Berlin and Florence in the Age of Enlightenment: Jewish Experience in Comparative Perspective

Into the 1930s, the Jewish population in Germany used the termEnlightenment (Aufklärung) emphatically to formulate itsself-image. At the end of the twentieth century scarcely anythingremained of the once emotional semantics. The most recent literatureon relations between Jews and the Enlightenment elaborates thehostility of the German Enlightenment towards Jews with philologicalacuity. The essay examines the relationship between the Enlightenmentand Jewry and Jewish experiences in the eighteenth century froma comparative perspective. The Berlin Enlightenment is comparedwith its Florentine counterpart. This comparison shows thatintellectuals in the Prussian capital were far more open andunbiased towards Jews than their Tuscan counterparts. Whilein Berlin Jews were admitted to the academies and convivialsocieties, this was largely denied them in Tuscany. Despite the altered climate at the end of the Enlightenmentperiod, the article emphasizes that, if there was ever a periodin German-Jewish history that may be deemed balanced, then itwas the age of Enlightenment. The comparison between Prussiaand Tuscany can thus help us to understand how the Enlightenmentcould become such an emphatic and emotional point of orientationfor German Jews in the nineteenth century.     

The idea of a Jewish nation in the German discourse about emancipation

This article compares the German conservative conceptualization of Judaism and Jewish emancipation with that of liberals, from the Vormärz (1830–1848) to the Neue Ära (1858–1861). It argues that both conservatives and liberals understood Judaism not merely as a religion but also as a nationality. Yet while liberals acknowledged the national dimension of Judaism as a secularized culture, and even supported Jewish emancipation, conservatives developed a different concept. Since the 1830s, conservatives accommodated nationalism while investing the Christian State ideal with national meaning. This national‐religious construction was imposed on Judaism, which was similarly interpreted now as a synthesis between religion and nationality. In accordance with this conceptualization, conservatives rejected Jewish emancipation on national ground while advocating for the establishment of a Jewish nation‐state. This thesis diverges from the existing literature, in which the reluctance of conservatism to embrace nationalism until the 1870s stands as the consensual view.     

Redescribing the Enlightenment: The German-Jewish adoption of Bildung as a counter-normative ideal

This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews in the late eighteenth century. By examining the creative use of the concept by German Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, later, in a very different political context, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the article challenges a body of scholarship that interprets the German Jewish enthusiasm for Bildung as an assimilationist capitulation by post-emancipation German Jews to the individualism and rationalism of the German Enlightenment. In contrast, I suggest that both Mendelssohn and Cassirer saw Bildung's emphasis on the vita activa as offering a vehicle for multifarious human engagement with the world that inspired not only a movement beyond reified conceptions of tradition, whether religious or secular, but forms of activism that could combine cosmopolitan sympathies with communal affiliation.     

Suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich

This article re-examines Jewish responses towards Nazi racismby studying German-Jewish suicides. Its purpose is twofold.First, it moves beyond the discussion of suicide as a statisticalincidence and asks what motivated German Jews to commit suicide.Statistics, however elaborate, disregard individual fates andcircumstances. While not entirely dismissing suicide statistics,this article is primarily concerned with qualitative questionsof social context and individual motives. It introduces hithertoneglected archival sources, including suicide notes. These sourcesallow us to assess the impact of Nazi racial policies on individualsuicides and to study the emotional effect of Nazi policieson German Jews. This article also takes up the question as tohow far, if at all, German-Jewish suicides can be considereda form of resistance towards Nazism and to what extent theywere an act of despair and hopelessness. The Nazis claimed tobe the arbiters over the lives of Jews once the deportationsstarted in 1941. The vast majority of Jews left in Germany afterNovember 1938 were fairly elderly. They could not be expectedto go into hiding, and their will to live may have been less,as was, undoubtedly, the ability or desire to start a new lifeelsewhere. In this bleak context, the overwhelming majorityof German-Jewish suicides derived from personal despair andthe desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. Nazi racialpolicies coalesced in a condition of anomie, an overturningof normal life and its norms and values that increases the likelihoodof suicide, prompted by the collapse of hope in the possibilityof a future. Emile Durkheim originally developed the conceptof anomic suicide as a way to explain suicide as a social phenomenon.This concept helps us understand the suicides of German Jewsin the Third Reich both in their wider political and privateimplications.     

SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES

Wang Benli, On the Emancipation of British Jews In Britain, it was not until the 1820s, mainly urged by the trend of the times, that the issue of Jewish emancipation was put on the political agenda. Although the emancipation is prominently symbolized by the political emancipation, it is not a synonym of the latter, its process was long and its contents were multiple, even piecemeal. It can be said that the emancipation process of British Jews lasted from the year 1830 till the end of the 19th century. Besides the solution to the problem of equal civil rights for British Jews,     

Cosmopolitisme et transferts culturels le cas des Juifs allemands

During the XIX^th century, the socio-economic rise and cultural assimilation of the German Jews generated two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, their integration into the German nation, which they pursued willingly; and, on the other, their cosmopolitanism, which resulted from their location at the center of a socio-economic network on a continental scale and a wide migratory movement. The Jews thus contributed to the development of a cultural concept ofMitteleuropa as opposed to the geopolitical and expansionist concept upheld by Pan-Germanism. German-Jewish cosmopolitanism found its expression on different levels: in the religious field, the school of the «Science of Judaism» (Wissenschaft des Judentums) became a model for the modernisation of Jewish culture in most European countries: in the economic field, emancipated German Jews consolidated their financial and commercial transnational network, which existed from the age of the «Court Jews» (Hofjuden); in the political field, radical German Jews played a leading role in the diffusion of Marxism as a universalist intellectual current, crossing national borders. Generally speaking, German Jews played a pivotal role in a process of cultural transfers stretched on more than a century. After Nazism came to power, German-Jewish cosmopolitanism took the way of exile, trying to preserve the legacy ofAufklärung.     

Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Burgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article attempts to relate modern anti-Semitism to theincreasingly close interactions of Jews and non-Jews in an ageof political emancipation and social integration. It arguesthat the changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Protestantsin the German educated bourgeoisie are of central importancein this regard. In nineteenth-century Germany, literature movementssuch as realism, and various human sciences such as anthropology,Protestant theology or philology provided ample material fordiscussing the Jewish character. These fields suggest four waysof perceiving Jews: the Jew as parvenu, as Talmudist, as materialistand as nomad. Indeed, bourgeois Jews themselves contributedto these literary and scholarly debates. Their discussions werefrequently shaped by the attempt to confront anti-Jewish misconceptions.Moreover, they propagated their own interpretation of the Jewishcharacter: the figure of the humanistic Jew. This Jewish interpretation,which identifies a universal mission, proves to have a twofoldnature: it is not only a counter-attack against anti-Semiticpolemics, but also a particular result of the peculiar Jewishadaptation of bourgeois culture. As the article argues, however,this humanistic perception of Jewish identity caused concernon the Protestant side, which led to further polemics and thusfurther Jewish defence. The resulting spiral of problematicperceptions was the consequence of the growing social intimacyof bourgeois Jews and Protestants in nineteenth-century Germany.Modern anti-Semitism, it is thus argued, can be interpretedas a specific form of rejection of ambivalence and the establishmentof neat binary codes in the confusing closeness of Jews andnon-Jews.     

The German-Jewish soldier: from participant to victim

The story of German-Jewish soldiers and veterans of World War I illustrates how, under circumstances of inclusion (even if incomplete) rather than vicious persecution, Jewish suffering in wartime, and with it the forms of collective memory and strategies for commemoration of the dead, could closely parallel, even intersect with, the suffering of Germans as a whole. To be sure, the points of intersection were accompanied by points of deflection. Even when Jews served, fought, suffered and died as German soldiers, their interpretations of the war experience, and their communities’ postwar memory and commemorative practices, differed from those of other Germans. In many ways, however, German-Jewish veterans suffered the aftermath of the war as did other Germans; they shared the prevailing fury over war guilt and reparations, and they retained a strong pride in their military service, a pride through which they interpreted the events of 1933–1945.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 6. December 2017

Cover caption, volume 33 issue 6 Front Cover Rescuing tradition from the rubbish, a Jewish man in Israel recovers discarded sacred books. This scene serves as a metaphor for the struggle to hold on to tradition in the modern nation state of Israel. The achievement of political sovereignty is thought to be a form of liberation. It is supposed to bring freedom to the subaltern nations who attain it. But can the modern state create the conditions in which a once persecuted minority can finally flourish? Ethnonational states are always exclusionary. Israel inflicts the conditions that European Jews once suffered onto Palestinians, who have been displaced, disinherited, walled off; and even when they are citizens, they are always second class. But what about those at the center of sovereign citizenship: ‘the people’ themselves? Hannah Arendt reminded us that Jews were never quite at home in Europe. They had to be exceptional to be accepted. They had to be Jews, but not be like Jews, relegating their identity to the private sphere: ‘men in the street and Jews in the synagogue’. But these forces of ‘emancipation’ did not make them citizens like all others. The story of modernity and secularism in Europe is also foundational to nationalism and claims of self‐determination elsewhere. The question is whether or not emancipation has been achieved through political self‐determination, and if so, what such emancipation looks like. Do the forces of assimilation end with political self‐determination? Can a once persecuted people finally be liberated? Who feels free to be Jewish in the modern state of Israel? Whose cultures flourish and whose Jewish traditions can be practised freely? Who finally feels at home? And who, among the sovereign citizens of the ethnonational state, still experience a sense of exile, reflected in the need to rescue traditional texts from being tossed out with the rubbish? Back Cover: MALAGASY JUDAISM Through a warren of alleys in densely packed Antananarivo, capital of the island nation of Madagascar, there is a gated compound. Beyond the gate is a metal door to the entrance of the house within the compound. Emblazoned on it are a seven‐branched menorah and the Hebrew letter ? (shin, for Shaddai, God). Down the corridor, to the left, is a door with Hebrew writing affixed to it; behind it is a prayer room. Instead of pews or chairs, there are rugs, as one might expect to see in a mosque. This is Madagascar's synagogue, in the home of Tubiyya, the self‐taught Malagasy hazzan (Hebrew: cantor). Tubiyya stands next to his wife Miriam and their children. As with the man pictured on the front cover of this issue, Tubiyya sports payos – long strands of hair, sidelocks, that ultra‐Orthodox Jewish men grow on the sides of their faces, to obey the Old Testament commandment from the book of Leviticus 19: 7: ‘Ye shall not round off the edge‐growth of your heads, neither shalt thou diminish the corner edge‐growth of thy beard’. Most observant Jewish men do not follow this particular commandment. In this sense, the Malagasy Tubiyya and the Ashkenazi Haredim in Jerusalem (see front cover) represent small but visible minorities within the greater Jewish world. But they are outliers – both globally and locally – in a deeper, theopolitical sense: both are anti‐Zionist Haredim, rejecting the legitimacy of the Jewish State on religious grounds. The Messiah has not yet come to ‘ingather the exiles’. In the meantime, Israeli society is too secular for them. And yet, would the hawker on the front cover accept Tubiyya as a fellow Jew? Race and Jewish genealogy set them apart. This issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY bookends antipodes of Jewry, where inclusion and exclusion are in constant tension.     

“They Will Take the Country from Us”: Labor Zionism,the Origins and Legacy of the “Other” in Israeli Mass Media,and Hegemonic Narratives

After 1948, Israel's governing elites embarked on a rigorous program of state building and settling hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the process, the elites, primarily from the leading Mapai party, developed a process of othering Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Arab citizens, and Orthodox Jews. They were physically segregated in their own schools and communities, and the elite culture described them as a threat against the European culture of Jewish immigrants from central Europe. The process targeted Mizrahi Jews before moving on to deplore the “demographic threat” of Orthodox Jews and resulted in the current normative hegemonic discourse in Israel that paints numerous groups as threatening the state. This article proposes a four‐part model for understanding “the other” in Israel: contemporary denial and nostalgia for a homogenous past, the view of Zionism as a civilizing mission, the application of separation of ethnic groups in planning, and demographic fear of the other. Altogether, they paint a picture of an Israel that has not come to grips with its past, and therefore continues the process of “othering” in its contemporary ethnocratic framework. Combining the analysis of geographic separation, and planning and media, it presents an innovative understanding of Israeli society.     

Walking a Fine Scientific Line: The Extraordinary Deeds of Dutch Neuroscientist C. U. Ariëns Kappers Before and During World War II

Dutch neuroscientist Cornelius Ubbo Ariëns Kappers is famous for pioneering neuroembryological work and for establishing the Amsterdam Central Institute for Brain Research. Less well known is his anthropological work, which ultimately played a role in saving Dutch Jews from deportation to their deaths during the Holocaust. Ariëns Kappers extensively campaigned against anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution during the 1930s. During World War II, he utilized his credentials to help create anthropological reports “proving” full-Jews were “actually” partial- or non-Jews to evade Nazi criteria, and at least 300 Jews were thus saved by Ariëns Kappers and colleagues. His earlier work demonstrating differences between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish skull indices became the focus of an attempt to save hundreds of Dutch Portuguese Jews collectively from deportation. Ariëns Kappers and colleagues brilliantly understood how anthropology and neuroscience could be utilized to make a difference and to save lives during a tragic era.     

THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?

From Hellenistic to modern times, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, circumcision is a sign that marks the boundary between Jews and non-Jews. Jews are circumcised, gentiles are not. What, then, of Jewish women? Why are they not marked with a bodily sign attesting to their place within the covenant? Cohen argues that the Jews of antiquity seem not to have been bothered by this question probably because the fundamental Otherness of women was clear to them. Jewish women were Jewish by birth, but their Jewishness was assumed to be inferior to that of Jewish men. Jews and Christians, however, who opposed circumcision, used the non-circumcision of women as one of their supporting arguments.     

“Suffer Not the Evil One”: Unitarianism and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill

The 1826 Maryland Jew Bill was the most protracted and heated fight over Jewish political rights in the United States. For eight years, in the legislature, in newspapers, and in elections, Marylanders debated whether Jews should be allowed to hold government office or positions of public trust, a struggle that garnered journalistic coverage from throughout the country. Historians have not explained why Maryland, a state with very few Jews in the early nineteenth century, was the site of the country's largest debate over their legal status. This study argues that Unitarianism, which did not claim many adherents in Maryland at the time of the Jew Bill but occupied an outsized role in the state's debates about religious rights and Christian orthodoxy, is a key part of the story of Jewish rights in Maryland; the state's unique experience with Unitarianism is one of the causes of the state's unique place in the story of Jewish rights in the United States.     

Exile at home: A matter of being out of place

This article employs Hannah Arendt's theorizing about assimilation to consider how sovereign citizens of a nation state might nevertheless experience a sense of exile. It builds on Aziza Khazzoom's notion of a ‘chain of Orientalism’ to suggest that the assimilation of Europe's Jews to Enlightenment ideals has had ongoing repercussions among Jews in the modern state of Israel. The article focuses on what it means to be Jewish in terms of religious observance, and who feels at home in the Jewish state. Employing vignettes from recent ethnographic fieldwork, it raises questions about the modern nation state's capacity to create conditions in which its own ‘people’ can flourish. In this case, Israel has claimed to make it possible for the Jews to flourish, in Arendt's terms, ‘as Jews’, but it is far from clear what ‘as Jews’ would, could or should mean. This leads the author to suggest that Israel has a Jewish problem.     

Papal Power and Protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth‐century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.     

论19、20世纪之交东欧犹太移民在美国的群体互助

从19世纪80年代持续到一战后初期,东欧犹太人为逃避俄国及其周边国家的反犹迫害浪潮而大批涌向美国。他们在老一辈美国犹太人的慷慨资助下渡过最初的困境后,就着手调动自己有限的资源创立帮助犹太新移民的慈善组织,并且按照乡镇或地区来源建立同乡会共渡生活难关。他们还将欧洲犹太社区中久已存在的无息贷款社移植到美国,无偿为有志创业者提供小额资金。这些互助组织有效地保障了整个东欧犹太移民群体在美国的生存和发展。     

Jewish experiences in the Italian Risorgimento: political practice and national emotions of Florentine and Leghorn Jewry (1849-1860)

Recent political and historical debates in Italy have led to a re-examination of the Risorgimento. This article asks what this revisionist reconsideration of the national past means for Italian Jews and whether Italian-Jewish history needs to be rewritten. Taking Tuscany as a case study, this article examines Jewish experiences in ­Florence and Leghorn during the Risorgimento, from the return to power of Grand Duke Leopold II after the revolution of 1848-9 to 1859, when Tuscany joined the new Italian national state. Tuscan Jews participated enthusiastically in the national movement, playing a decisive role in the development of the new political culture and in creating the emotional appeal of the nation. Jews were deeply integrated into the new national state and shared the same values and political attitudes as their Christian counterparts. Any reconsideration of the Risorgimento must take into account that - from a Jewish point of view - this period had remarkable innovative aspects and promising perspectives.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

German modernity,barbarous Slavs and profit‐seeking Jews: the cultural racism of nationalist liberals

This paper examines emblematic texts by two important protagonists of post‐1848 liberalism in Germany, Gustav Freytag and Heinrich von Treitschke, focusing on their treatment of Jews and Poles. The paper analyses the social content of their statements and argues that the elements of anti‐Semitism and anti‐Slav racism that they contain were motivated by the specific kind of nationalist liberalism that frames their affirmation of the process of modernisation. This affirmation was directed against the Poles on the one hand, seen as backward Easterners who had to be pushed into civilisation by Prussian–German colonialism, and, on the other hand, the Jews, largely perceived as representing the wrong kind of modernity against which benign (supposedly German) modernity had to be protected. At the same time, the image of the Jew in Freytag and Treitschke also participates in that of the backward Easterner, permitting to see undesirable, allegedly Jewish aspects of modernity also as distortions resulting from an alien and ancient culture. This analysis has consequences for theorisations of both liberalism and nationalism: it suggests that the racism and anti‐Semitism of nationalist liberals were intrinsically related to core aspects of the liberal world‐view rather than being merely contingent opinions held by particular individuals. It also indicates that the nationalism of many German post‐1848 liberals was ethnic as well as liberal. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing body of literature discussing the illiberal aspects of liberalism as well as the shortcomings of the long‐established conceptual dichotomy of ethnic vs. liberal nationalism.