Would it be an exaggeration to say that German Jewry, more than any other European Jewish community, has been the subject of comprehensive historiographical research, and that this historiographical efflorescence is due largely to the shadow of Hitler and National Socialism? Yet it should be asked whether the last fifty years of writing the history of this community taught us anything new about its annals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The many studies about the fate of German Jewry, from the nineteenth century through 1933, paint a uniform portrait of a complacent community that conducted its economic and social life in serene tranquility. Although far from monotonous—there was no shortage of religious and socio-economic voices—it was a community that established and evolved patterns of cultural behavior that distinguished it from all other European Jewish communities. Out of a wish to belong to German society, there evolved a Jewish-German symbiosis that tried to survive even after 1933.
Yet this symbiosis has been studied less than any other cultural field, as the research has neglected both Jewish and German culture in this unique linkage. I am not referring to culture in the traditional sense of the term, but to the linguistic praxis, the cultural and social codes, gender relations as a prominent element of social expression, and socialization processes; in other words, to the totality of the society’s behavioral patterns.
This prefatory note is significant in the context of my discussion of History of the Holocaust—Germany, the recently published collection of articles about the tragic failure of the Jewish-German symbiosis. The roots of this collection, under the general direction of the late Avraham Margaliot of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, go back some two decades. At that time Yad Vashem undertook an international project to publish a fifteen-volume History of the Holocaust. The American historians Karl Schleunes and Christopher Browning were also asked to produce individual volumes in this series; Browning’s will soon be published. Schleunes and Browning dealt with Nazi Germany’s Jewish policy, whereas Margaliot focused on internal facets of German-Jewish history. After Margaliot’s death in 1987, he was succeeded as editor-in-chief by his student, Yehoyakim Cochavi.
Now, for the first time, the Israeli public has been presented with the official history of German Jewry after 1933. I say “official” rather than “authorized” or “institutional” because this work has been published by the body that has undertaken, among other things, to memorialize the life and times of this community.
There is no doubt that this is an impressive enterprise—in many ways incomparable and unequaled. The general reader who is interested in the history of German Jewry under the Nazis will be grateful for this collection. Nevertheless, in its contribution to the scholarship—which is the focus of this review—it suffers from a number of drawbacks.
The ten articles in the book attempt to survey almost every major aspect of Jewish life in Germany after 1933: “The Response of the Centralverein and the Zionist Federation of Germany to Antisemitism in the Weimar Republic,” by Jehuda Reinharz (pp. 11–67); “The Response of German Jewish Institutions and Organizations to the National Socialist Regime in the Years 1933–1938,” by Avraham Margaliot (pp. 69–233); “The Last Phase of German Jewish History, 1933–1943,” by Yehoyakim Cochavi (pp. 235–400); “The Regional Umbrella Organizations of German Jewry during the Nazi Era, 1933 - 1938” by Max P. Birnbaum (pp. 401–447); “The Struggle for Economic Subsistence in the Years 1933–1943,” by Avraham Barkai (pp. 471–593); “Jewish Education in Nazi Germany,” by Josef Walk (pp. 595–695); “The Jewish Youth Movement in Germany during the Holocaust Period,” by Chaim Schatzker (pp. 697–760); “German Jewish Cultural Activities during the Nazi Regime,” by Yehoyakim Cochavi (pp. 761–837); “Orthodox Jewry in Germany during the Nazi Regime,” by Yaakov Zur (pp. 839–908); and, finally, “Jews in the Resistance Movement in Nazi Germany,” by Konrad Kwiet (pp. 911–940). All the articles cover their topics very thoroughly.
The decision to present the papers in their uncut version is commendable, even though most have been published previously in one form or another. Yet this same point raises my initial reservation about the volume. The studies attempt to summarize “. . . the main chapters in the lives of the Jews of Germany,” as it states in the preface; however, articles that were published over two decades ago are better suited to their own time than to ours. Moreover, with the use of the word “articles,” I am substantially off the mark. These are not articles in the usual sense, since most of them span dozens of pages—and those of Barkai, Cochavi, and Margaliot run to more than 100 pages each. Sections have been published previously in Hebrew and other languages, and one of the prominent shortcomings of the volume is the absence of any indication of original publication dates. True, the publication date of an article does not necessarily indicate antiquated research methods, but scholarship in the areas covered—foremost the study of the organizational structure of German Jewry—has not been stagnant. Except for the fact that this is the first publication of these articles in a Hebrew-language collection, there is no real reason to republish them today. In addition, one is acutely aware of the lack of an up-to-date editors’ introduction that would acquaint readers with newer scholarship dealing with German Jewry during the Weimar and Nazi periods. There is no doubt that this period is one of the foci of research in Israel, the Anglophone countries, and Germany, and the fruits of that scholarship cast a shadow over everything presented in this collection. At the very least it would have been appropriate to add a section in the introduction to bring the readers up to date on the strides that have been made in the methodological and research in recent years.
