community of Muslims in Germany. The term Multi-Kulti is everywhere under attack in Germany (and in Europe), but I have to ask: what is the alternative?
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First of all, one detail I’d like to haggle about a little: “Still, there is tension and some measure of guilt among Jews that Germany – with its terrible history [for Jews]” Terrible history from 1932 through the Second World War, yes, but through much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany was the most tolerant place in Europe for the Jewish people, with a degree of conscious emancipation and community support unrivaled except perhaps in the United States. This is one of the reasons why so many German Jews (along with their Gentile counterparts) made great contributions in the sciences, engineering, literature, and other areas. Relatively speaking, the various German states offered unparalleled opportunities for those in their Jewish communities. In fact, from the perspective of someone in the 1800’s, Germany was the *last* place one would have expected the Shoah in the 20th century to take place– yet another reminder of how Hitler’s wretched totalitarian ideology and agenda changed history so much for the worse. In this sense at least, Hitler’s period of rule was a rare anomaly which, nonetheless, had far-reaching and devastating consequences. Even into the 1920’s, before the worldwide Great Depression hit, Jews enjoyed a relative degree of prosperity and success in Germany.
So the history of the Jewish people in Germany is multifaceted and complex. There’s the horrible history of the Holocaust and Hitler’s repugnant ideology. Then there are also the two great flowerings of Jewish culture in the German lands, the first in the High Medieval Period of the Ashkenazi (the very word “Ashkenazi” refers to the Rhine River in Germany, and millions of Jews have German surnames dating to this thriving era) and the second in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like some other great nations with twin histories of high culture and achievement and bloody brutality on the other (Russia, Japan, Britain in India/Australia/Ireland and with the slave trade to name a few), Germany has both in its past, and even during the Nazi period there were countless Germans within and outside of Germany (including millions in the USA– this is why military historians always quip that Dwight D. Eisenhower was the best German general of the war) who bitterly opposed and resisted Hitler, often at great risk– Stauffenberg, Popitz, Count von der Schulenburg, Hassell, Beck, Canaris to name just a few within Germany. The Nazis may have seized power and brainwashed a good portion of the population, but they definitely did not have the hearts of minds of a large segment of the German people on their side within Germany, let alone outside of it. Some suggest that a third period of Jewish flourishing– and hopefully a permanent one– may be sprouting up in Germany in the early 21st century. We’ll see.
As for the multi-culti question– you’re right to consider this, but it’s my belief that a country does need a core identity that pretty much stays constant, or at least continues to revolve around a central premise. In the case of Germany, many of the accomplishments of the revived Jewish community there would be undone if, say, a large proportion of the Muslim population were to embrace a radical anti-Jewish Islamist variant (as some in France have done, to the detriment of the Jewish community there). OTOH, the situation in Germany looks more encouraging at the moment at least, since the Muslim immigrants there (chiefly Turkish and Kurdish as well as Arab) seem better able to embrace a German identity that’s simultaneously friendly toward a variety of contributing cultures within the umbrella, thus the relatively decent Muslim-Jewish relations in Germany. Modern Germany, in fact, is incredibly diverse, with millions of Eastern European and millions more from places like China and Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Venezuela and a panoply of other nations. Even within France, the vast majority of the North African immigrants are law-abiding, contributing citizens; hard to predict the future, and there may be more upheavals like the recent Parisian banlieue riots of 2005 and anti-Semitic attacks, but hopefully France over the medium and long term will also have a Muslim population that coexists peacefully and productively with its large Jewish population as well.
For my part, I believe that it’s beneficial not only to the recipient nations but to the Jewish community in general to have a number of thriving communities dispersed throughout the world, within and outside of Israel. Israel is critical as a refuge for the Jewish people and a place to preserve their culture (which is diminishing in much of the USA, through low fertility rates and a large fraction of the intermarriages), but it’s just too hazardous to have Israel as the only such repository of a strong, secure Jewish culture– it’s a small country, and there should be other centers of Jewish culture as well.
