Judaism III E-Book

• Herausgeber: Kohlhammer Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 586

Beschreibung

Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic religions, is one of the pillars of modern civilization. A collective of internationally renowned experts cooperated in a singular academic enterprise to portray Judaism from its transformation as a Temple cult to its broad contemporary varieties. In three volumes the long-running book series "Die Religionen der Menschheit" (Religions of Humanity) presents for the first time a complete and compelling view on Jewish life now and then - a fascinating portrait of the Jewish people with its ability to adapt itself to most different cultural settings, always maintaining its strong and unique identity. Volume III completes this ambitious project with profound chapters on Modern Jewish Culture, Halakhah (Jewish Law), Jewish Languages, Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Literature, Feminism and Gender, and on Judaism and inter-faith relations.

Leseprobe

Die Religionen der Menschheit

Begründet vonChristel Matthias Schröder

Fortgeführt und herausgegeben vonPeter Antes, Manfred Hutter, Jörg Rüpke und Bettina Schmidt

Band 27,3

Michael Tilly/Burton L. Visotzky (Eds.)

Judaism III

Culture and Modernity

Verlag W. Kohlhammer

Translations: David E. Orton, Blandford Forum, Dorset, England

Cover: The Duke of Sussex’ Italian Pentateuch (British Library MS15423 f35v) Italy, ca. 1441–1467.

1. Auflage

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Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic religions, is one of the pillars of modern civilization. A collective of internationally renowned experts cooperated in a singular academic enterprise to portray Judaism from its transformation as a Temple cult to its broad contemporary varieties. In three volumes the long-running book series ›Die Religionen der Menschheit‹ (Religions of Humanity) presents for the first time a complete and compelling view on Jewish life now and then – a fascinating portrait of the Jewish people with its ability to adapt itself to most different cultural settings, always maintaining its strong and unique identity. Volume III completes this ambitious project with profound chapters on Modern Jewish Culture, Halakhah (Jewish Law), Jewish Languages, Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Literature, Feminism and Gender, and on Judaism and inter-faith relations

Prof. Dr. Michael Tilly is head of the Institute for Ancient Judaism and Hellenistic Religions at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Tübingen University.

Prof. Dr. Burton L. Visotzky serves as Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (NYC).

Content

Foreword

1  Die Wissenschaft des Judentums

2  World War II and Vatican II

3  Jacob Neusner resets the agenda

4  Martin Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus (Judaism and Hellenism)

5  The New Academy

6  Kohlhammer’s Die Religionen der Menschheit

Jewish engagement(s) with Modern Culture

Joachim Schlör

1  The challenges of modernization

2  Hopes of belonging and experiences of rejection

3  From Berlin to Tel Aviv and Los Angeles: The internationalisation of Jewish modernity

4  After the Holocaust: Has modernity betrayed Jewish culture?

For further reading

Halakhah (Jewish Law) in Contemporary Judaism

Elliot N. Dorff

1  Napoleon and the Functioning of Jewish Law in Enlightenment Countries

2  Jewish Legal Theories in Response to Living in Countries with Freedom of Religion

3  The Authority of Jewish Law

4  Jewish Identity: Who Is a Jew?

5  Moral Issues: Bioethics

5.1  The Beginning of Life: Generating Pregnancy

5.2  The Beginning of Life: Preventing Pregnancy

6  Moral Issues: Interpersonal Relations

7  Moral Issues: Social Justice and Environmental Ethics

8  Jewish Dietary Laws (Kashrut, or the Kosher Laws)

9  The Life Cycle

10  Marriage and Weddings

11  The Seasonal Cycle: The Sabbath, High Holy Days, and Festivals

12  A Gift of Love

For further reading

Languages of the Jews

Stefan Schreiner

Prolegomenon

1  Mono-, Bi-, and Multilingualism

2  Hebrew

2.1  Ancient Hebrew

2.2  Postbiblical Hebrew

2.3  Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew

2.4  From Ancient Hebrew to Medieval, Sephardic Hebrew

2.5  Ashkenazic Hebrew

2.6  Israeli Hebrew

3  Aramaic

3.1  Imperial Aramaic

3.2  Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic

3.3  Christian-Palestinian Aramaic

3.4  Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic

3.5  Jewish neo-Aramaic dialects

4  Greek

5  Judeo-Arabic

6  Ladino

7  Yiddish

7.1  The Origins of Yiddish

7.2  A Language with many Dialects

7.3  From Jewish-German to Yiddish

7.4  The Yiddish of the Pious

8  Judeo-Persian

9  Conclusion

For further reading

Jewish Philosophy and Thought

Ottfried Fraisse

1  The Concept of »Jewish Philosophy«

2  Between Palestine and Babylon: Philosophical Potential in Traditional Literature (2nd to 11th cent.)

3  Hellenistic Judaism: Alexandria

4  Under Islam in the East: Baghdad and Kairouan

5  Under Islam in the West: al-Andalus

6  Under Christianity in the West: Southern France, Spain, Italy

7  Ottoman Empire: Thessaloniki, Istanbul

8  The Reconfiguration of »Jewish Philosophy« in the Context of Modernity: Amsterdam, Berlin Haskalah, and Wissenschaft des Judentums