Since the volume was published in Hebrew, I shall refer readers to recent studies in Hebrew that may shed new light on most of the articles in the collection. The studies by Gabriel Alexander, Jacob Borut, Michael Brenner, Derrek Georg, Eliezer Domke, Yfaat Weiss, Doron Niederland, Claudia Prestel, and Anthony Kauders are only a few examples of recent modern research by Israeli and non-Israeli scholars whose conclusions could have been incorporated into the introduction. In any event, the translation and publication of articles by the young scholars listed above and of German and American researchers would have been a worthy complement to the present collection.
In order to get a more complete picture of the history of German Jewry, therefore, one must read, in tandem with almost every article, another more recent study. Several such studies are mentioned below as “recommended reading.” The collection also sorely lacks an up-to-date bibliography and a chronological table, which would have brought some order to the plethora of dates and events presented in the articles in a somewhat helter-skelter fashion.
The articles lead to several main conclusions. A central recurrent motif is the Jews’ “desire” to cooperate with the Nazi regime until almost the last moment in 1939. True, one should not disregard the constraints that affected the Jewish leadership, but time and again we witness the gloomy picture of contacts between German-Jewish leaders and Nazi leaders, except for Hitler (see, for example, pp. 97–98, 137–138, and 217). Further research is needed on the extent to which this cooperation may also have stemmed from a certain identification with several goals of Nazi policy, chiefly in foreign affairs. As Avraham Margaliot notes, “just as the faith of the Jewish organizations in the authority of state agencies never flagged, neither did their sense of affiliation with Germany waver” (p. 217).
Perhaps as a salient example of this faith, one should read the last article in the collection, “Jews in the Resistance Movement in Nazi Germany” by Konrad Kwiet. As the shortest chapter in the book, its length may reflect the reality of the Third Reich if one were to compare Jewish resistance to that of the Communists and the Socialists. I do not mean to compare the compass of Jewish resistance with that of the Communists. Naturally, the issue involves patterns of social action that originate in totally different ideological sources and day-to-day constraints. The chapter does, however, reflect the antiquated use of the concept of “protest.” Social protest or resistance (Widerstand) is one of the socio-cultural categories that scholars all over the world use today to describe the (admittedly few) manifestations of resistance to the Nazis.6 Kwiet’s main thesis (correct as far as it goes) that organized resistance was impossible and his fixation on Jewish organizations and their protest writings, rather than on the many other cultural forms of this protestresistance, inspire melancholy reflections both as to his methodology and about the feebleness of the protest he describes. There are many forms of protest against a totalitarian regime. For example, in the German experience of two dictatorships—the Nazi and the East German Communist—there evolved various ways, even without central organization.
Indeed, the methodology of several of the authors belongs to the finest traditions of the history of organizations (“administrative history”); most of them read somewhat tediously. Does it really take fifty pages to scrutinize the technical details of the regional umbrella organizations of German Jewry? Would it not have been preferable to tackle the cultural fragmentation and the regional-culture uniqueness of Jews in the various districts of Germany in the 1930s—a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be addressed? Do we really need almost 100 pages extolling the culture of German Jews, but nary a word about Jewish mass culture, daily customs, religious celebrations, sports in the Jewish community, the culture of women and children, and other important elements in the lives of German Jews? This seems to me no less important than “the four symphony orchestras, opera company, several professional choruses, and dozens of chamber orchestras . . .” (p. 778).
Not only does the failure to deal with mass culture stand out in view of what is going on today in the scholarly world, so does the lack of attention to women. The article gives the impression that only Jewish boys grew up in Germany, that only men participated in the resistance, that only male pupils were enrolled in the Jewish school system, that only male artists performed in the concerts and the opera productions, but no Jewish women. Thus a large segment of German Jewry is totally ignored. Marion Kaplan’s new study on Jewish women in the Third Reich7 exemplifies scholarship on this social group and should be read alongside many of the articles in the collection under review here.
Education, too, is approached differently today. We now know that Weimar educational trends, like the Volkshochschule, had a powerful influence on the patterns of Jewish and non-Jewish education during the Weimar years and under the Third Reich. There should, therefore, have been an extensive discussion of education before 1933, and Michael Brenner’s trail-blazing book could have been mentioned, if only in a footnote or in the preface.
Another conclusion that may be read between the lines of this volume is that German Jewry began to decline even before the Third Reich. Moshe Zimmermann analyzed these trends in his recent study of German Jewry between 1914 and 1945, and it, too, should be read alongside the collection. An explicit conjecture about the decline of German Jewry even before 1933, appears only in Avraham Barkai’s superb article, possibly the best in the collection. It is, in fact, not an article but a 120-page monograph on the struggle for economic survival. Barkai’s quotation from the German historian Wilhelm Treue is chilling, given our knowledge of the fate of German Jewry: “. . . If [Hitler] had managed to be patient . . . he would have had the privilege of witnessing the decline of Jewry naturally.” Barkai correctly notes that this basic premise is “on target” (p. 474). His general economic and social analysis of the Jewish community, without providing unnecessary minutiae, clearly sketches the process of the impoverishment of German Jewry; this was perhaps the key process, from their perspective, until 1938. He is right when he argues that “it was clear to anyone with eyes in his head that German Jewry was facing economic liquidation” (p. 547). True, the daily reality in the Third Reich entailed the decline of the Jews—by means of boycotts, Aryanization, and dismissal from work—but the article views this bitter and grim experience only as one phase in a lengthy process of gradual deterioration. This could be dated to the early 1920s, with the decline of the entire German bourgeoisie. Barkai’s argument is a bold interpretation. There is no doubt that publication of this article in Hebrew, based on a book published in German about a decade ago, is the most important contribution that this volume makes to Israeli scholarship.
Over the past decade, copious material on modern German history has been uncovered in archives in Moscow and eastern Germany, providing new revelations about antisemitism in Germany and the Jews’ reaction to it in the first half of the twentieth-century. Jehuda Reinharz’s article about the response of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens) to Weimar antisemitism, written in the early 1970s, should be read in light of these disclosures. Reinharz’s claim that “the Zionist movement arose in response to the persecution of the Jews of Russia and Poland and the ascent of antisemitism in Germany itself” (p. 17), based on Richard Lichtheim’s 1951 book, requires some revision. Today we know a great deal about German antisemitism and the changes in the organizational patterns of both German and Jewish society in the late nineteenth century. Jacob Borut’s pioneering study about the relations between the two societies and their organizational patterns at that time should be read alongside Reinharz’s article. We now know that German antisemitism in the Weimar era was stronger than is described in the scholarly literature, that it was widespread beyond the early years of the Republic, and that it was prevalent among many who were not Nazi sympathizers. Reinharz deals mainly with the response of the Zionist institutions to this antisemitism. His study illuminates their inability to understand antisemitism as a phenomenon in and of itself.
All the articles in History of the Holocaust—Germany deal with “politics as viewed from above” and with high culture. They are a good example of the well-known assumption held by historians, sociologists, and administrators about the gap between the leaders and the members of an organization. The fact that the national representative body of the Jews of Germany (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden) published a manifesto or order is no indication of what was actually going on among the membership or how the order was received and implemented. Nothing in the volume provides a concrete indication of how German Jews “really” felt about the cultural heterogeneity, social pluralism, and variety of experiences that this community underwent. Undoubtedly, there is further room for study as to the living patterns of the Jews in Nazi Germany so as to offer a more complete picture of a vanished world. This is not necessarily the traditional, hegemonic portrait that the collection seeks to display, which revolves around the Jews’ organization in a single central authority, the Reichsvertretung. One interesting though undoubtedly controversial point could produce studies about those Jews who were imbued with such strong German nationalism that they greeted the Nazis’ rise to power with some apprehension but also noted the historical and national potential of the National-Socialist revolution. This is one example of what could serve as a point of departure that would stand in sharp contrast to the findings in this collection.
Source: Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 27, (1999), pp. 473-483