If I were elected Interplanetary President for Extraterrestrial Settlement (TM), I’d have a policy by which cultures with relatively small numbers of people, in danger of disappearing through assimilation (such as many native American tribes, the remaining Celtic cultures dispersed throughout Europe, and the Jewish people) would have several colonies of their own to help reinvigorate their communities and keep them strong in a variety of locales. But back in the real world of 2006, we’re stuck with Planet Earth, and so I think it’s essential that the Jewish community have Israel as a strong base, while having multiple roots in other lands as well. I’m actually one of those rare cautious optimists who thinks that one day, the Jewish and Palestinian people, cognizant of their common Semitic roots and recognizing the benefits of mutual economic cooperation, will muzzle the extremists on both sides and come to at least a relatively peaceful coexistence with each other.
However as I said, Israel is a small country, and it’s important for Jewish culture to thrive in multiple locations. I think it would be a wonderful historical development for one of those cultural flowerings of the 21st century to be in Germany. It would crush Hitler’s sick dream of a judenrein nation once and for all, casting him as the loser he always was. In the broader historical context, it would also represent that third great efflorescence of Jewish communities along the Rhine, a revival that would be fantastic from any perspective.
Interesting. I dashed off my post before having read the Boston Globe article (the link wasn’t opening for some reason), but I just had a look at it, and one of the immigrants (quoted in the article above) expresses my sentiments exactly:
“There is a twinge of guilt, some secret shame, I think, in the heart of every Jew who calls Germany home,” said Josef Eljaschewitsch, a physician from Latvia. ”And yet, for Jews not to come here — to surrender our stolen heritage in this country — would be to give the Nazis a sort of final victory: A Jew-free Germany.”
Precisely. The best way to slap Hitler in the face a little more, and to make it unequivocally clear that he and all his reprehensible plans have failed utterly and entirely, is to strengthen and perpetuate this newly engendered Jewish revival in Germany. The German-Jewish alliance of the late 19th century produced one of the most indisputably dynamic cultures in world history, and our world today is much the richer (not to mention more comfortable) due to their efforts and tangible accomplishments. This was the culture of Karl Friedrich Gauss, Wilhelm Roentgen, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Emil Fischer, Robert Koch, Theodor Billroth, Werner von Siemens, Carl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, Moritz Heinrich Romberg, Adolf Kussmaul, Eduard Henoch, Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Gustav Kirchhoff, Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch– and so many hundreds of others of individuals who so fundamentally made the modern world.
This was a period when the German Gentile and Jewish cultures cross-pollinated each other and played off one another, both with mutually reinforcing and high standards of excellence and a reverence for achievement, productivity and social responsibility. The Gentile and Jewish elements of the 19th century German culture were like two arms on the same body, and it was their incredibly productive cooperation which brought about so many of that period’s amazing accomplishments in engineering, physics, chemistry and so many other fields. The contributions of these people were a great gift to the world, and perhaps now, this great collaboration can be revived once again, this time with the nation immunized against any madmen who would try to turn Jew and Gentile against each other.
Dear Wes,
Many thanks for your insights on the situation of Jews in Germany. As you say, it is a multi-faceted and complex history. I cannot go along with your statement, however, that the persecution under Hitler was an “anomaly”. The roots of the Holocaust extend far back in history, but really began to take shape in 1918, when the Kaiser blamed the Jews for the defeat in the Great War, even though German Jews were among the bravest and most patriotic soldiers in that bloody disaster.
To some extent, the success of Jews in Germany – especially from 1800 to 1933 – came at the expense of their Jewish identity: they embraced a secular”Kulturreligion” which they mistakenly thought would ensure their complete assimilation in German society. In spite their monumental achievements,we now know that this dream of assimilation was a delusion.
For me, the best book on this entire subject is Amos Elon’s “The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1833”. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Dear David,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I was in no way attempting to imply that the murderous anti-Semitism of the 1930s appeared out of the blue; it had of course been present throughout Europe even in the relatively emancipated 18th and 19th centuries (as well as in the USA for that matter, as Henry Ford, Charles Coughlin and T.S. Eliot made clear). There certainly were ugly diatribes against the Jewish people swirling around throughout this period, which did take shape in the pogroms of Russia (and the Protocols that emerged from the Czarist regime in the early 1900s).
Naturally, much of this vitriol also streamed into Western Europe, and was indeed later appropriated by the thugs of the 1930s. However, those anti-Semitic currents in the 18th and 19th centuries really were counterbalanced by, as you suggest, a more open culture of the Enlightenment during the period which was far more welcoming to the Jewish people resident in Western Europe and widely admiring of their accomplishments. There is still a good deal of anti-Semitism today after all, throughout the world including in the US, but there are also strong *countercurrents* against that impulse. It is impossible to predict the future of course, and there is the potential in any country (especially in the midst of an economic collapse with little recourse) for a demagogue to find an easy scapegoat. The overseas Chinese, for that matter, have also encountered severe persecution at times in Indonesia, being a small yet privileged minority easy to blame for adverse circumstances in the country.
My point, however, was to counter the facile and common assumption, at least in some history treatments here in the USA, that sometimes arises as a result of a focus on the 1930s to the exclusion of what came before– that is, the notion that anti-Semitism was the dominating, prevailing impulse throughout Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. It really wasn’t, particularly in Germany, which was a reason that so many European Jews (such as Einstein, Haber, Born and many others) were able to flourish there to such a remarkable degree. Hindsight can sometimes muddle one’s sense of the true course of events, and for historians in the mid-19th century, there was not a “red flag” to indicate, for example, that the Dreyfus affair would fulminate as it did in the 1890s, or that a far greater catastrophe would ensue 40 years later as it did. This is in part because no one really anticipated that the First World War would result in the catastrophe that it also did. There was certainly the *potential* for the anti-Semitic drivel percolating around to be taken up at some point, but it would be misleading to aver that the catastrophes of the 1890s and 1930s were somehow inherent in the culture of Europe.
Even in 1930s Germany, enraged by the Versailles impositions and in severe straits from the global Depression (and without the cushioning effect of the vast and fertile territory of the USA or an overseas imperial domain, like those possessed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain and France, providing outlets and access to resources unavailable at home), the rise of Hitler was in no way foreordained. There were other angry political movements which took on a more nationalist perspective that was less anti-Semitic in its philosophy, and the Nazis never, ever won a majority in Parliamentary elections; even in the campaigns of 1931-1932, when the Depression and resentment were at their worst, the Nazis could not muster anything approaching a bare majority in the elections themselves. Hitler gained power because, unfortunately, he was a master of Parliamentary maneuvering and a far more adroit politician than his adversaries appreciated, and the Weimar leaders thought they were extending an olive branch to Hitler to shut him up. They never dreamed that Hitler would use that branch to climb up and push them out of power as he did.
Heck, nobody elsewhere in Europe, or in the US, anticipated that either. If you have an opportunity, go to a university library and take a look at American magazines such as Vanity Fair or Time during the early 1930s. It’s an eye-opening experience, since the US journalists were not only neutral toward Hitler’s rise– they frequently treated Hitler’s ascendancy as a “rags-to-riches” story from the slums of Vienna. This was in part because Hitler really did wear the robes of the deceptive politician quite well, but also because the Nazis managed to mute much of their early anti-Semitic rhetoric and focus more on things like economic reform and deficit spending as a way to snow their observers about their true underlying motives. The anti-Semitism was clearly there if one peered intensely enough, but to the beat reporters for the US glossies, the anti-Semitic attitudes did not appear *that* much different from what one encountered elsewhere in Europe, or from the poison pen of Henry Ford in the USA, for that matter.