9  Jewish Diaspora and Israeli Thought after the Holocaust

For further reading

Modern Jewish Literature

Matthias Morgenstern

1  Concept

2  Pioneers and Beginnings

3  On »German-Jewish Literature«

4  Yiddish Literature

5  English-language Literature

6  Hebrew Literature

7  Drama

8  Lyric Poetry

For further reading

Judaism, Feminism, and Gender

Gwynn Kessler

1  1970s Jewish Feminism: Coming out Fighting

2  1980s: Toward Finding the Right Question(s)

3  1990s: Coming of Age: Jewish Feminism and »(En)gendering« Jewish Studies

3.1  Feminist Scholarship; Gender and Jewish Studies

3.2  Jewish Women’s Writings: Memoirs and Midrash; Commentaries and Anthologies

3.3  Bridges, Feminist Organizations and Social Justice Work

4  21st Century: »New« Jewish Feminism

5  Conclusion

For further reading

Judaism and inter-faith relations since World War II

Norman Solomon

1  Historic overview

2  Jewish-Christian Dialogue

2.1  Beginnings

2.2  The World Council of Churches until Sigtuna (1988)

2.3  Articulating a Jewish Response

2.4  The Roman Catholic Church

2.5  The World Council of Churches after Sigtuna (1988)

2.6  Individual non-Roman Churches

2.7  Orthodox Churches and the Demise of Communism

2.8  Some Recent Statements

2.9  Israel and Interfaith Dialogue

2.10  Jewish Responses

3  Other Religions

3.1  Dialogue with Islam

3.2  Non-Abrahamic Religions

4  New Horizons: Scholars and Theologians

4.1  Covenant Theology

4.2  New Theologies: Feminism, Liberation, Creation

4.3  The Global Context of Dialogue

4.4  Academic Developments

4.5  Dialogue Moulds Theology

5  The Popularization and Secularization of Dialogue

6  Conclusion

For further reading

Index

1  Sources

1.1  Biblical Sources

Genesis

Exodus

Leviticus

Numbers

Deuteronomy

2 Samuel

1 Kings

2 Kings

Isaiah

Jeremiah

Jonah

Psalms

Job

Ecclesiastes

Esther

Daniel

Ezra

Nehemiah

1 Chronicles

2 Chronicles

1.2  Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

1.3  Rabbinic Sources

2  Names

3  Keywords

Foreword

In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible was formed as an anthology of Jewish texts, each shaping an aspect of Jewish identity. As the Israelite community and its various tribes became two parts: a Diaspora and its complement, the community in the Land of Israel—competing interests formed a canon that represented their various concerns. Over time, the communities grew, interacted, and focused on local religious needs, all the while ostensibly proclaiming fealty to the Jerusalem Temple. Even so, some communities rejected the central shrine that the Torah’s book of Deuteronomy proclaimed to be »the place where the Lord chose for His name to dwell« (Deut. 12:5, et passim). Still other Jewish communities had their own competing shrines. Yet for all their dissentions, disagreements, and local politics, there was a common yet unarticulated core of beliefs and practices that unified the early Jewish communities across the ancient world.1 As the Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE) drew to a close, the biblical canon took its final shape, and a world-wide Jewish community—no longer Israelite—emerged as a moral and spiritual power.2

That canon, by definition, excluded certain Jewish texts, even as it codified others. And the political processes of the Persian and Hellenistic empires confined and defined the polities of their local Jews. From east to west, at the very moment in 70 CE when the centralized Jerusalem cult was reduced to ashes, Judaism, like the mythical phoenix, emerged. Across the oikumene, with each locale finding its own expressions, communities that had formed around the study of the biblical canon produced commentaries, codes, chronicles, commemorations, and compendia about Judaism. Some of these were inscribed on stone, others on parchment and paper, while still others were committed to memory. The devotion to this varied literature helped shape a Jewish culture and history that has persisted for two millennia.

This three-volume compendium, Judaism: I. History, II. Literature, and III. Culture and Modernity, considers various aspects of Jewish expressions over these past two millennia. In this Foreword, we the editors: an American rabbi-professor and an ordained German Protestant university professor, will discuss what led us to choose the chapters in this compendium. Obviously three volumes, even totaling a thousand pages, cannot include consideration of all aspects of a rich and robustly evolving two-thousand-year-old Jewish civilization. And so, we will assay to lay bare our own biases as editors and acknowledge our own shortcomings and those of these volumes, where they are visible to us. To do this we need to have a sense of perspective on the scholarly study of Judaism over the past two centuries.

1  Die Wissenschaft des Judentums

Dr. Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) began the modern study of Judaism by convening his Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews) exactly two hundred years ago, in late 1819 in Berlin.3 Although the Verein was small and lasted but five years before disbanding, it included such luminaries as co-founder Eduard Gans, a disciple of Hegel, as well as the poet Heinrich Heine.4 The scholarly Verein failed to gain traction in the larger Jewish community. None-the-less, Zunz and his German Reform colleagues introduced an academic study of Judaism based upon comparative research and use of non-Jewish sources. Their historical-critical approach to Jewish learning allowed for what had previously been confined to the Jewish orthodox Yeshiva world to eventually find an academic foothold in the university.

In that era, history was often seen as the stories of great men. Spiritual and political biographies held sway. Zunz accepted the challenge with his groundbreaking biography of the great medieval French exegete, »Salomon ben Isaac, genannt Raschi.« The work marked the end of the Verein and was published in the short-lived Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.5 The monographic length of the article and its use of what were then cutting-edge methods ironically helped assure the journal’s demise. Further, the attempt to write a biography that might assay to peek behind the myth of the towering medieval figure, assured that the orthodox yeshiva scholars who passionately cared about Rashi would find the work anathema. Nevertheless, the study was a programmatic introduction not only to Rashi, but to the philological and comparative methods of Wissenschaft des Judentums. It would set a curriculum for critical study of Judaism for the next century and a half.

Zunz solidified his methods and his agenda in 1832, when he published Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (The Sermons of the Jews in their Historic Development).6 Here, Zunz surveyed rabbinic exegetical and homiletical literature, and by focusing on this literature, he conspicuously avoided both the study of the Talmud and Jewish mysticism. Zunz began his survey in the late books of the Hebrew Bible and continued to review the form and content of the genre up to German Reform preaching of his own day. His work was not without bias. Zunz separated what he imagined should be the academic study of Judaism from both the Yeshiva curriculum—primarily Talmud and legal codes—and from the Chassidic world, which had a strong dose of mysticism.

Zunz’s acknowledgement of the mystic’s yearning for God came in his masterful survey of medieval liturgical poetry, Die Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters.7 Indeed, Jewish mysticism only finally came to be acknowledged in academic circles a century later by the efforts of Gershom Gerhard Scholem (1897–1982). Leopold Zunz essentially set the curriculum for the academic study of Judaism until the horrible events of World War II irreparably changed the course of Jewish history and learning. Even so, Zunz’s agenda still affects Jewish studies to this day and has influenced the content choices of these volumes.

2  World War II and Vatican II

The world of Jewish academic study had its ups and downs in the century following Zunz. A year after his death, the Jewish Theological Seminary was founded in New York. It continues to be a beacon of Jewish scholarship in the western world. But the shift to America was prescient, as European Jewry as a whole suffered first from the predations of Czarist Russia, then from the decimation of World War I, and finally from the Holocaust of World War II.

The absolute destruction that the Holocaust wrought upon European Jewry cannot be exaggerated. Much of what is described in these volumes came to an abrupt and tragic end. Yet following World War II, two particular events had a dramatic effect on the future of Judaism. Both have some relationship to the attempted destruction of Jewry in Germany during the war, yet each has its own dynamic that brought it to full flowering. We refer to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and the declaration of the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate document in 1965. The former has been a continual midwife for the rebirth of Jewish culture and literature both within and outside the Diaspora. Of course, there is an entire chapter of this compendium devoted to Israel. The Vatican II document, which revolutionized the Catholic Church’s approach to Jews and Judaism, is reckoned with in the final chapter of this work, describing interreligious dialogue in the past seventy years.

3  Jacob Neusner resets the agenda

A graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s rabbinical school, Jacob Neusner (1932–2016) earned his doctorate with Prof. Morton Smith, who was a former Anglican cleric and professor of ancient history at Columbia University.8 Although they broke bitterly in later years, Neusner imbibed Smith’s methodology, which served to undermine the very foundations of Zunz’s Wissenschaft curriculum. Neusner was exceedingly prolific and succeeded in publishing over 900 books before his death.

Among these was his A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai: 1–80 CE.9 This work was a conventional biography of one of the founding-fathers of rabbinic Judaism, not unlike Zunz’s much earlier work on Rashi. Yet eight years after the publication of the Yohanan biography, Neusner recanted this work and embraced Smith’s »hermeneutic of suspicion,« publishing The Development of a Legend: Studies in the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai.10 With this latter work, Neusner upended the notion of Jewish history as the stories of great men and treated those tales instead as ideological-didactic legends which exhibited a strong religious bias. He and his students continued to publish in this vein until they put a virtual end to the writing of positivist Jewish history.

This revolution came just as Jewish studies was being established as a discipline on American university campuses. For the past half-century, scholars have been writing instead the history of the ancient literature itself, and carefully limning what could and could not be asserted about the Jewish past. Due to Neusner’s polemical nature, there has been a fault line between Israeli scholars and those in the European and American Diasporas regarding the reliability of rabbinic sources as evidence for the history of the ancient period, describing the very foundations of rabbinic Judaism.

4  Martin Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus (Judaism and Hellenism)

Even as this monumental shift in the scholarly agenda was taking place, another significant change affected our understanding of Judaism. This transformation followed from the theological shift evinced by Vatican II and was apposite to the ending of what has been characterized as the Church’s millennial »teaching of contempt« for Judaism.11 European-Christian scholarship had, from the time of the separation of Church and Synagogue,12 characterized Christianity as the direct inheritor of Greco-Roman Hellenism while Judaism, often derogated as Spätjudentum, was portrayed as primitive or even barbarian. In 1969, Martin Hengel (1926–2009) wrote a pathbreaking work of heterodox scholarship exploring the Hellenistic background of Judaism and how it was a seed-bed for subsequent Christian Hellenism.13

Hengel himself was relying in part on Jewish scholars such as Saul Lieberman, who wrote in the decades before him of Greek and Hellenism in Jewish Palestine.14 Lieberman, however, wrote particularly of influences on the literature of the ancient rabbis and targeted his work to scholars of Talmudic literature. Hengel, a German Protestant scholar, wrote for scholars of New Testament, and achieved a much broader reach and influence. Finally, one hundred fifty years after Zunz gathered his BerlinVerein, Hengel granted Jewish studies and Judaism itself a seat at the table of Christian faculties, even as he felt that Jewish theology of the ancient period erred in rejecting Jesus.

5  The New Academy

Since Hengel, there has been a vast expansion of Jewish Studies in universities in North America and throughout the world. Today, there is nary a university without Jewish Studies. In part this waxing of Judaica was due to the theological shifts in the Catholic Church and Protestant academy. In part, especially in the US, the explosion of Jewish studies departments was due to a general move towards identity studies that began with women’s studies and African-American studies, expanded to include Jewish studies, and other ethnic and religious departments, majors, or concentrations. But Jewish Studies itself has changed in many profound ways. To wit, Christian scholars have also excelled in the field. At the time of this writing, the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, Prof. Christine Hayes of Yale University, is the first non-Jew to lead the organization in its 51year history. Similarly, Peter Schäfer served as Perelman professor of Judaic Studies at Princeton University for fifteen years, having previously served as professor for Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (1983–2008). Both Schäfer and Hayes specialize in Talmud scholarship. By this focus, we highlight not so much the anomaly of a gentile studying Talmud, as it is a sign of the integration of Jewish Studies into the broader academy. Indeed, as early as 1961, the late Rabbi Samuel Sandmel served as president of the otherwise overwhelmingly Christian membership of the Society for Biblical Literature.

6  Kohlhammer’s Die Religionen der Menschheit

Since 1960, Kohlhammer in Stuttgart has published the prestigious series Die Religionen der Menschheit (The Religions of Humanity). While the series was originally conceived of as thirty-six volumes almost 60 years ago, today it extends to fifty plus volumes, covering virtually all aspects of world-religions. That said, a disproportionate number of the volumes (often made up of multi-book publications) are devoted to Christianity. This is unsurprising, given Kohlhammer’s location in a German-Lutheran orbit.

In the earliest round of publication, Kohlhammer brought out a one-volume Israelitische Religion (1963, second edition: 1982), which covered Old Testament religion. This also demonstrated Kohlhammer’s essentially Christian worldview. By separating Israelite religion from Judaism, it implies that Israelite religion might lead the way to Christianity; viz. that the Old Testament would be replaced by the New. Its author was Christian biblical theologian Helmer Ringgren.

In 1994, though, Kohlhammer began to address the appearance of bias with its publication of a one-volume (ca. 500 pp) work Das Judentum, Judaism. Although it was edited by German Christian scholar Günter Mayer, (who specialized in rabbinic literature), and had contributions by Hermann Greive, who was also a non-Jew; the work featured contributions by three notable rabbis: Jacob Petuchowski, Phillip Sigal, and especially Leo Trepp. German born, Rabbi Trepp was renown as the last surviving rabbi to lead a congregation in Germany.

In its current iteration, twenty-five years later, this edition of Judaism is a three-volume, 1000-page compendium with contributions by thirty experts in all areas of Judaism, from the destruction of the Second Temple and the advent of rabbinic Judaism, until today. We, the co-editors, are Dr. Burton L. Visotzky, Ph.D., a rabbi who serves as the Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. The other co-editor is Dr. Michael Tilly, a Protestant minister, Professor of New Testament and head of the Institute of Ancient Judaism and Hellenistic Religions at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

Further, the individual chapter authors are a mix, albeit uneven, of men and women (our initial invitations were to the same number of women as men, but as will be apparent, the final number favors men over women). And there are more Jews than Christians writing for these three volumes, although we confess to not actually knowing the religion of each individual participant. Scholars from seven countries make up the mix, with a preponderance of North-Americans; there are also many Germans, Israelis and then, scholars from England, France, Austria, and Poland. We are not entirely sure what this distribution means, except perhaps that the publisher and one of the editors is German, the other editor is American, and the largest number of Jewish studies scholars are located in America and Israel. The relative paucity of Europeans indicates the slow recovery from World War II, even as we celebrate the reinvigoration of Jewish Studies in Europe.

In this volume devoted to Culture, we survey the cultural movements that have affected Jewish identity development over recent times. Much of what we can discern regarding Jewish culture in antique and medieval times necessarily is found in the literature that survives. But more recently, in addition to literary evidence, the scholar of Jewish culture can turn to other artifacts and evidence to write a fuller appreciation of the various Jewish cultural environments.

We have chosen cultural moments that are readily discernable through the existence of scholarly disciplines devoted to them. It is not our intention to express preferences for one form of culture over another. Rather, we are attempting to draw a map of the various forms and movements of Jewish culture in the pre-modern and modern periods. We cannot be all inclusive, as Judaism has been blessed with a surfeit of cultural movements and expressions in the past century. We hope this volume celebrates that abundance.

Michael Tilly / Burton L. Visotzky, January 2020

Jewish engagement(s) with Modern Culture

Joachim Schlör

1  The challenges of modernization

Looking back at the documented history of mankind, we find in any given society individuals or smaller groups who were ahead of their contemporaries, more daring, more adventurous, more interested in the world beyond the confines of their respective communities. Modernity, understood as a conscious departure from tradition, has always been there. In the context of Jewish history, we can identify many instances where traditional customs and values have been replaced by more modern ones, from biblical times onward. In general terms, political upheaval, war, and forced emigration necessarily challenged individuals and communities to rethink traditional forms of living and to adapt to new circumstances. The Babylonian exile and the emergence of an exilic identity among those removed from Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, for example, could be usefully analysed and discussed in a context of modernisation. Given the mainly diasporic character of Jewish life and culture from the 6th century BCE on, and even more so after the destruction of the Second Temple, such periods of modernisation were often the product of an encounter—in contact, cooperation, or conflict—with the non-Jewish world: in Babylon, in Athens and Alexandria, in Rome1, from the cities along the North African coast to the centres of Jewish life under Muslim2 and Christian rule in »Sepharad« as well as in the settlements along the Rhine river in what was to become »Ashkenas«3.

Traditional Jewish communities acquired new languages4, Spanish or Middle High German, new customs, new forms of food or dress, and were influenced by different philosophical and scientific developments long before the dates that are usually noted as markers of the onset of modernity—be it 1492, with the discovery of a world beyond former conceptions of the earth, or 1789, when the French Revolution shattered the feudal societies all over Europe. Still, with this reservation, it is fair to say that the enlightenment in the late 18th century opened up the world of thought to a wider degree than ever before, and in its wake the industrial revolution with all its consequences changed the world of traditional communities, including that of the Jews, to such an extent that it makes sense to concentrate on the period that most researchers regard as modernity: from the end of the 18th through the 19th and 20th centuries, and to formulate questions that are of importance until the present day.

For the purposes of this text, we agree on some simple and basic assumptions. Culture is different from nature. Culture begins when people »do something« with nature, when they start to change the given landscape by working on it, by moving through it, by regarding, describing or studying it, by making their imprint on it. Culture, furthermore, is practice. In a narrow sense, we refer to practices such as writing, painting, making music or building houses as »cultural«. In a wider sense, practices such as inhabiting places, making clothes and dressing, eating and drinking, believing in natural or supernatural powers and giving form to such belief, in prayer and ritual, conceiving and rearing children, and educating them, are no less cultural, especially when they form part of processes of change and development—and when they become topics of reflection and forms of cultural production. In our context, »modern culture« evolves continually and offers new perspectives beyond traditional ways of living and thinking. It also needs to be noted that modernity, once set in, did not necessarily move forward unhindered. On the contrary, whenever and wherever individuals tried to depart from traditional ways of life, they met with resistance.

In the history of Judaism, the most famous case in point is the fate of Baruch Spinoza (1632‒1677) who can be regarded as a precursor of later developments. Born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a Portuguese-Jewish family, the intellectually highly gifted thinker »was issued the harshest writ of herem, ban or excommunication, ever pronounced by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam«. In his works, Spinoza »denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a transcendent, providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews«.5 He clearly was an early moderniser, but his departure from traditional values and rituals was regarded as damaging for his community.

The case of Moses Mendelssohn (1729‒1786) is not so completely different as one might assume, given the relative success of the Jewish enlightenment—the Haskala—that his life and work initiated. But the idea, and ensuing practice, to open the Jewish community of Berlin to the new horizons offered by the translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, the use of the German language in daily encounters, the creation of a »free school«—Jüdische Freischule, founded in 1778 by David Friedländer with Isaak Daniel Itzig and Hartwig Wessely—that offered instruction in worldly topics, and a thorough reform programme concerning synagogue services, a weakening of rabbinical authority, and the discontinuation of certain rituals, again provoked resistance within the community: »Reform«, in a way, created »Orthodoxy« as a (modern and anti-modern) response, and the path of German Jews towards modernity has been a troubled, ambivalent, and difficult one from the very start.

This can be illustrated with an example from those regions that Prussia acquired during the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century (1772‒1795). When Prussian reformers, enlightened and carried on by the ideas of tolerance and a—controlled—emancipation of the minorities arrived in those regions, one of their first activities was to tear down old city walls and to make way for traffic and economic development: an act of modernization. By doing this, they unknowingly also destroyed parts of the traditional eruv6, the Sabbath border of observant Jewish communities beyond which, according to Talmudic laws, Jews were not allowed to carry things on their holy day of the week. An interesting collection of documents, kept in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, shows how the rabbis and representatives of those communities, in the years between 1822 and 1835, applied to the authorities in Berlin to be allowed to reconstruct their eruvim, their »borders« that, for them, symbolized the continuity of a specific religious tradition and way of life. Permission then partly had been granted, but while some communities decided to re-erect the symbolic »walls« and »gates«, others opted for their abolition and thus opened the path for the members of their congregation: into modernity. In many cases, this initiated the beginning of a large-scale migration process from the smaller towns in Eastern and Central Europe—and similarly from the rural communities in South-West Germany—to the larger cities, most importantly to Berlin from where the heralds of enlightenment, the »Berliners«, had come with such promising news about a new future of emancipation and integration. Confronted with modernisation, those communities saw themselves challenged in two main areas: the tension between traditional religious practice and the culture of their host societies and, in more general terms, the relation between their existence in exile and the no less traditional longing for a return to the land of Israel.

As Rabbi David Ellenson, the eighth president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), has argued,

the advent of modernity led to radical political and legal changes for Jewry, particularly in the West. Coercive belonging to a community was replaced by voluntary adherence to what might best be called a congregation. [...] Modernity has affected many disparate areas including new forms of Judaism, opting out, Jewish identity, marriage, gender relations and expression, interfaith dialogue, attitudes toward universalism and particularity, and so on. Modernity has stimulated assimilation but also has fostered new ways of expressing Jewish identity.7

Modernity for Jews, Ellenson argues further, »begins first and foremost when the governmental structures that formerly marked the medieval kehila (community) collapsed«. The American and French revolutions also brought with them the separation of religion and state. Ellenson’s teacher, the eminent historian Jacob Katz,

contended that a major criterion for determining when modernity began was to analyze the moments when Jews began to think in cultural patterns taken from the non-Jewish world8.

We can see this development in France, shown by Frances Malino’s work on the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux9 where he describes the high degree of acculturation of their mores and manners. Similarly, Todd Endelman’s book on the Jews of Georgian England10 tells how Jews began to adapt and live like non-Jewish people. But, Ellenson concludes,

if one wants to understand the essence of how modernity influenced Judaism, one has to study the developments in German Jewry. That was the only country where the changes in Jewish life were based on ideological justifications.

While this chapter will indeed concentrate on developments in Berlin, different paths to modernity need to be considered as well. As Lois Dubin and David Sorkin have shown, Sephardic trading families and communities—whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496—in the Early Modern Period had been allowed to settle in a string of port cities that reaches from Amsterdam, London and Hamburg in the North via Bordeaux, Bayonne, Livorno, Venice, and Trieste down to Sarajevo, Sofia, and Constantinople.11 Even without an enlightenment »ideology«, practical life that required international contacts and cultural exchange enabled the »Port Jews« in those cities to establish a comparably important network of reformed communities with an equally strong interest in education and integration: again, in the context of urban societies which often were marginal in relation to their respective countries, but central for the creation of international trading routes and for the emergence of cultural practices related to the economy: cartography, translation, printing, activities that enabled them to participate in modern culture of a different kind.

A newly founded city on the shores of the Black Sea, Odessa, which was neither »ashkenazi« nor »sephardic«, maybe best represents the ambivalence between the positive and the negative aspects of Jewish urban fantasies during the 19th Century. Free of settlement restrictions, able to vote and even to be elected, Odessa’s Jews, invited by Catherine the Great in 1794 and growing into the city’s largest ethnic group in the course of the 19th century, experienced everything »modernity« had on offer: a relatively high level of equality and violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism; amazing wealth in the case of some entrepreneurial families and great poverty among the working class; a high degree of cultural exchange with Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, Italian, and Russian neighbours and the emergence of nationalist movements (as a response they created their own national movement, Zionism12, with a »practical« fraction initiated by Leon Pinsker and the Hoveve Zion, and a very influential »cultural« fraction, supported by Achad Ha’am and Chaim Nachman Bialik). Odessa became the creative centre for the development of modern Jewish literature13 not just in Yiddish (Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moikher Sforim) and in Hebrew (Bialik, Shaul Tchernichowsky) but also in Russian (Vladimir Jabotinsky, Isaak Babel), and ideas that were born in Odessa travelled the Jewish world, from Warsaw to Berlin and Paris, London and New York, Buenos Aires and of course Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Urbanization, then, in different forms, has been the most important factor for the modernization process and for the Jewish encounter with modern culture. But again, the ambivalent character of modernity and modernization needs to be considered. The big and growing city is a theatre of opportunities. Life in an urban and ever urbanizing context offers new forms of education and cultural activity unheard of in the places of origin: free schools, access to libraries and museums, theatre and concerts far beyond any religious content, and—maybe most importantly—the chance to make one’s life outside of the traditional framework of the community. In Berlin more than elsewhere, this chance has been taken by the majority of those who became »German Jews« and saw themselves on the path to emancipation and integration within the wider society. Alongside the traditional institutions, synagogues, schools, hospitals, and charitable organisations, they created German-Jewish societies, from the »Gesellschaft der Freunde« to the bibliophile »Soncino-Gesellschaft«, as a means of integrating Jewish initiative with German culture, language, and lifestyle.

At the same time, the city provided the immigrant communities from Russia and Eastern Europe, not least Ḥasidic groups who had already rejected traditional rabbinical authority in their very own way, with the space to build up their own institutions, shtiblech and private synagogues, aid societies, landsmanshaftn (to use a Yiddish notion that gained most prominence in New York and other North and South American cities), areas of retreat and reclusion where members of those traditional groups could lead non-modern lives within the framework of modernity. This contrast has become obvious in Berlin, where the liberal Neue Synagoge of 1866 on Oranienburger Straße, a symbol of belonging and self-confidence, with a widely visible golden cuppola, stands not more than 200 yards away from the orthodox synagogue of Adass Jisroel, that opened in 1869 in a backyard on Artilleriestraße (today Tucholskystraße). German-Jewish history in the following period would be characterized by this duality, and other tensions would follow—between the more established community that regarded itself as German, and the new arrivals that were regarded as »Ostjuden.« Later, the struggle was between those who in 1893, as part of their fight against emerging anti-Semitism, formed the »Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens« (CV) and new movements such as Jewish renaissance and, most importantly, Zionism.

2  Hopes of belonging and experiences of rejection

While these ambivalences have principally been based in a religious context, they have often been played out and made visible by different attitudes towards modern culture. One important and very urban cultural practice of »belonging« among those who saw their place firmly established within the modern European societies was the support given by prominent Jewish individuals and families to the institutionalisation of modern culture in art museums and archaeological collections, in concert halls and opera houses. The author Theodor Fontane who, with his later novels, became a representative of Berlin’s culture and identity towards the end of the 19th century, conceded in an article of 1878 for the aptly-named journal Die Gegenwart, that the Prussian aristocracy (whom he used to admire and praise in his early works) had nothing more to contribute to the new times, to sciences and the arts. They were too poor in spirit, too provincial, not cosmopolitan enough, whereas the new and emerging bourgeois society, and specifically the Jews, began to step in:

Here then is superiority, while narrowness unfolds and the provincial is stripped off. Great interests are negotiated, the gaze has expanded, it goes across the world. Customs are refined, purified, improved. Especially Taste . . . The arts and the sciences, which otherwise went begging or were dependent on themselves, here have their place. Instead of stables, observatories are built. Instead of images in blue and yellow and red, the works of our masters now hang in rooms and galleries. The state may have lost, the world has won.14

Whether the »exposure to the modern world« was »forced« (Pierre Nora15) or voluntary, its result was a profound change to the traditional ways of Jewish life. Generations of scholars have debated the question of whether modern art—music, literature, fine and graphic arts, photography, film, popular culture—created or supported by Jewish individuals can be regarded as »Jewish«.16 Would such a description not be essentialist or even exclusive? Has it not been a consistent strategy of anti-Semites to denounce creations or ideas »as Jewish« (and therefore, by conclusion, not »German« or »French« or »Polish« enough)? Following Karl Popper, cultural identity should not be imposed on a person or on their work, and self-identification is the important criterion for our contemporary assessment of these contributions. Individual Jews regarded the opportunities offered by modernization as a chance—and often enough as a risk—to participate in and to contribute to the emergence of a civic society in many areas, from natural science to urban sociology, from entrepreneurship to banking, from education to modern art.

A key figure in this context is James Henry Simon (1851‒1932), who was born in Berlin. His father Isaac and uncle Louis had arrived there in 1838 and built up a cotton trade company. James went to school in the renowned Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster in Berlin where he developed an interest in Latin, Greek, and Ancient History. He played the piano and the violin and would have loved to study classical languages. Instead, he joined the family business and became one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the city. His house, a villa in Tiergartenstraße 15a, was regarded as one of the finest addresses in Berlin, filled with an art collection for which he received advice from Wilhelm von Bode, the central personality for the development of Berlin’s museums. In 1900, Simon donated his collection of Italian Renaissance art to the newly founded Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (today’s Bode-Museum). He supported the »Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften« and the »Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft«, founded in 1898, and he financed the archaeological excavations at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt which brought the famous bust of Nefertiti to Berlin.

It has been said that Simon donated about one third of his yearly income, not just for the creation of museums and scientific institutions but also for social projects such as hospitals, public baths, children’s homes, or »start-ups«, as we would say today, for Eastern European Jewish immigrants. While he was not an observant Jew, his public engagement has been grounded in the Jewish tradition of Zedakah and in the civic spirit that began to develop in imperial Germany. This tradition contributed to progress in science and technology, as well as the arts, and turned the formerly provincial Prussian capital into the modern metropolis before World War I and during the seemingly »Golden Twenties«. Simon, who died shortly before the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, was part of a world that Thomas Mann summed up in a letter to his brother Heinrich, after a first visit with his future Jewish father-in-law: »One is not at all reminded of Judaism among those people: one feels nothing but culture.«17

Simon’s engagement with modern culture had contemporary alternatives. Here, we consider the contribution of Jewish folklorists, both in the Russian Empire and in Germany, such as Solomon An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport), or Rabbi Max Grünwald. Between 1912 and 1914, An-ski headed ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement. In his view, »only folklore would be the basis for creating a contemporary Jewish culture«.18 His was a different, but no less valid, response to modernity than that of his contemporaries who opted for linguistic and cultural assimilation, not just in the sense of an »embourgouisement« as in Germany, but also in a proletarian context. The Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeyter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), known simply as »the Bund,« was founded in Vilna in October 1897 by a group of Jews who were profoundly influenced by Marxism and intended »to attract East European Jews to the emergent Russian revolutionary movement«.19 In a distinct alternative to such assimilationist programmes, An-ski looked for a specifically Jewish response to modernity, and he found it in »tradition«. The folkloristic material itself that was collected during the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society’s expeditions in Volhynia and Podolia can be regarded as the material expression of traditional religious practice (often made of wood, leather, and other simple fabrics)—but its collection, and its representation in exhibitions and museums, for example in St. Petersburg in 1917 and again between 1923 and 1929, was an act of modern cultural politics: to preserve local customs and surviving material objects in the face of modernisation and of potential loss.

With a comparable intention, Max Grünwald (1871‒1953), an alumnus of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, whose PhD thesis had been dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, and who officiated as a rabbi in Hamburg from 1895, founded the Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde in 1898. Until 1929, he edited the »Mitteilungen« of this society that intended not only to preserve and to exhibit monuments of the Jewish past but to use them as a means of Jewish self-understanding and self-confidence in view of modernity and its challenges. Both initiatives inspired an eclectic movement, mostly in Germany, that has been termed »Jewish Renaissance«, an attempt on many artistic levels to both safeguard Jewish cultural heritage and to adapt it to the new realities. Advocates of this movement who lived through a first creative period between 1900 and 1914 and a second during the interwar years, reacted to similar tendencies in different European societies and tried to work out the specifically Jewish potential of a return to the roots which ideally functioned, at the same time, as a step towards the future. Two longer quotations by Martin Buber can illustrate the ideas of this movement, since they discuss, importantly, tradition and modernity in dialogue rather than in opposition to each other:

So we see universal and national cultures melt together in the deep unity of becoming. The best spirits of our time are illuminated by the idea of a human life saturated by beauty and benign strength, created and enjoyed by every individual and every people, each according to their ways and their values. That part of the Jewish tribe that understands itself as the Jewish people is placed within this new development and set aglow by it just like any other group. Still, its national participation in this development has a very distinct character: that of a contraction of muscles, a looking up, an elevation. The word »resurrection« forces itself on one’s lips: an awakening that is a miracle. History, however, does not want to know miracles. But history does know the streams of popular life that, seemingly run dry, continue to flow underground and break forth after millennia, and history knows the grains of nationhood that conserve their power to germinate over thousands of years. A resurrection from half-life to full is imminent for the Jewish people. Therefore we may call its participation in the modern national and international cultural movement a renaissance.20

As noted above, the two main areas of engagement were religious and cultural practice on the one hand and the question of national identity, between exile and diaspora on the other:

It will be more difficult for the Jewish people than for any other to enter into this renaissance movement. Ghetto and Golus, not the external but the internal enemy powers that bear these names, keep it back with iron shackles: Ghetto, the unfree intellectuality and the coercion of a tradition divested of all significance, and Golus, the slavery of an unproductive monetary economy and the hollow-eyed homelessness that undermines all unitary intent. Only through a fight against these powers can the Jewish people be born again. The outer redemption from Ghetto and Golus, which can only happen in a revolution far beyond anything granted today, needs to be preceded by an internal one. The fight against the pathetic episode of »assimilation«, which lately has degenerated into a wordy banter poor in substance, needs to be replaced by a fight against the deeper and more powerful forces of destruction.21

The crisis of modern culture, in a wider perspective, had affected not just European society as a whole, but also individuals and their relationship to traditional concepts such as the family, generation, gender—and even the self, both in body and soul. The following discussion will also widen the perspective from the situation in Germany to Central Europe. Two distinct authors whose language was German but who lived in two of the main cities of the Habsburg Empire, and later in the capital cities of newly emerged independent states, Prague (Czechoslovakia) and Vienna (Austria), need to be considered: Franz Kafka (1883‒1924) and Sigmund Freud (1856‒1939). In his recent biography of Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips discusses the question »how Jewish« