from Jewish Social Studies Volume 9, Number 1
Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities, and Community
Marion Kaplan
Permission to CopyYou may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:
Copyright Clearance CenterFor other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923 FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com
In the course of emancipation in Central Europe, as some have argued, Jews plunged headlong into "assimilation," absorbing West European culture as they integrated into their nation states.1 Judaism lost its hold, allegedly evolving or declining--depending on one's viewpoint--into a religious creed rather than an all-enveloping environment.
We may modify these assumptions by pointing to the rich variety of Judaisms that evolved in Imperial Germany. Using the perspective of a school of history known in Germany as Alltagsgeschichte,2 the history of everyday life, we can focus on how changing structures (such as urbanization) and cultural shifts affect subjective experiences. Alltagsge‚schichte reveals the qualitative aspects of ordinary people's existence--their emotions, perceptions, and mentalities. It can illuminate the multiple ways in which individuals interpreted and refashioned their religious beliefs and behaviors.3
Jewish religious life changed unevenly, incorporating a multiplicity of voices and practices in perpetual motion. Two major developments within Judaism, themselves products of their changing times, provided the setting within which Jews could choose how they wished to worship and how they wished to manage their religious lives outside the synagogue: the Reform Movement, which spanned the nineteenth century and attracted increasing numbers of German Jews;4 and modern Orthodoxy, which remained a "viable religious movement almost everywhere in Germany for most of the century."5 Moreover, Jewish migration to urban centers shifted the setting of Jewish life away from small towns and villages where tradition lasted longer. That generalization notwithstanding, even village behavior was unpredictable. A number of Reform communities in the 1840s had switched to Orthodox rabbis in the twentieth century.6
If, to some extent, the religious cohesiveness of small communities, or "milieu religiosity," gave way to an "individualistic religiosity,"7 there was actually a complicated relationship between the two. Individuals created their own Judaism, interacting with their surroundings but not tyrannized by them, reflecting the role, ultimately, of personal choices. Indeed, individuals within the very same family set out in different directions. Gershom Scholem's father celebrated Christmas, and his uncle observed Hanukkah. Of four brothers, Gershom chose Zionism, another became a communist and an atheist, another a German nationalist who distanced himself from Jewish tradition, and the fourth a member of the Democratic Club.8 Preserving Jewish tradition was an intensely private decision.
How did individuals manifest this diversity? This article will attempt an answer by focusing on personal and spontaneous expressions of faith or heritage. It analyzes milieus in which practice9 continued or diminished, attempting to look at the attachments of individuals to their religion even as these attachments changed over the course of a person's lifetime. In so doing, we may shed light on the question of what constitutes modern religion.
Recasting Tradition
The nineteenth century witnessed the gradual privatization of religion among most Germans, especially in the cities. Educated urbanites subscribed to a "secular religion," a Bildungsreligion, originating in the German Enlightenment attempt to interpret divine revelation on the basis of reason and on the notion of a personal, inner process of development.10 Whereas "God was indeed 'dead' for the educated city-dweller of Protestant Germany,"11 religion was not. Between 1870 and 1880, Protestant weekly churchgoing reached its lowest rates of the century,12 but "each person made up his own religion," participating in life-cycle events, home rituals, and organizations with a religious character.13
Similarly, Judaism lost its spiritual power to regulate the lives of many, but the vast majority of Jews did not abandon Judaism. Indeed, Jews evinced a profound attachment to German Enlightenment traditions. However, they were also drawn by an equally powerful attraction: the desire to retain their Jewish identities. Juggling both, late- nineteenth-century Jews appropriated German bourgeois culture while maintaining elements of traditional religious beliefs, practices, family, and (increasingly voluntary) communal commitments.
Some, like their non-Jewish counterparts, adopted a Bildungsreligion, modernizing or relinquishing some religious practices. They redefined "Judaism" and what it meant to be "Jewish." Combinations of faith and secularism--the "freethinker" who fasted on the high holidays and whose wife maintained the Sabbath14were fairly typical among German Jews. In fact, the diversity of expressions characteristic of modern Judaism may have been born in Imperial Germany. Arnold Eisen has suggested that "Jews for the most part navigated their way through modernity's unfamiliar terrain much as we do today: via eclectic patterns of observance and varied, often individual, sets of meanings discovered in those patterns or associated with them."15 This is an apt description of Jewish religious life in Imperial Germany.
Although it is impossible to gauge precisely the extent of religious practice among Jews, there are some general external guideposts. Whether someone maintained the laws of kashrut (dietary laws), attended synagogue regularly, and observed holidays indicated some degree of devotion. But every practice can be interpreted in multiple ways--theological, familial, communal, or simply traditional. Does maintenance of ritual indicate deep faith, or did those who practiced rituals do so out of "consideration for their reputations and relatives . . . fear or habit?"16 Conversely, "a good deal of religious consciousness and sentiment can live on without necessarily finding expression in socially observable conduct."17 Did "three-day Jews" (who frequented synagogue only on the high holidays) for example, lose all attachment to Judaism? To the synagogue as a place for spiritual expression? Or to spirituality as such?
Synagogue attendance (like church-going for Christians), expressed spirituality for some, habit for others, and, for many, a combination of both that also changed over time. As a child, Alex Bein attended a Liberal Nuremberg synagogue regularly. Subsequently, his faith waned, but "I was always edified by the aesthetic of the room . . . also . . . the sermons . . . with their eloquent connection between traditional learning and modern Bildung."18 Bein wondered, though, whether the service had lacked "simple religiosity." More critically, Jakob Wassermann saw synagogue services as a "noisy routine of drill," complaining bitterly of "a gathering without devotion."19
Wassermann may have been right for some. Others eschewed regular services but continued to experience their devotion privately. The inward-looking nature of Bildung, contemporary Lutheranism's emphasis on morality above dogma, and Pietism's stress on the "inner self"20 provided a context in which some Jews reduced their practice but maintained--maybe even increased--their faith. And, to the extent that individualism began to replace community--in all religions--faith may have replaced practice. Berthold Freudenthal (born 1873) provides a test case. Superficially, he appeared to lack devotion, attending his Frankfurt synagogue only on the high holidays.21 His practice did not, however, correspond to a decline in beliefs, defined either as feelings or convictions. He prayed nightly and recorded an ongoing monologue to God in his diary, thanking God for a career promotion and praying for a German victory in World War I.22
Similarly, in the 1870s, Philippine Landau's family in Worms limited its observance to three days.23 Like many Jews of her generation, she tended to use the Yom Kippur fast to gauge religiosity. Although Jews might be lax about kashrut or the Sabbath, they generally complied longer with the obligation to fast. The Landaus eventually gave it up but with ambivalence: their meals were "somewhat abridged," because "by every right we actually should have been fasting." Moreover, "an aura of sacredness and deep solemnity" still hovered over their house and, in synagogue, "I was in an enchanted, better world, full of holiness. . . . I felt strangely purified and lifted up."24 Performing or ignoring rituals allowed Jews to express "a variety of meanings--whether to [themselves], to fellow Jews, or to Gentiles."25
Families, Gender, and Judaism
Alongside the synagogue, Jewish leaders pointed to the family as crucial in fostering Judaism.26 Families mediated Judaism on a daily, personal basis: "what parents gave their children . . . wasn't religiosity, nor knowledge, but their lived lives."27 This meant that men and women passed on gendered traditions deeply embedded in Judaism: women focused on the home while men "counted" in public expressions of religion.
The public and private, however, needed each other. The Sabbath and holidays required home and synagogue observances. A kosher home entailed the diligence of women and men. Food symbolized cultural continuities or breaks and set the tone of the household.28 But kosher meals also required public arrangements consisting of (male) rabbis to resolve questions regarding food rituals, (male) butchers, who could ritually slaughter meat,29 and (mostly male) merchants whom one could trust to sell kosher foods. The public and private reinforced Jewish life.
When (male) synagogue attendance began to decline, Judaism, by default, shifted its focus (though not its theology) to revolve around women's domestic practice.30 However, the home alone could not sustain Judaism. Curt Rosenberg, born in Berlin in 1876, learned little of his religion except the prayers his mother had taught him and without which he could not fall asleep. His grandmother prayed every morning, but this impressed him far less than the Christian prayers that started his school day and the Christian tunes "that I liked a lot and . . . still know by heart."31 Mothers who hoped to imbue their children with a religious spirit faced an uphill battle, one that many lost. The philosopher Edith Stein reported that her mother kept Jewish practices, much to the amusement of her siblings. The children negotiated for shorter seders with her, and she capitulated. Stein, who later became a Carmelite nun, was murdered by the Nazis as a Jew.32
Often the privatization of religion coincided with its marginalization because women's activities and beliefs did not carry as much respect as that of men. Moreover, when men lost interest in passing on the more formal aspects of Judaism (generally to their sons), children no longer understood its intellectual content and saw their mothers' practices as empty.33 Piety became a "feminine" attribute and was devalued as such. Feminist leaders like Bertha Pappenheim understood this and encouraged women to educate themselves in Judaism (despite, as she noted, the texts' male perspectives). She hoped that women's piety combined with new knowledge would revitalize Judaism and enhance women's status.34
Differences between male and female observance notwithstanding, each succeeding generation practiced ever fewer rituals.35 For example, when village boys found lodgings in nearby cities to study at the Gymnasium, their parents tried to find them kosher pensions or send kosher food with them.36 Nevertheless, many of the young gave up this practice.37 Around 1905, an urban child found her provincial grandmother wearing a wig (an Orthodox requirement for married women), her otherwise-observant aunt with no hair covering at all,38 and her small cousins dressed in naval outfits in imitation of the Emperor's family.39
Orthodoxy, too, despite its self-image as "bearer and guardian of the ancient Jewish faith and tradition," had evolved over time.40 Also, membership in an Orthodox synagogue did not prove private loyalty to reli‚gious law: "Some people were more or less consistent in their attendance at public weekday prayer, others less so. Not everyone was equally punctilious in the choice of a future son-in-law." Moreover, the birthrate among Orthodox Jews declined, an indication that many were using birth control despite Orthodox teachings against it.41 Nor did Orthodox East European immigrant Jews always perpetuate their ways.42
One woman, whose sisters all acceded to marriages arranged by their Orthodox father, a rabbi, broke from her family to become a communist. Gender and generation influenced religiosity, but location probably had equal or greater power.
Location, Location, Location
Location--geographically and in one's own life cycle--played a significant role in an individual's connection to Judaism. In villages and small towns, everyday life and traditional Judaism complemented each other more easily than in cities. This period witnessed an extraordinarily rapid rate of Jewish urbanization. In 1871, about 30 percent of Jews lived in big cities, but by 1910 almost 70 percent did. Jews who migrated to cities left the more stringent degrees of religious compliance behind them-- or had already given them up. Often (but not always) those who achieved the most financial and social success absorbed urban secular culture fastest.43
The "sinking relevance of holidays and fasting days" resulted not only from the secularism and seductions of urban life but also from interest in such philosophers as Darwin, Haeckel, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Hermann Cohen.44 Margarete Sallis's parents no longer observed religious practices because "they were deeply influenced by the spirit of the times; they had read 'enlightened' books like Haeckel . . . and the socialists, and their protest was not as such against Judaism but against religion in general."45
German Jewry supported about 1,855 synagogues in 1903.46 These ranged from grand and conspicuous ones, like the New Synagogue in Berlin,47 the largest synagogue in the world upon its completion in 1866, to tiny, makeshift ones, like two rooms above a stable where one could hear the mooing of the cows as congregants prayed.48 Leadership, too, varied. In 1905, 1,101 cantors and only 217 rabbis officiated in Germany. The greatest number of rabbis, cantors, and religious teachers per capita could be found in Alsace-Lorraine, Württemberg, and Bavaria.49 Similar to Protestants, urban Jews did not expand the number of their religious leaders proportionately to their growth in population. There were fewer leaders per capita, but urban Jews had easier access to them than rural Jews, if they cared to seek them out.50
Urban synagogues tried to reach out to cosmopolitan populations, attempting an "intensification and shortening" of the service.51 Nevertheless, in Berlin, the congregation only filled the 3,000 seats of the New Synagogue on the high holidays.52 In contrast, rural communities of between 100 and 300 people held daily services and Jews in larger towns frequented services weekly.53 The small size of villages and towns meant that most Jews saw each other commemorate the Sabbath or holidays and may have felt social pressure to join in. Large cities, more anonymous, provided cover for those no longer interested.
Rural and small-town Judaism persisted as an organic part of the landscape. Jews observed the weekly and annual holidays openly, in full view of their non-Jewish neighbors, attesting to a comfort level rarely experienced before.54 In towns such as Worms, Landau noticed festively dressed Jews outside the synagogue "simply taking a break from worship and spending some time in the open air."55 During Purim, the most public festival, the Jews of Gailingen, the largest Jewish rural community in Baden, held parades dressed in their holiday costumes.56 Village Jews also celebrated Sukkot publicly, building a sukkah near their homes and eating meals there, in full public view.57
Life-cycle rituals concerning birth, coming-of-age ceremonies, marriage, or death appeared to have an even more tenacious hold than holidays. At the intersection of family and life cycle, they appealed to pious and secular Jews alike. In villages, "usages that had a family connotation, continued to be strictly upheld."58 In cities, too, Jews tended to follow life-cycle conventions, if not always the letter of the law. The birth of a boy meant that his family celebrated the Brit milah, his circumcision, as a religious initiation.59 The birth of a girl brought far less excitement and almost no communal ritual.60
Namings connected families to previous generations and to religious traditions as parents passed on the Hebrew names of their ancestors to their newborns. Namings also confronted Jews directly with the vexed issue of tradition versus acculturation as families began to pass on secular first names--or "Germanized" old Jewish names. Sometimes only a first letter remained as a reminder of the person after whom the child had been named.61 Jewish parents (like non-Jews) "were quicker to release their female descendants from the constraint of traditions of names."62 Jews preferred boys' names such as Moritz, Adolf, or Hermann to those of their own or their parents' generation, such as Isidor, Abraham, or Moses. Urban and professional Jews, especially, were extremely sensitive to an "antisemitism through polemics against names."63 The more humble Jewish population followed at a distance, but follow they did. In a Hessian village in the 1880s, the local Jewish teacher who also ran the synagogue services insisted that newborns be given modern names, like Isidor instead of Itzig. The latter would "only bring the child ridicule."64
The male coming of age ceremony, the bar mitzvah, was de rigueur even among "three-day Jews." Another chance to reaffirm family and community, it was celebrated in country and city. At 13, the age of religious responsibility, the boy prayed in front of the congregation during the Sabbath services and attained religious manhood. Of course, boys did not always understand the meaning of their bar mitzvah, and city boys appear more removed from its significance than their country cousins. In Breslau in 1897, Adolf Riesenfeld underwent hasty tutoring and later wrote: "I rapidly read off the incomprehensible Hebrew words without getting stuck, and then . . . at home . . . gifts were showered upon me."65
Marriages not only marked important life-cycle events but also merged families and communities. Hence the interest in arranging "appropriate" unions and the joy in intrafaith marriages, which would en‚sure Jewish continuity. In the countryside, marriage partners rarely came from the same town. Thus, celebrations, even in tiny villages, tended to be large and cosmopolitan by rural standards. In Baden, for example, two wedding invitation lists from the village of Kippenheim in 1896–97 show visitors from "outside," including Karlsruhe, Erfurt, and Paris.66 Urban weddings tended to be more elaborate, more extravagant, and less kosher.67
Funerals offered occasions for Jews to come together to fulfill religious precepts as well as to show familial and communal solidarity. Death occurred at home with doctors increasingly in attendance,68 but nurses and--most often--relatives provided sick care.69 When Lily Pincus's father lay dying in 1916, a cousin traveled to Berlin to help nurse him. His three children attended him regularly, sometimes reading him stories.70 In villages, the (male or female) Hevrah Kadishah (Holy Burial Society) took over the death watch and the religious rites, including cleaning, guarding, and dressing the body. The practice continued well into the twentieth century, although some communities had hired undertakers earlier.71 Urban Jews, too, could elect to have professionals intervene rather than burial societies. Death brought even secular urban families back to traditional rituals. When Alice Salomon's father died (1886), they hired a rabbi who led the funeral procession of horse-drawn coaches.72
The Jewish calendar and Jewish laws did not fare as well as life-cycle rituals, although Jews adhered to these traditions more carefully in rural than in urban areas. A Jewish villager insisted, "No one doubted that every village Jew kept a kosher home,"73 and kosher butchers could count on regular customers.74 These observations notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to assume uniform devotion.
We can find a multiplicity of customs among villages.75 Small, isolated villages differed markedly. In parts of Bavaria and Hesse, village Jews strictly observed the Sabbath, kosher laws, and the ritual bath, whereas in parts of rural Westphalia and the Rhineland Jews were less rigorous, keeping mainly the high holidays and rites of passage.76 Hugo Mandelbaum's community of 18 Jewish families in Geroda (Lower Franconia) observed the Sabbath. When he attended middle school a short way from home in rural Buttenhausen (Württemberg), a community of 40 Jewish families, he found only two still observing the Sabbath. There, the Jewish horse dealers paraded their newly purchased horses through town on Saturdays.77
Even within the same small community, observance showed great diversity. All Jews prayed together since they could only support one synagogue, yet religious demarcations existed. Sometimes these were in the form of sehr fromm (very religious or very observant), nicht besonders fromm (not especially religious), and nicht so kosher (a bit lax),78 or sehr fromm, fromm, and liberal. The last term connoted adherence to Reform Judaism.79
What did this multiplicity of behaviors look like in daily practice? It appears that Jews gave up ritual purity first. By the turn of the century, the mikvah, or ritual bath, had fallen into general disuse. Only 55 percent of communities maintained one at all,80 and, except for the Orthodox prayer book, women's prayer books no longer mentioned it.81 Food rituals and Sabbath observance lasted longer but Jews treated them with great individuality. One man (born 1889 in Bavaria), who considered his home "religious," noted that his parents kept kosher and did not work on the Sabbath, but other families interpreted "work" far more strictly.82
In the cities, many of the divisions already visible among rural Jews intensified. Most communities split between Orthodox and Liberal (the adherents of Reform), not to mention a growing number of secular Jews.83 Although the Prussian law of 1876 made secession from the synagogal community possible without loss of membership in the Jewish religion, giving Orthodoxy new legal and political powers, only about 15 percent of German Jews could still be considered Orthodox by 1900.
Redefining Judaism
Measured in lagging synagogue attendance or in rising rates of inter‚marriage or conversion, "Judaism" as a practice declined, especially in the cities. Values and beliefs, however, cannot be measured as easily. Urban Jews, in particular, turned Judaism into a form of "ethnic encounter"--ceremonies formerly attached almost entirely to religious practice evolved into family occasions and community events.84
Family (and Food)
For urban, increasingly secular Jews, the family provided a crucial location for Jewish observance, a central form of religious activity, and, indeed, a replacement for it. Similar to many Christian families in which "[t]he family honored Christian holidays as a way of celebrating itself,"85 many Jews experienced the Sabbath and holidays as familial celebrations, often around the table. In the 1880s, a Berlin woman recalled "a strict commandment of family togetherness" for Friday night dinners.86 Other families gathered on Friday evenings without any rituals at all, but the two elements--family meals and religion/ethnicity--cannot be disentangled. Even when Jews reduced the holidays they celebrated, they attempted to commemorate the major holidays with a family reunion and a traditional meal, a form of "gastronomic Judaism."87 As Jews minimized religious content, these holidays provided a way of reaffirming the family and its group heritage. The family became a cornerstone of a more secular version of Judaism,88 what George Mosse called the "embourgeoisement of Jewish piety."89
The extended family and the older generations also served as bridges to traditional Judaism. Rural relatives provided traditional models and meals for urban visitors. A child from Hamburg participated with rural cousins in Sabbath rituals that she had never seen practiced at home.90 In the 1890s, a boy in Munich noted that his grandfather preferred an allegedly more kosher restaurant than did his parents.91 Families held celebrations in kosher restaurants or hotels so that the entire family--those who observed kashrut and those who did not--could gather.92
Although most urban Jews no longer observed kashrut,93 they maintained food traditions to appease older generations, to ease their own consciences, or from habit. Gender, too, played a role, with women insisting on maintaining kosher kitchens longer than their husbands or children.94 Contemporaries approached these complicated and symbolic compromises--some of which may baffle us--with a sense of humor or irony. Most commonly, children of religious Jews maintained a kosher kitchen so that their parents would agree to eat in their homes.95 But this could bring its own strange twists. In Breslau, for example, the Hirschberg family kept a kosher kitchen out of respect for the grandmother, a pious woman whose religiosity amused her husband. Heeding the stricture to separate milk and meat, however, did not discourage the rest of the family from eating pork on separate plates.96
Similarly, traditional Jewish recipes might include nonkosher ingredients. Around 1900, one of Victor Klemperer's friends took great pride in cooking the traditional Sabbath casserole. She had learned to prepare the meal as the daughter of the Jewish teacher in Hildesheim.
When Klemperer asked her for the recipe, she replied: "This is the ritual way of making it . . . and that is how I ate it in my parents' home . . . but I, myself, always add a ham bone to it."97
A sense of ambivalence pervades these stories: the legitimacy of some observance lingered among Jews as they remodeled the practice.98 In fact, did fewer requisites perhaps help to keep the legitimacy intact?99 Even secular, intermarried Jews occasionally observed Jewish food customs in their daily lives, especially around holidays when the extended family gathered.100 Some intermarried Jewish women still cooked traditional holiday meals, and a number of mixed families celebrated all the important Jewish holidays alongside Easter and Christmas. The son of one such union noted that "[we] celebrated the Jewish holidays by eating," and another assumed that the Easter bunny was Jewish because the eggs he found in his garden had been protected by shreds of the same paper in which his matzos were normally wrapped.101 Foods as "ethnic emblems"102 provide clues as to changing norms, but more important than the food itself was the site of celebration, the family.
Bildung and Community
Urban Jews appropriated not only family but also Bildung as a cornerstone of their Judaism. An entrée into middle-class respectability, Bildung--education and cultivation--became a secular version of religion. For many Jews it became "synonymous with their Jewishness."103 Bildung allowed Jews to merge Jewish traditions of learning with secular appreciation of German language, literature, and etiquette. Mosse concluded that "Bildung . . . was transformed into a kind of religion--the worship of the true, the good, and the beautiful."104 Increasingly, love of literature, music, and theater replaced purely Jewish learning. In his will, Adolf Fr–hlich, born in 1872, recommended Goethe's autobiography, Truth and Poetry, and his novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, to his children.105 Orthodox families, too, embraced German culture. Sabbath meals followed traditional ritual, but occasionally there might also be a reading from a German book, and "[t]he bookshelves of many Orthodox Jewish homes were likely to hold incomparably more German books--Schiller and Goethe were particular favorites--than books in Hebrew."106
The diary of Helene Eyck, a Berlin mother of six, offers a glimpse into the inner world of someone for whom Bildung and piety were intertwined. The family belonged to a synagogue in Berlin, but the essence of Eyck's spirituality can be seen in her diary entry of May 1895. She prayed that Lilli, her adorable two-year-old, remain loving and sweet. Instead of a Hebrew benediction in transliteration or in German translation, she wrote: "It seems as though I must lay then, My hand upon thy brow, Praying that God may preserve thee, As pure and fair as now."107 Her words came from Heine's "Thou art so like a flower," a poem Eyck had probably memorized at school or knew from musical compositions by, among others, Franz Liszt or Robert Schumann.
Eyck exemplified some of the typical incongruities of Jews in the process of secularization. Just as casually as she mentioned one of her children eating ham, she wrote about cooking "ritually prepared fish" for Friday evenings,108 considering Friday a "half holiday."109 Although she never mentioned attending synagogue, she continually referred to a very personal God. She taught each of her children to pray in a meaningful manner, admonishing them when they simply droned on: "that's not how one prays to our dear God."110 She also wanted her sons to begin Hebrew lessons when they were four and five. Since her husband opposed this idea, she justified it as an act of deference toward his parents.111 The boys eventually did learn Hebrew, and the second son proved committed enough to Judaism and to his family to say the mourner's prayer daily for months after his grandfather's death.112 Her apparent interest in their Jewish knowledge notwithstanding, Eyck cast her sons' bar mitzvahs as family festivities.113 In Eyck, a religion of Bildung blended with family meals on the Sabbath and the importance of Hebrew (for her sons). Feelings, convictions, and allegiances lingered long after ritual had waned: "the blandly generic term secular Jew gives no indication of the richly nuanced variety within the species."114
Jewish local, regional, national, and international voluntary organizations reinforced and extended the impact of family and Bildung on Jewish identity.115 Jewish organizational life experienced a revitalization, coinciding with an era of explosive associational growth in late- nineteenth-century Germany. Jews formed cultural, political, and self-defense associations. By the turn of the century, 12 national organizations stretched across Germany, and 312 major Jewish associations, not including myriad local ones, flourished there.116 The Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens (founded 1893), the major Jewish defense organization, attracting over 100,000 Jews, stressed not only its "Germanness" but also became "intensely preoccupied with strengthening the sense of Jewish identity."117 Moreover, the small Zionist movement found adherents among young German Jews and East European immigrants.118 When counting national, regional, and local groups, approximately 5,000 Jewish clubs thrived in Germany, with tens of thousands of members. They offered conviviality as well as the opportunity to pursue Jewish interests.
On a grassroots level, Jews embraced the mitsvah, or commandment, of charity. In the 1880s and 1890s, this included very personal ministrations as well as institution building. In the town of Allenstein (East Prussia), the women's group, founded in 1879, intended to help other Jewish women "who through no fault of their own" had fallen into poverty.119 In cities, too, care could be very personal. In Stettin, Max Daniel's father brought poor members of the synagogue home for dinner every Friday night and, with the help of other Jews, bought a four-story shelter for Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms. Seven women volunteered to cook for the refugees.120
Even in small, relatively isolated communities, Jews conceived of themselves as part of a supralocal community. In Allenstein, for example, the local Jewish community received entreaties from poorer communities and individuals in the region.121 These calls for help presumed that Jews would demonstrate solidarity.122 Cries for assistance came from afar as well. In 1877, the international Alliance Israélite Universelle sent an appeal to Jewish communities to help Ottoman Jews affected by the third Russo-Turkish war (1877–78).123 In 1881, local communities responded to the pogroms in Russia.124 In 1889, a committee of Berlin Jews requested money for Ottoman Jews dying of cholera in Baghdad.125 Palestine, too, belonged to the extended community: in 1889, German Jews sent money for matzos to needy Jews in Jerusalem.126 They acknowledged responsibility--religious and social--for a far-reaching community of Jews.
For some individuals, Jewish associations fulfilled a religious precept. For others, associational life provided the community they no longer sought from the synagogue alone. Such activity "became their principal mode of Jewish identification."127 In the 1880s, Paul Mühsam's father regularly attended Jewish community meetings, "but he never went to services."128 Similar to Christians, who manifested their (nonchurch-going) allegiance to Christianity by participating in a wide range of charitable organizations "pursued in a Christian spirit,"129 Jewish private charities provided a voluntary forum in which to express loyalty to the faith and the community. They created structures that held Jews together. Recognizing this, one observer wrote: "The more women and men . . . participate in organizational life, the more people remain interested in Jewish matters, [the more] their joy in belonging, [the more] their feelings of solidarity are strengthened."130
A lively Jewish press and charitable institutions also provided group cohesion and demonstrated concern for Judaism. Even before the establishment of most national organizations, Jews developed a wide array of newspapers. These papers never replaced the local or national German press, but they revealed an interest in Jewish communal, cultural, and religious affairs. Over 30 newspapers and newsletters enlivened Jewish reading and included family and youth, Orthodox and Liberal, teachers' and gymnasts', and bibliographical and literary periodicals.131
Temptations and Breaks
The Nanny and the Christmas Tree
Family, Bildung, and community helped recast and reinforce modern Judaism, in its religious and secular variants, but a Christian world, its symbols and holidays, surrounded and penetrated the Jewish milieu. Jewish children learned Christian stories and songs in public school, and Jewish adults had to close their shops on the Christian day of rest. Many experienced firsthand contact with Christian belief and practice through Christian nannies and household help.132
Children grasped that their nannies favored Christianity. Jakob Wassermann's nanny hugged him and said, "You have a Christian heart!" At the same moment that he felt her love, this compliment frightened him because it demeaned his Jewishness.133 Some household helpers openly indicted Judaism. Kurt Blumenfeld recalled the Catholic maid telling him that she went to confession because of her sin--serving Jews. When he asked why that was a sin, she responded: "The Jews crucified Christ!"134 Nannies could also terrify children with Christian folktales.135
Domestics often familiarized their charges with Christianity.136 When the daughter of a rabbi begged to be brought to church just once, her caretaker complied. The girl "spoke to God, like I did in the temple, and I was certain that he heard me exactly [as clearly] here as there."137 Another child compared boring visits to her grandfather's synagogue with her nanny's "mysterious" church services.138 Sometimes Jewish children learned Christian bedtime prayers without realizing the origin of the rhymes. Usually words about Christ had been changed to more neutral ones about heaven.139
Christian household helpers also introduced children to Christmas. As Christmas became the central German bourgeois family celebration, replete with gifts and with its original religious meaning diminished,140 the Christmas tree made its entrée into a number of Jewish homes. Memoirs illustrate families that eschewed a tree but exchanged presents on Christmas,141 those who had a Christmas tree "for the help" but still celebrated Hanukkah,142 and those who celebrated Christmas with a tree and gifts but devoid of Christ.
Jews who displayed trees did not always make the transition easily. Some families resisted for a time, then bought them "for the servants" and only later admitted to their own pleasure. Moreover, Jewish families revealed a variety of attitudes toward these trees, reflected for example on a linguistic level. Most referred to the Christmas tree as the "tree with lights" (Lichterbaum) or the Christmas tree (Weihnachtsbaum) rather than the "Christ tree" (Christbaum).143 Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, did not care what label he used for his tree: "as far as I'm concerned they can call it the Hanukkah tree."144
Jews (like many secular Christians) stripped the tree of Christian symbolism, some pointing to ancient festivals, others to the winter solstice. In the 1880s, a Frankfurt Jewish woman decorated the room with mistletoe and "heathen and pre-Christian" palm and pine branches. She did not allow standard Christmas decorations.145 Most Jews with trees, however, conflated their tree with Germanness. Toni Ehrlich (1880s) celebrated a "German holiday," a "northern winter festival," seeing the tree as a hallmark of Germanness.146 Gershom Scholem's family (1900– 1910) also joined in a "German folk festival" as Germans.147
Memoirs identify consideration for Christian personnel as the reason--or rationalization--for the tree.148 Scholem recalled the "big distribution of presents for servants, relatives and friends" and an aunt who played "Silent Night, Holy Night" for the "cook and servant girl."149 In Speyer (1890s), Margarete Sallis's parents commemorated all Jewish life-cycle rituals, a secularized Sabbath dinner with the extended family, and Passover with matzos and bread but also celebrated Christmas--including a tree and gifts--with the Christian help.150
Some, however, saw servants as a pretext. Julius Posener recalled his Berlin Christmases:
Even if parents followed the common bourgeois-Jewish excuse that they did it for the servants, they couldn't have entirely believed this. Does the master of the house climb around on a ladder for the better part of Christmas Eve morning . . . to decorate a Christmas tree that reaches to the ceiling only for the servants?151
Posener's point is partially correct, but it understates the importance of servants. Servants were like family in many cases. Some ate with the family, most received birthday presents, still others were included in the children's prayers, and some remained loyal to "their" families during the Nazi years.152 Despite increasing turnover among servants and, hence, increasing emotional distance, it was possible that the "master of the house" would decorate a tree "for the servants"--especially if it would simultaneously please his children and spouse.
It is instructive to analyze the self-understanding of "Christmas tree Jews." Some were rather removed from religious practice. Walter Benjamin (born 1892), whose parents infrequently sent him to high holiday services, recalled his eager anticipation of the tree and gifts as a Christian prayer flowed through his mind.153 Another family whose observance consisted of spending Passover with Orthodox grandparents regarded Christmas as a major family holiday.154 Yet, more observant families, too, enjoyed the tree. Nora Rosenthal's father, who said prayers after every meal, set up their first tree in their Frankfurt home in 1900.155 In 1880s Baden, Otto Baer-Oppenheimer characterized himself as a "good Jew" who attended synagogue twice daily for a year after his mother's death. He experienced his first Christmas tree introduced by the French housekeeper who had been hired to care for him. He found the "Christ tree" in the woman's room "beautiful," recalling it 50 years later. He and his brother lingered around the tree, but his father did not join them.156 Even some Orthodox families permitted a tree for the servants.157
Conversely, eschewing a tree did not automatically correspond to profound religiosity. Many a "three-day" Jew rejected the tree. Born in 1898, one woman described her tree-less childhood in a family of "three-day Jews" (including her envy of Jews who had trees).158 For most Jews, Judaism became a mélange of rituals to be observed or neglected, but the Christmas tree remained taboo.
Even when they rejected trees, German Jews remembered Christmas. They focused on pageants at school and in the local environment.159 Jewish children in a small town in Württemberg in the early 1890s attended the Sisters of Mercy school. There, the nuns assured them that they did not have to pray along or cross themselves, although the Jewish children would have liked to do so! The Jewish children dressed as angels in the Christmas pageant, and their mothers attended the event. These parents, whose own Judaism was deep-seated, did not fear that their "Jewish angels" would be negatively influenced by the Christian milieu.160 Similarly, in Bavaria, Jewish children in a Catholic day-care center enjoyed receiving candies from St. Nicholas and participating in the Christmas play. The nuns carefully chose roles, like that of King David, for the Jewish children, intending not to offend the Jewish parents.161 In Breslau, Toni Ehrlich found the "many pine trees with their forest-like scent in the snow covered streets" alluring. She characterized the Christmas market (Kindelmarkt)--whose booths "glittered and gleamed like a fairytale land," offering countless, colorfully frosted gingerbread men, children's toys and multicolored decorations--as equally enticing.162
Christmas trees as symbols are far more powerful than their numbers--or meanings--in Jewish homes warranted.163 Jews who celebrated Christmas generally came from circumscribed, secular, urban, bourgeois circles, like those of Berlin West. That newspaper articles and sermons condemned the "Jewish Christmas tree" indicated their own anxiety or politics more than the tree's widespread use.164 Memoirs also tend to skew the picture. A disproportionately high number of memoirs were written by precisely the urban bourgeoisie most likely to have observed Christmas. And, these memoirs stress similarities between the Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeoisie, a group for which Christmas had evolved into the all-encompassing German family event. Moreover, meanings, as has been noted, varied. The majority of Jews lived amid Christians and Christian symbols, acknowledging--and even enjoying--them without giving up Judaism. The nanny and the Christmas tree were rarely the cause of a final break with Judaism.
Conversion and Intermarriage
Instances of conversion in the Imperial era were closely related to waves of antisemitism. Some baptisms of Jewish children by parents who remained Jewish, for example, accompanied the rise of antisemitism in the 1880s.165 These parents intended to make their children's lives easier.166 Also, some professions, like academic medicine, put great pressure on members to convert if they hoped to achieve higher status positions,167 and some Jewish men in these fields yielded. Urbanization, too, led to increased formal withdrawals from the Jewish community168 and conversion. Berlin Jews converted at a much higher rate than any others: between 1875 and 1888, for example, 890 out of 1,901 conversions (to Protestantism) in Prussia occurred in Berlin.169 In Imperial Germany about 23,000 Jews converted overall.170
Urbanization also led to increased intermarriage. In 1875, with the introduction of civil marriage, the German Empire legalized marriage between Jews and other Germans. Given the small size of the Jewish community in total--as well as intraethnic affinities and antisemitism--intermarriage rates remained relatively low. However, the rate of intermarriage rose rapidly in the pre-war years and, in 1909, the Centralverein declared apostasy a bigger threat than antisemitism.171 During the war, intermarriage rates soared, especially in several large cities. In Hamburg, the rate reached 25 percent of all Jewish marriages by 1910 and 49 percent in 1915; in Berlin, the rate was 18 percent of all Jewish marriages in 1910 and 33 percent in 1915. Breslau, too, showed an increase in intermarriages, from 11 percent of all Jewish marriages in 1890 to 39 percent in 1920. During the war, the rate there rose to 53 percent. Similarly, in K–nigsberg the intermarriage rate rose from 7 percent of all Jewish marriages in 1885 to 35 percent in 1914 and hit a high point of 47 percent during the first year of the war.172
Jewish men led the way in intermarriage and conversion.173 In 1901–02, for example, one in twelve (8.3 percent) Jewish grooms and one in fourteen (7 percent) Jewish brides married out.174 These percentages jumped during the war to 24 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Women were a quarter of all converts between 1873 and 1906. Their share grew to 40 percent by 1912, as more women entered the work force and faced antisemitism there and the resulting temptation to convert.175
Most Jews disdained conversion.176 Even secular families that evinced no close connection to the Jewish religion saw conversion as a form of dishonor and desertion.177 Indeed, even Jews who eagerly sought social integration with non-Jews expressed disappointment or indignation when other Jews converted: one simply did not "abandon a besieged fortress" even if one no longer believed in its tenets. It was a matter of character, not faith.178
Those who did convert usually saw it as the final step to "becoming" German or a tribute to German nationalism. In an age of "creeping" secularization179for German Protestants, too--Jews who left the faith saw themselves as very distant from religion of any sort and intent on Germanizing. Sallis's uncle converted after his marriage to a Protestant woman "because one was convinced of the need to blend into the majority."180 Fritz Haber converted in 1892 at the age of 24, thereafter adopting German nationalism as his religion. Quite typically, he continued to associate with friends who were Jewish or of Jewish descent, and non-Jews often disparaged him for his Jewish origins.181 Indeed, converts were often still seen as Jews by non-Jews.182 When two converted Jews in the senate of Heidelberg University were absent on the day of a meeting, the president, a Protestant theologian, remarked sarcastically, "I notice to my regret, our Jewish co-Christians [jüdische Mitchristen] are not here today."183 It was nearly impossible to "escape" being Jewish in one generation in Imperial Germany.
Victor Klemperer's complicated conversions offer a glimpse into the motives and feelings of a convert. When one of his brothers converted, Victor saw it as a "blending into Germanness"184 but objected when another brother tried to convince him to do the same in 1903. An atheist, he argued: "But it is a change of faith and I don't believe in Christian dogma." Finally, he agreed "that we are and wish to be Germans and . . . that Christianity belongs to Germanness."185 More mundane reasons for converting concerned his brothers. The university career to which he aspired--and for which they were paying--required such a step.
The actual conversion involved a pastor who proposed several hours of religion lessons but relented when Victor's brother said they had no time.186 Klemperer stood before the pastor, a small table between them with a bowl of water on it. He had to affirm with a "yes" and a handshake that he would remain true to the church: "He reached for my hand and I managed to get out a halfway audible 'yes.'" Then the pastor touched Klemperer's forehead with the water, agreed to accept him into the church, and handed him his conversion certificate. Klemperer paid 14 marks, 75 pfennige. He reflected: "The whole event was repugnant to me, but not at all tragic."187
Afterward, Klemperer experienced doubts for having buckled to his brothers. He privately "un-converted" by signing "mosaic" on his official wedding certificate in 1906 upon marrying his Protestant wife.188 At that moment, he saw his conversion as "pure careerism . . . as mindless imitation of my brothers."189 Finally, in 1912, he conceded that his career depended on his conversion and, once again, converted.190
Unlike conversions, intermarriages often had romantic beginnings. Couples fell in love, confronted parents who faced the marriage either reluctantly or with intense opposition, and overcame these obstacles to achieve a happy ending--or at least a happy beginning.191
Conversion and intermarriage could cause permanent divisions, especially in religious families. To avoid just such a split, Adolf Fröhlich, for example, courted his Protestant girlfriend for eight years, marrying in 1912, exactly one year--the official Jewish mourning period--after his last parent died.192 In another instance, a disagreement between a man and his sister regarding his possible conversion led to a list he wrote for her perusal: "A Refutation of the Reasons that Lisi offers against my Conversion to Christianity."193 Then he waited 10 years until he took the final step. Johanna Harris's father, who taught in the Jewish primary school and conducted synagogue services in their village, refused to see his sons or their families after they intermarried.194 Often, children of these marriages grew up as Christians, another form of distancing from the grandparents and the ultimate form of distancing from Judaism.195
Generally, however, angry relatives were asked to forgive the "culprit" and did so. When Martin Freudenthal, a gifted musician and lawyer, converted in 1908, his mother, an observant Jew, wrote her irate relatives: "We have lived as Jews, have observed all the holidays, and have felt like Jews." But, she reminded them, "We have to . . . learn to accept reality and we don't change things with our pain." She admitted that her son's decision hurt her but believed he hoped to make his and his children's lives easier. He had discussed his thoughts with his parents some years earlier, "and as little as we agreed with him--we did not have the right to forbid it."196 His brother, too, hoped that the rest of the family "who had banished him because of his conversion" would forgive Martin, especially after he had earned the Iron Cross in the war.197 When Philip Löwenfeld decided to marry a non-Jew around 1912, his grandfather swore he would kill himself, but "he did not jump out of the window. He overcame his negative feelings."198
Those family members who made rapid peace with the converts or intermarriages had generally moved away from strict religious observance themselves.199 When Georg Klemperer decided to intermarry and convert, his father, a rabbi (but considered a deist by his son Victor), accepted the conversion with a sigh, and his mother, too, countenanced it without complaint. She only hesitated to call her new daughter-in-law by her "all too Christian name" Maria, preferring Marie or the diminutive, Mariechen.200 Sometimes, however, a lack of religiosity did not predict acceptance of either intermarriage or conversion. Scholem's father, for example, who purposely ignored Jewish rituals, "declined . . . to have any further contact" with the son who intermarried.201
Converts and intermarriages formed a transitional stage. They generally departed from official Judaism but remained influenced by their upbringing and an informal Jewish community. They did not abandon Jewish familial and friendship networks, nor were they abandoned in return.
Conclusion
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Orthodox Der Israelit praised the previous century as one that had seen such extraordinary progress for Jews that the few "prejudices and shortcomings" that still existed paled in contrast. It worried only that the progress of Jews (Judenheit) had come at the expense of Judaism (Judentum)--that Jews were no longer as observant as they had once been.202
By the late nineteenth century, Jewish religious behavior spanned a vast spectrum. For many, the family evolved from a site for domestic religious practices to a surrogate for religion itself,203 providing the most intimate link to Jewish values and traditions. In addition, Jewish organizations conveyed Jewish ideals, creating strong communal bonds, even across national borders. And, Jewish adherence to a Bildungsreligion provided a secular frame in which Jewish traditions lived on.
Most Jews practiced an individualistic religiosity, influenced by their family, location, community, or nation--and even by their own life cycles. They found a comfort zone somewhere between tradition and Bildung, between conformity to hallowed customs and openness to new forms of Jewish life. Judaism was no longer what one did in synagogue or at home but the myriad private and public ways in which one connected to tradition, family, and community. Older beliefs blended with Bildung, behavior focused on the family, and belonging meant a voluntary Jewish community. Thus, Jews expanded and revised "Judaism," their beliefs, behaviors, and belonging, transforming old traditions into modern Jewish practice.
Notes
I would like to thank the Leo Baeck Institute (New York) and The Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library for supporting my re‚search, and the German Women's History study group of New York, Lisa Grant, and Robin Judd for their careful reading of this article.
1 See my discussion of these terms in "Tradition and Transition: The Acculturation, Assimilation and Integration of Jews in Imperial Germany: A Gender Analysis," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27 (1982).
2 Alltagsgeschichte connotes history from "below." In Britain this grew from labor history with Marxist influence and in the United States from non-Marxist sociology and the New Left. Although I have not done so, Alltagsgeschichte also focuses on micro-historical studies; see, e.g., David Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen 1700–1870 (Cambridge, Engl., 1990), and his Kinship in Neckarhausen 1700–1870 (Cambridge, Engl., 1998).
3 See also Marion Kaplan, ed., Jewish Everyday Life in Germany, 1700–1945, a forthcoming project of the Leo Baeck Institute, N.Y. (hereafter LBI).
4 Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988).
5 Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877 (Westport, Conn., 1985), 13.
6 Steven Lowenstein, "The 1840's and the Creation of the German-Jewish Religious Reform Move‚ment," in Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History, Werner Mosse et al., eds. (Tübingen, 1981), 273.
7 Leo Baeck coined the term "Milieufr–mmigkeit," and Alfred Jospe used "Individualfr–mmigkeit." Alfred Jospe, "A Profession in Transition: The German Rabbinate, 1910–1939," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 19 (1974): 51.
8 Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1980), 29, 42–43. Similarly, the four daughters of judge and law professor Alfred Wieruszowski, whose own background included an Orthodox kheyder education, chose different paths: one became Protestant, another Catholic, another Jewish, and, the last, atheist. Jenny Wieruszowski, diary, LBI.
9 Arnold Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago, 1998). Eisen argues that what mattered in modern religion was not whether individuals believed in it, but whether they practiced it, even in a selective manner.
10 Hermann Timm, "Bildungsreligion im deutschsprachigen Protestantismus--eine grundbegriffliche Perspektivierung," in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 2: Bildungsgüter und Bildungswissen, Reinhard Koselleck, ed. (Stuttgart, 1990), 57–89; Wolfgang Schieder, "Sozialgeschichte der Religion im 19. Jahrhundert. Bemerkungen zur Forschungslage," in Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Wolfgang Schieder, ed. (Stuttgart, 1993).
11 By World War I, the most devout section of the urban Protestant population was the lower middle class. Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789–1989 (Oxford, 1997), 98–99, 101, 116.
12 Churchgoing declined to 1–5 percent. Lucian H–lscher, "Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century," in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930, Hugh McLeod, ed. (London, 1995), 278. Hölscher writes that, already by 1850, "the core of loyal church people in German cities made up less than 10 percent of nominal parishioners." And, these years were also low points for Catholic practice (ibid., 281).
13 McLeod, Religion and the People, 98. Protestants maintained high participation in rites of passage--baptism, marriage, and burial--and preserved some home rituals such as grace or prayers at night. H–lscher, "Secularization and Urbanization," 281–82.
14 Andrea Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1997), 240.
15 Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism, 2.
16 Jakob Wassermann memoir, in F. E. Menken, ed., Stachel in der Seele: Jüdische Kindheit und Jugend (Weinheim, 1986), 119.
17 Fritz Stern, "Comments on the Papers of Ismar Schorsch, Vernon Lidtke and Geoffrey Field," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 25 (1980): 73.
18 Alex Bein (born 1903), Hier kannst Du nicht jeden grüssen: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen, Julius H. Schoeps, ed. (Hildesheim, 1996), 86.
19 Wassermann was born in 1873 in Fürth; Menken, ed., Stachel, 119.
20 F. W. Graf and H. M. Müller, eds., Der deutsche Protestantismus um 1900 (Gütersloh, 1996).
21 Margarete Sallis-Freudenthal (born 1893; hereafter Sallis), memoir, LBI, 93.
22 Sallis, memoir, LBI, 55, 73–74.
23 Monika Richarz, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte im Kaiserreich (Stuttgart, 1979), 343.
24 Monika Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries, trans. Stella and Sidney Rosenfeld (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 249–51.
25 Eisen, Rethinking, 4.
26 Samson Raphael Hirsch, Versuche über Jissroels Pflichten in der Zerstreuung (Frankfurt am Main, 1909), 365.
27 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 178.
28 Werner Cahnmann suggested that "internally Jewish life was suspended between the emotional poles of prestige (kavod) and food (achila)" ("The Village Jew," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 19 [1974]: 118).
29 In small towns, some kosher butchers posted hours during which they would ritually slaughter for anyone to see. "Schlachtstunden für Geflügel auf dem Synagogenhofe" (1897), Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, Centrum Judaicum, Berlin (hereafter GDDJ). #65, A al 1, Nr. 55 [film 12, frame 275].
30 Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991), chap. 2.
31 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 298–99 (written in 1947).
32 Bettina Kratz-Ritter, Für "fromme Zionstöchter" und "gebildete Frauenzimmer" (Hildesheim/Zurich, 1995), 94.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 44.
35 Andreas Gotzmann, Jüdisches Recht im kulturellen Prozess: Die Wahrnehmung der Halacha im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1997), 375–77; Kratz-Ritter, Frauenzimmer, 22. A far less common phenomenon was the turn to Orthodoxy of the children of liberal Jews. Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 243.
36 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 200.
37 Paul Friedhoff left his tiny village for an apprenticeship, carrying his kosher food. However, there were no kosher restaurants in his new town, and he preferred eating in the factory cafeteria with the other apprentices. Bernhard Kukatzki, . . . Das einzige Hotel in der ganzen Gegend das koscher geführt wurde: Das Hotel Victoria in Rülzheim (Schifferstadt, 1994), 24.
38 Wigs were considered more modern than the caps women had worn up to mid-century. Seen as too modern, some Orthodox families did not sanction wigs, but Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer permitted them during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, at a point when many Orthodox women allowed their own hair to show. Mordechai Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany (New York, 1992), 7.
39 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 196, photo of Herz family in 1905. The wig replaced the hair cap by the mid-nineteenth century and fell into disuse generally but even among some Orthodox women by the twentieth century. Breuer, Modernity, 9, and Salomon Carlebach, Ratgeber für das jüdische Haus: Ein Führer für Verlobung, Hochzeit und Eheleben (Berlin, 1918), 12.
40 Breuer, Modernity, vii, 4–11.
41 Ibid., 4–5, 7.
42 Mischket Liebermann, Aus dem Ghetto in die Welt: Autobiographie (Berlin, 1977), 6–8. See also Die Welt, June 10, 1904, 2–3, included in Nancy L. Green, ed., Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley, 1998), 53.
43 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 239. However, some rural Orthodox Jews migrated to the cities to join viable Orthodox communities and Orthodox circles also included the very wealthy. Nevertheless, even poor, Eastern immigrant Jews broke away from strict observance once they moved to cities. Die Welt, June 10, 1904, 2–3, included in Green, ed., Jewish Workers, 53. Immigrant Jews did not influence religious culture in German cities as they may have done in Vienna or Warsaw. Marsha Rosenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, 1983), 150–53, and W. Bartoszewski and A. Polonsky, eds., The Jews in Warsaw (New York, 1991).
44 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 244–47.
45 Sallis, memoir, LBI, 3. A few families, including that of Sallis, took advantage of the "Austrittsgesetz of 1876" and left their religion without converting. See Peter Honigmann, Die Austritte aus der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin, 1873–1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 11–13.
46 Of these, 1,089 synagogues were in Prussia, 200 fewer than in 1867. Jacob Thon, Die jüdischen Gemeinden und Vereine in Deutschland, Veröffentlichungen des Bureaus für Statistik der Juden, Heft 3 (Berlin, 1906), 6.
47 Although I cannot discuss synagogue architecture, it, too, affected the daily lives of Jews aesthetically and politically as Christian neighbors took note of new buildings. For examples of the varieties and politics of architecture, see Harold Hammer-Schenk, Synagogen in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1981); Annie Bardon, "Synagogen in Hessen um 1900," in Neunhundert Jahre Geschichte der Juden in Hessen, Christiane Heinemann, ed. (Wiesbaden, 1983), 351–76; and Frank Ahland, "Probleme der Integration der Wittener Juden im Kaiserreich," in Juden im Ruhrgebiet, Jan-Pieter Barbian, Michael Brocke, and Lüdger Heid, eds. (Essen, 1999), 335–37.
48 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 173–74.
49 In many towns, the cantor or the teacher provided the only religious leadership. Miserably paid, cantors eked out a living on the side. In 1878, for example, the cantor of Hohenstein (E. Prussia) earned extra money by hand-copying the Torah and then running a lottery to select a winner (1878. GDDJ, 75A Br 9, #1383 [film 1383, frame 256]). See also Monika Richarz, "Jüdische Lehrer auf dem Lande im Kaiserreich," Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte (Gerlingen, 1991).
50İThon, Die jüdischen Gemeinden, 7. In some cases, like Berlin, there were 10 synagogues (about one for every 10,400 Jews) compared to a province like Mecklenburg-Schwerin in which 18 synagogues served 98 Jews scattered throughout the province (Ibid., 6–7). The urban ratio was similar to Protestant parishes, which served between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Hölscher, "Secularization," 278. In Berlin, the Protestant ratio was one minister to 9,593 parishioners in 1893. McLeod, ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 16.
51 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Oct. 14, 1904, pp. 497–98, quoted by Chaim Schatzker, Jüdische Jugend im zweiten Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 160. Some of these synagogues championed sermons in German and offered youth services (GDDJ, #695, Jugendgottesdienst in Breslau [frame 381]). Some encouraged singing, including choirs with male and female voices, the latter anathema to Orthodox doctrine and sensibilities. Thon, Die jüdischen Gemeinden, 5, 14–17.
52 Michael A. Meyer, "Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde: Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism," in In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, Michael Brenner and Derek Penslar, eds. (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), 16.
53 Thon, Die jüdischen Gemeinden, 10–14. In contrast to the United States today, 100 Jewish people could be a thriving community, and communities as small as 30 or 40 individuals were viable. Steven M. Lowenstein, "Decline and Survival of Rural Jewish Communities," in Brenner and Penslar, eds., Search of Jewish Community, 224 (using the research of Jacob Borut in Hebrew in Oded Heilbronner, ed., Yehudei Weimar: Hevrah be-mashber ha-moderniyut, 1918–1933 [Jerusalem, 1994]).
54 As late as the mid-1850s, synagogues had not faced the street, nor were they allowed on main thoroughfares.
55 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 250. This can be seen in photos as well: Bein, Hier kannst Du nicht jeden grüssen, 55.
56 Jews made up 28 percent of the population in 1918, down from over 50 percent in 1858. Regina Schmid, Verlorene Heimat: Gailingen, ein Dorf und seine jüdische Gemeinde in der Weimarer Zeit, Schriftenreihe des Arbeitskreises für Regionalgeschichte Konstanz (Constance, 1988), 17, 57–60 (including photos of 1910 parade), 99.
57 Despite occasional negative reactions by gentile villagers, most Jews continued to build these structures at least until the end of World War I. Elfie Labsch- Benz, Die jüdische Gemeinde Nonnenweier (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1981), 93–94; Utz Jeggle, Judendörfer in Württemberg (Tübingen, 1969), 264.
58 Werner Cahnmann, "Village and Small-Town Jews in Germany: A Typological Study," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 19 (1974): 119.
59 A few Jews even went so far as to object to circumcision. They criticized this ritual for what they saw as modern, hygienic reasons. The sucking of blood by the mohel, or metsitsa, had been forbidden by many German state governments by the 1880s. Breuer, Modernity, 258–59. Others, embarrassed, believed circumcision to be a primitive vestige of their ancient religion. Some refused circumcision while still insisting on membership in the Jewish community. W. Gunther Plaut, ed., The Rise of Reform Judaism (New York, 1963), 206–11. See Robin Judd, "Cutting Identities: German Jewish Bodies, Rituals and Citizenship" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000).
60 In some areas, a naming celebration, Holekrasch, took place. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 80.
61 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 269.
62 Dietz Bering, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812–1933, trans. Neville Plaice (Cambridge, Engl., 1992), 69.
63 Name changes (in adulthood) were more frequent in urban circles. Bering, The Stigma, 118.
64 Richarz, Jewish Life, 212.
65 Adolf Riesenfeld, diary, LBI, entry of Dec. 7, 1916.
66 Ulrich Baumann, Zerstörte Nachbarschaften: Christen und Juden in badischen Landgemeinden, 1862–1940 (Hamburg, 2000), 73. See also Labsch-Benz, Nonnenweier, 102.
67 Of course, some villagers no longer observed kashrut, either. On the village of Lemgo (in Lippe), see Steven Lowenstein, "Jüdisches religiöses Leben in deutschen Dörfern. Regionale Unterschiede im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert," in Jüdisches Leben auf dem Lande: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte, Monika Richarz and Reinhard Rürup, eds. (Tübingen, 1997)," 225–26.
68 By 1900, between 65 and 75 percent of Germans had been attended by a doctor upon their deaths. Faure, "Der Arzt," in Der Mensch des 19. Jahrunderts, Ute Frevert and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds. (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 101.
69 Sallis's mother moved in with Sallis's cancer-stricken grandmother until she died in 1912. Sallis, memoir, LBI, 17.
70 Lily Pincus, Verloren-gewonnen: Mein Weg von Berlin nach London (Stuttgart, 1980), 32.
71 GDDJ, Nr. 1425, Synagogen-Gemeinde zu Bromberg [frames 9–10].
72 Alice Salomon, Charakter ist Schicksal: Lebenserinnerungen (Weinheim, 1983), 25–26; on traditional Jewish death rituals in families, see also Pincus, Verloren, 33.
73 Kukatzki, Das einzige Hotel, 19.
74 Ibid.
75 Lowenstein, "Jüdisches religiöses Leben."
76 Steven M. Lowenstein, "Decline" and "Religious Life," in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 3, Michael Meyer, ed. (New York, 1997), 104–5. For religious splits in Westphalia, see Isi Kahn, "Streiflichter aus der Geschichte der Juden Westfalens," in Aus Geschichte und Leben der Juden in Westfalen, Hans Chanoch Meyer, ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1962), 64–65.
77 Hugo Mandelbaum, Jewish Life in the Village Communities of Southern Germany (New York, 1985), 28, 88, 93 (between 1906 and 1910).
78 Labsch-Benz, Nonnenweier, 120–22.
79 The term "Reform Judaism" generally meant the tiny, atypical Berlin Reformgemeinde. Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), chap. 5; Lowenstein, "Religious Life," 103.
80 Thon, Die jüdischen Gemeinden, 17–18. For an example of a half-built mikvah the community could not afford to complete, see Request from Jutroschin (Posen) in 1892 in GDDJ, Nr. 695 [frame 418].
81 Kratz-Ritter, Frauenzimmer, 148– 49, 152–53.
82 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 199.
83 Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context (Westport, Conn., 1985), 13; Meyer, Response to Modernity, chap. 5; Lowenstein, "Religious Life," 103.
84 Phyllis Albert, "L'Intégration et la persistence de l'ethnicité chez les Juifs dans la France moderne," in Histoire politique des Juifs de France: Entre universalisme et particularisme, Pierre Birnbaum, ed. (Paris, 1990).
85 Michelle Perrot and Anne Martin-Fugier, "The Actors," in A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Michelle Perrot, ed. (London, 1990), 286.
86 Johanna Meyer Loevinson, memoir, LBI, 23.
87 Joëlle Bahloul, "Foodways in Contemporary Jewish Communities: Research Directions," Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 9, no. 1 (1987): 2.
88 Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 75–77.
89 Mosse, "The Secularization of Jewish Theology," in Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality, George Mosse, ed. (New York, 1980), 258.
90 Ruth von Bialy interview, Hamburg, 1997. A child from Breslau similarly visited relatives in Posen and learned about the Sukkot holiday. Hirschberg, (long) memoir, LBI, 3. Similarly, see Sallis, memoir, LBI, 2–3.
91 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 311.
92 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 214.
93 The extent of nonadherence to kashrut can be seen in some rabbis' suggestions to religion teachers to bypass this issue in order to avoid a crisis of conscience (Gewissenskonflikt) in the children. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, May 1, 1908, p. 205, quoted by Schatzker, Jüdische Jugend, 124.
94 Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, chap. 2.
95 Gershom Scholem, "On the Social Psychology of Jews in Germany," in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis, David Bronson, ed. (Heidelberg, 1979), 12.
96 Hirschberg, (short) memoir, LBI, 2. See also Michael Zimmermann and Claudia Konieczek, eds., Jüdisches Leben in Essen 1800–1933, Studienreihe der Alten Synagoge, vol. 1 (Essen, 1993), 33.
97 Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae: Jugend um 1900, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1989), 1: 154.
98 On ambivalence and tension, see Gotzmann, Jüdisches Recht, 359–79.
99 My thanks to Robin Judd for this insight.
100 Kirstin Meiring, Die Christlich- Jüdische Mischehe in Deutschland, 1840–1933 (Hamburg, 1998), 130–35.
101 Ibid., 132–34.
102 Bahloul, "Foodways," 2.
103 George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 4. See also David Sorkin, The Transformaton of German Jewry (New York, 1987).
104 Mosse, German Jews, 4.
105 Wiltrud Fröhlich, "Adolf Fröhlich, Kommerzienrat (1872–1946)," in Jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Pfalz, Arbeitskreis für neuere jüdische Geschichte in der Pfalz, ed. (Speyer, 1995), 164–65.
106 Contemporary authors were also popular. Breuer, Modernity, 11, also 46, 83, 150.
107 Eyck, diary, LBI, 64. Heine, "Du bist wie eine Blume," published 1825. Translator unknown from song by George Whitefield Chadwick, op. 11, no. 3, cited on www.recmusic.org/lieder/h/ heine/du.wie.blume.html.
108İEyck, diary, LBI, 4, 6, 14, 45, 56, 64, and 84.
109 Ibid., 45.
110 Ibid., 19.
111 Ibid., 10.
112 Ibid., 10, and F. Eyck introduction to Eyck diary, 8.
113 Ibid., 47 (1890) and 53 (1891).
114 Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 9.
115 Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester (Ox‚ford, 1998).
116 Thon, Die jüdischen Gemeinden, 58, 59.
117 Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York, 1972), 119, 147.
118 Zionism reached about 10,000 German Jews before World War I.
119İ Aussteuerverein, 1903, GDDJ, Nr. 26 A, Al 1, Nr. 16. [film 26– 40, frame 23]. Statut des Frauen-Vereins zur Unterstützung hilfs‚bedürftiger Israeliten weiblichen Geschlechts zu Allenstein. 1879. GDDJ, #60, A Al 1, Nr. 50 [film 12, frame 9].
120 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 216–18.
121 On families: GDDJ, 75 A Al 1 [film 26, frame 50] (from town of Rhein near Osterode Ostpr., 1889); Deutsch-Israelitische Darlehnskasse für Frauen und Jungfrauen (1875): GDDJ, A Al 1, Nr. 14 [film 7, frame 20].
122 GDDJ, A Al 1, Nr. 14 [film 7, frame 103] from Flatow, W. Prussia, 1876. For another example of fundraising for synagogue renovation, see request from Landeck W. Pr, Aug. 7, 1889, in GDDJ, A Al 1, Nr. 17, Allenstein [film 26, frame 62].
123 GDDJ, A Al 1, Nr. 14 [film 7, frame 140].
124 Ibid., frame 279.
125 The small community of Allenstein succeeded in collecting over 20 marks, at the rate of 1 mark or 50 pfennige per person for this cause (GDDJ, 75 A Al 1 #26, Nr. 16 [film 26, frame 152–53]).
126 GDDJ, Beuthen, Nr. 695: Matzoh [frame 372] and cemetery [frame 377]. Charity had its limits, however. German Jews felt themselves beleaguered by itinerant beggars, a phenomenon that leaders deridingly labeled the "Schnorrer-Unwesen" (sponger-nuisance). "Mitteilung!" GDDJ, #62, A Al 1, Nr. 52 [film 12, frame 73].
127 Steven M. Lowenstein, "The Community," in Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 144.
128 Richarz, Jewish Life, 255.
129 For Protestants, see Hölscher, "Secularization and Urbanization," 282; for Catholics, see Josef Mooser, "Katholische Volksreligion, Klerus und Bürgertum in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Thesen," in Schieder, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft, 150–52.
130 Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 195. See also Sabine Knappe, "Jüdische Frauenorganisationen in Hamburg zwischen Assimilation, jüdischer Identität und weiblicher Emanzipation während des Kaiserreichs" (Master's thesis, University of Hamburg, 1991), 194.
131 The paper with the largest circulation could be found in Berlin, where between 40,000 and 50,000 Jews received the Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. Barbara Suchy, "Die jüdische Presse im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik," in Juden als Tr”ger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland, Julius Schoeps, ed. (Stuttgart, 1989), 181. Among the most famous weeklies were the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, founded in 1837, which represented the liberal majority of German Jews, and the Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt, "a gemütliche, middle-brow journal written for the average petit-bourgeois family . . . to edify, educate and comfort." Herbert A. Strauss, "The Jewish Press in Germany, 1918–1939," in The Jewish Press That Was, Aryeh Bar, ed. (Tel Aviv, 1980), 323. Founded in 1898, the Familienblatt attempted to remain above religious divisions. The Orthodox press included, among others, the Israelit, founded in 1860 (the only paper to appear twice weekly between 1883 and 1905), and the Berlin Jüdische Presse. The former imparted religious instruction to its readers, distinguishing between strict and lax observance, and sometimes taking "the place of actual Torah study for unschooled readers," whereas the latter, like other Jewish papers, tended to look at issues of broad concern. Breuer, Modernity, 171–72.
İİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİİ Led by the Centralverein organ, Im deutschen Reich, most Jewish journals insisted on Jewish rights and assailed the anti‚semitic waves of the 1880s and 1890s. Only the Zionist press, which grew in the pre-war years, underemphasized German events "with almost studied neglect," looking toward Palestine and Jewish lives abroad. Strauss, "Press," 331.
132 There were simply too few Jewish domestics to go around, and rabbis, too, hired Christian help. Richarz, Jewish Life, 176. Christian helpers frequently learned Jewish routines and rituals in order to practice them with the children. Kratz-Ritter, Frauenzimmer, 89.
133 Menken, ed., Stachel, 122.
134 Kurt Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage (Stuttgart, 1962), 27. He was born in 1884 in Insterburg, East Prussia.
135 Riesenfeld, diary, LBI, 1916. He was born in 1884 in a small town in Upper Silesia.
136 Kratz-Ritter, Frauenzimmer, 87.
137 Ibid., 89.
138 Malka Schmuckler, Gast im eigenen Land: Emigration und Rückkehr einer deutschen Jüdin (Cologne, 1983), 6.
139 Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 1: 34.
140 The tree's popularity among Germans increased after the wars of 1870–71 and then spread "like wildfire." Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Die deutsche Familie: Versuch einer Sozialgeschichte, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1978), 226, 223–43. For Europe, see Perrot and Martin-Fugier, "The Actors," 286, 289–91.
141 Richarz, Jewish Life, 257.
142 Interview with Lee Ziegler, whose family had a tree "for" the servants. New York, 1995.
143 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 178–79. There were also regional differences: Northern Germans tended to use Weihnachtsbaum, whereas other regions referred to the Tannenbaum and Christbaum as well. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches W–rterbuch (Leipzig, 1960), vol. 14, sec. I, part I, 717. Similarly, the Weihnachtsmann dispensed gifts in northern Germany and the Christkind in the south. Weber-Kellermann, Die deutsche Familie, 228.
144 Monika Richarz, "Der jüdische Weihnachtsbaum--Familie und S”kularisierung im deutschen Judentum des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Geschichte und Emanzipation: Festschrift für Reinhard Rürup, Michael Grüttner, Rüdiger Hachtmann, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds. (Frankfurt, 1999), 285, 287.
145 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 179.
146 Ehrlich, memoir, LBI, 9.
147 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 28. In Frankfurt, Siegfried Sommer, an Oberlandesgerichtsrat, and his wife hesitated to set up a tree until World War I when he also construed the tree as a symbol of belonging to the German people. Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 179.
148 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 178.
149 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 28.
150 Margarete Sallis-Freudenthal, Ich habe mein Land gefunden: Autobiographischer Rückblick (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 12.
151 Richarz, "Weihnachtsbaum," 284.
152 Jeggle, Judendörfer, 224–25.
153 "Alle Jahre wieder / kommt das Christuskind / auf die Erde nieder / wo wir Menschen sind." Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 32, 103.
154 Eleanor E. Alexander (born ca. 1908), "Stories of My Life," memoir, LBI, 11. By the time of the Weimar Republic, Naomi Lacqueur believed that most middle-class Jews celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah. Lacqueur, A Memoir, 1920–1995 (Frankfurt, 1996), 10–11.
155 Rosenthal, memoirs, LBI, 6–7.
156 For Baden, Otto Baer-Oppenheimer, archives, LBI, 23.
157 Breuer, Modernity, 313.
158 Hirschberg, (short) memoir, LBI, 2.
159 Richarz, "Weihnachtsbaum," 283; Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 103; Alice Ottenheimer, memoirs, LBI, 4.
160 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 175–76.
161 Ibid., 194–95. Of course, not all Jewish children joined in Christian entertainment. Some refused parts offered them in the Christmas play in their Protestant or Catholic school without further repercussions. Menken, ed., Stachel, 140.
162 Ehrlich, memoir, LBI, 9; Meyer-Loevinson, memoir, LBI, 41.
163 Easter egg hunts or the exchange of matzos for Easter eggs seem widespread as well but did not raise the same controversy. In the tiny village of Hochberg am Neckar, "Baskets filled with sugar bunnies, candies and Easter eggs . . . were hidden in the garden," for Alice Ottenheimer (born 1893) to discover. Memoirs, LBI, 4.
164 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 367, 401.
165 The numbers should not be exaggerated: e.g., the largest number of conversions took place in 1888, among which there were only 39 baptisms of children. Between 1885 and 1888 (inclusive), there were 114 baptisms of children. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, May 11, 1894, pp. 218–19.
166 Inadvertently, they may have added to their children's confusion. Ludwig Haas (born 1875) noted, "you have to have a strong character in order not to suffer from the fact that your parents belonged to a different community from your own." Schatzker, Jüdische Jugend, 150–51.
167 Honigmann, Die Austritte, 109.
168 After the Law of Secession of 1876 in Honigmann, Die Austritte.
169 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, May 11, 1894, p. 218.
170 This is out of a population of 512,000 increasing to 615,000 Jews and does not include baptisms shortly after birth. Richarz, Kaiserreich, 16.
171 Jacob Boas, "German Jewry's Search for Renewal in the Hitler Era," Journal of Modern History 53, no. 1 (Mar. 1981): 1003.
172 Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen, 1999), 147. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Die jüdische Minderheit in Königsberg/Preussen, 1871–1945 (Göttingen, 1996), 370 (on Berlin, Hamburg, and Königsberg). Isr. Gemeindeblatt (Cologne) May 8, 1908, p. 186, shows the actual numbers of intermarried Jewish men and women. In 1907, 3,905 Jews married each other in Germany, compared with 458 Jewish men and 361 Jewish women who married outside of their faith. ZDSJ, May 1907, p. 80. Compared to non-Jewish intermarriages (those between Christian denominations, such as Catholics and Protestants), Jews, a tiny minority, showed a stronger tendency to marry out. In 1901, for example, 8.8 percent of Christians married out of their denomination. This percentage rose to 12 percent in 1914. Gerd Hohorst, Jürgen Kocka, and Gerhard Ritter, eds., Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch: Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs, 1870–1914 (Munich, 1975), 31.
173 This was also the case with regard to resignations from the Jewish community: between 1873 and 1918, 68 percent of those who left the Jewish community were male and 32 percent were female. Honigmann, Die Austritte, 134.
174 Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1904), 81.
175 Similar to men, women hoped to enhance their job prospects, but female converts came from the lowest income categories. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 82.
176 Sallis, memoir, LBI, 18, 50.
177 Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 295.
178 Richarz, Jewish Life, 236.
179 Schieder, "Sozialgeschichte der Religion," 18.
180 Sallis, memoir, LBI, 16. His was not a religious conversion, since he always bragged that he had been in a church only twice.
181 Fritz Stern, Einstein's German World (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 74.
182 Earlier in the nineteenth century, Heine noted directly after his conversion that "I am now hated by Christian and Jew. . . . No sooner have I been christened than I am cried down as a Jew." Letter of Jan. 9, 1826, in Gustav Karpeles, ed., Heinrich Heine's Life Told in His Own Words, trans. Arthur Dexter (New York, 1893), 145.
183 Hugo Marx, Werdegang eines jüdischen Staatsanwalt und Richters in Baden, 1892–1933 (Villingen, 1965), 25.
184 Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 1: 106.
185 Ibid., 350.
186 Ibid., 351.
187 Ibid., 352.
188 Ibid., 405.
189 Ibid.
190 Ibid., 2: 15–16. Career enhancement as a result of "Germanness"--as symbolized in Christianity and German names--can be seen in Bering, The Stigma, 228–36.
191 Statistics indicate that divorce was slightly higher among intermarriages than among marriages within the same religion. Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart, 246. Of course, people who decide to marry against convention may also be more inclined to divorce rather than to remain in an unhappy marriage.
192 Fröhlich, "Adolf Fröhlich," 162– 65.
193 The conversion occurred during the early Imperial years, and the convert was Viktor Steiner. Benigna Schönhagen, "'Ja es ist ein weiter Weg von der Judenschule bis hierher . . . .' Kilian von Steiner und Laupheim," Spuren 42 (Apr. 1998): 9.
194 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 165. See also Eleanor Alexander, "Stories of My Life," memoir, LBI, 11. Her grandfather never spoke to two sons again after they intermarried.
195 About 25–35 percent of the children of marriages between Jews and Christians grew up Jewish. Meiring, Die Christliche-Jüdische Mischehe, 104–5. For Breslau, Till van Rahden's careful analysis shows that, between 1890 and 1910, about 30–35 percent of offspring were nominally Jewish. Up to half of the offspring of Jewish fathers remained Jewish as of 1890, although these figures dropped in the following years. Van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 171–72.
196 Sallis, memoir, LBI, 88.
197 Ibid., 73.
198 Richarz, Kaiserreich, 320–21.
199 Honigmann argues that the Jews who left the Jewish community were more assimilated--in his definition, had taken on different values--than those who remained. Die Austritte, 69. Hence, family members who had become more acculturated could accept such a decision more easily than those who remained more traditional.
200 Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 1: 106.
201 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 31.
202 Der Israelit, Feb. 4, 1901, pp. 219– 20.
203 This was also a Christian phenomenon. Hugh McLeod, "Weibliche Frömmingkeit--Männlicher Unglaube? Religion und Kirchen im bürgerlichen 19. Jahrhundert," in Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert, Ute Frevert, ed. (Göttingen, 1988), 140.
IU Press Journals
Home PageMore about Jewish Social Studies
Library
RecommendationTables of
ContentsAdvance
InformationCopyright
Clearance