Again, hindsight makes it obvious how Hitler’s venomous invective in Mein Kampf would translate into his deeds, but at the time in the early 1930s, this was unclear. Furthermore, it was Hitler’s deep malice and unfortunate, unique political skill that enabled the Holocaust. Without him, another German nationalist, even fascist party may indeed have come to power and commenced a war of revenge against the Allies, but likely without the focused anti-Semitism of the Nazis. This, indeed, is one reason that so many German nationalists who had served in high posts or in the army (such as Stauffenberg, Count von der Schulenburg, Beck, and Popitz) so despised Hitler. They thought he was a fool, but like brave Protestant ministers such as Martin Buber, they were incensed by his hateful, anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions. They had recalled that many thousands of Jews had loyally fought for the Kaiser during WWI, and that many others had accomplished great things for the country in other respects as well. They were nationalists who shared much of the country’s resentment over Versailles, but they did not fall into the trap of finding the “easy target” in the country’s loyal, hard-working, law-abiding Jewish citizens.
Again, there were millions of Germans both at home and overseas who not only refused to buy into Hitler’s madness, but actively opposed him. This is one reason why Germany so quickly and paradoxically recovered and gained strength after 1945, under leaders like Konrad Adenauer– there were so many Germans who, despite the constant and unyielding terror of the Gestapo and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Hitler’s political opponents in the camps, refused to support the Nazis’ murderous aspirations and stood up to the regime in a variety of ways. After the expulsion of the Nazis from power in 1944 (which, again, involved a fair number of German-Americans and other overseas Germans who saw themselves as liberators of their homeland from the Nazis’ clutches), the Adenauerites were given the opportunity they had long sought from within and planned for during the difficult decade before, and they were able to revitalize the country in the midst of severe adversity with unprecedented rapidity, in part because so many in Germany, elites as well as rank-and-file, were happy to see the wretched National Socialists ousted from their perch. They had never accepted the Nazi regime in the first place.
The ascendancy of the Nazis in the 1930s submerged but did not quash the tolerant, philo-Semitic attitudes of so much of Germany’s intelligentsia in the decade before– an openness that proved to be remarkably resistant to the baiting and scapegoating that so many indulged in after 1918. Eminent Jewish scientists such as Einstein and Max Born, for example, did much of their most brilliant work in the late 1920s in Germany, where they were still welcomed and able to be productive despite the Kaiser’s scapegoating in 1918, or other bloodthirsty members of the “stabbed-in-the-back crowd.” Einstein’s many Gentile German colleagues (such as Arnold Sommerfeld, among many others), if they did not emigrate, were themselves compelled to witness the transmogrification of their country into a monstrosity after 1932, something which they had not expected and certainly did not countenance. It took someone of Hitler’s evil and political acumen to assume power and change things so radically, seizing on the anti-Semitic literature that had been present before throughout Europe, but successfully countered in the culture overall– this was not an inevitability, even with the economic collapse of the Depression.
The future is inherently unpredictable, and even here in the United States, one can never be certain what would happen in the wake of, for example, a severe and prolonged economic collapse or an awful military defeat. As noted above, Ford, Coughlin and other American anti-Semites were almost as rabid as their European counterparts, and of course we have a long and painful history here of black-white ethnic strife for a long interval after the Civil War, with what amounted to anti-black pogroms being commonplace well into the 20th century (and not only in the South, as is commonly and erroneously believed). There’s also the tortured history of the Indian Wars and massacres against the native Americans, not to mention the anti-Mexican hatred surrounding and ensuing from the Mexican War of 1846-48.
Strands of ethnic hatred, anti-Semitic and otherwise, are present here as they are anywhere else, but the operative question is whether those impulses are countered by the overall culture, which thus far they obviously are. It may or may not be so in the future– nobody can predict that. But this is why I think it is important to have a dispersion of thriving Jewish centers in many locales, including and especially in Germany, which has the extra bonus of stomping all over Hitler’s sick dream of a judenrein nation, and laughing in his face as the Jewish people not only rejuvenate their culture in Germany, but reinvigorate it to become a world center, as it was during the high Ashkenazi period or the mid-late 1800s.
Thank you for your recommendation of Amos Elon’s book. I have read other references in this vein, but not Elon’s in particular. I’ll be sure to add this to my reading list. Take care and best wishes.