In Search of Jewish Community

Description

New perspectives on the varied expressions of Jewish communal life in Weimar Germany and the Austrian Republic.

" . . . an excellent collection . . . well written and cogently argued." —David N. Myers

The history of Jews in interwar Germany and Austria is often viewed either as the culmination of tremendous success in the economic and cultural realms and of individual assimilation and acculturation, or as the beginning of the road that led to Auschwitz. By contrast, this volume demonstrates a reemerging sense of community within the German-speaking Jewish population of these two countries in the two decades after World War I.

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar
1. German Jews between Fulfillment and Disillusion: The Individual and the Community Shulamit Volkov
2. Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde: Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism Michael A. Meyer
3. Visions of Gemeindeorthodoxie in Weimar Germany: The Approaches of Nehemiah Anton Nobel and Isak Unna David Ellenson
4. Turning Inward: Jewish Youth in Weimar Germany Michael Brenner
5. Between Deutschtum and Judentum: Ideological Controversies Inside the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV), 1919-1933 Avraham Barkai
6. "Verjudung des Judentums": Was there a Zionist Subculture in Western Germany during the Weimar Period? Jacob Borut
7. Written out of History: Bundists in Vienna and the Varieties of Jewish Experience in the Austrian First Republic Jack Jacobs
8. Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State: The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic Marsha L. Rozenblit
9. Gender, Identity, and Community: Jewish University Women in Germany and Austria Harriet Pass Freidenreich
10. The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany: Social Conditions and Cultural Representations Sharon Gillerman
11. "Youth in Need": Correctional Education (Fürsorgeerziehung) and Family Breakdown in German-Jewish Families Claudia Prestel
12. Decline and Survival of Rurual Jewish Communities Steven M. Lowenstein
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• Judaism
• Religion
• General
• History
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 janvier 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253000576
• Langue: English

Extrait

IN SEARCH OF JEWISH COMMUNITY
 
 
 
 
 
In Search of Jewish Community
Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933
Edited by Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
_______________________________________
© 1998 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
In search of Jewish community: Jewish identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933 / edited by Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-33427-6 (alk. paper). —ISBN 0-253-21224-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)1. Jews—Germany—Social conditions—Congresses. 2. Judaism—Germany—History—20th century—Congresses. 3. Jews—Austria—Social conditions—Congresses. 4. Germany—Social conditions—1918–1933—Congresses. 5. Austria—History—1918–1938—Congresses. 6. Germany—Ethnic relations—Congresses. 7. Austria—Ethnic relations—Congresses. I. Brenner, Michael. II. Penslar, Derek Jonathan. DS135.G33S35  1998 305.892′4043—dc21    98-8304
1  2  3  4  5  03  02  01  00  99  98
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL BRENNER & DEREK J. PENSLAR
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
  1. German Jews between Fulfillment and Disillusion
The Individual and the Community
Shulamit Volkov
  2. Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde
Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism
Michael A. Meyer
  3. Gemeindeorthodoxie in Weimar Germany
The Approaches of Nehemiah Anton Nobel and Isak Unna
David Ellenson
  4. Turning Inward
Jewish Youth in Weimar Germany
Michael Brenner
  5. Between Deutschtum and Judentum
Ideological Controversies inside the Centralverein
Avraham Barkai
  6. “ Verjudung des Judentums ”
Was There a Zionist Subculture in Weimar Germany?
Jacob Borut
  7. Written Out of History
Bundists in Vienna and the Varieties of Jewish Experience in the Austrian First Republic
Jack Jacobs
  8. Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State
The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic
Marsha L. Rozenblit
  9. Gender, Identity, and Community
Jewish University Women in Germany and Austria
Harriet Pass Freidenreich
 10. The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany
Social Conditions and Cultural Representations
Sharon Gillerman
 11. “Youth in Need”
Correctional Education and Family Breakdown in German Jewish Families
Claudia Prestel
 12. Decline and Survival of Rural Jewish Communities
Steven M. Lowenstein
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume is the result of several years of planning and effort by a number of individuals, whom the editors take great pleasure in thanking at this time. In 1992, Robert Jacobs, Executive Director of New York’s Leo Baeck Institute, began working with Derek Penslar on the organization of a conference, to be held at Indiana University, on German-speaking Jews during the Weimar period. An organizational committee met in New York in May of 1993; the committee included officers of the LBI (New York President Ismar Schorsch, International President Michael Meyer, and New York Vice-President Fred Grubel), noted scholars (Richard Cohen, Harriet Freidenreich, Marion Kaplan, and Jehuda Reinharz), and representatives from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Dr. Dieter Dettke) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (Heidrun Suhr).
There was general agreement that Weimar Jewry and its Austrian counterpart had too long been studied in isolation from each other and that their political, economic, and intellectual elites had received the lion’s share of historiographical attention. This conference was seen as an exciting opportunity to open new pathways to the understanding of German-speaking Jews who, although not luminaries, were articulate and left behind moving testimonies of their thoughts, feelings, and deeds. With this agenda in mind, the conference, “Circles of Community: Collective Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1932,” was held in March 1996 at Indiana University-Bloomington; it was generously supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, DAAD, and Indiana University’s Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program.
The volume before you brings together revised and expanded papers from that conference. In revising those papers, the authors benefited from the responses, offered at the conference, by two Indiana University faculty members, George Alter and Benjamin Nathans, and three invited guests: Marion Kaplan, Ismar Schorsch, and Lee Shai Weissbach. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung offered additional support in the form of a publication subvention, for which the editors are deeply grateful. The editors also thank Carol Kahn Strauss, the current Executive Director of the New York Leo Baeck Institute, for her ongoing interest in this project. And a special expression of gratitude is reserved for Fred Grubel, a Zeitzeuge of the events discussed in these papers and a pillar of the Leo Baeck Institute for more than four decades.
At Indiana University, the members of the Borns Jewish Studies Program staff, Patricia Ek, Carolyn Lipson-Walker, and Melissa Deckard, ensured smooth running for the conference and helped ease the trauma of assembling a book manuscript produced by authors on four continents. Last, but certainly not least, the editors want to thank the authors for their prompt and thoughtful responses to the editors’ suggested revisions. From the start, the authors expressed a commitment to this volume and its goal: to encourage new ways of perceiving Austro-German Jewish history of the 1920s, a period that, although appearing from our perspective to have been one of impending twilight, seemed to many who lived through it to be the breaking of dawn.
 
Michael Brenner, Munich Derek J. Penslar, Toronto
INTRODUCTION
The history of Jews in interwar Germany and Austria is often viewed either as the culmination of tremendous success in the economic and cultural realms, or as the prologue to the road that led to Auschwitz. Some historians point to the significant role individual Jews, such as Max Liebermann, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Walther Rathenau, played in culture, science, politics, and the economy; and they emphasize the far-reaching integration of Jews into German society. In the words of Peter Gay, himself both a product and a chronicler of Weimar Germany, “despite the occasional surfacing of antisemitism Jews felt ‘at home’ in Germany. This was true in the Weimar Republic as well as in the Kaiserreich. There existed an irresistible mixture of a promising historical past and an exciting, and not at all hopeless, present.... Jews were, after all, able to realise their ambitions, more or less, without difficulty.” 1
Others stress the dark shadows looming over Weimar Germany. Representing such a view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen writes in his controversial study of the Holocaust: “Antisemitism was endemic to Weimar Germany, so widespread that nearly every political group in the country shunned the Jews. Jews, though ferociously attacked, found virtually no defenders in German society. The public conversation about Jews was almost wholly negative.” 2
While those approaches focus mainly on the position of Jews within the largely non-Jewish society, the authors of this volume have chosen a different emphasis. They have elected to treat the German and Austrian Jewish communities of the interwar period in their own right, without, however, neglecting the social and political context. In contrast to the plethora of valuable studies on the Jewish communities of Imperial Germany and Austria, not to mention those on the Nazi period, a list of publications on Weimar Germany and the First Austrian Republic is quite brief. 3 Studies in this field have tended to concentrate heavily on the fate of individual Jews and the threat of antisemitism. Only in recent years has the internal development of the German-speaking Jewish community in the two decades after World War One become a focus of scholarly attention. In these works, mostly by younger scholars, the centrality of a reemerging sense of community becomes evident. 4
    The strengthening of communal ties found its expression on two different levels, which are reflected in the German terms Gemeinde and Gemeinschaft . On one level, there is the expansion and intensification of activities within the framework o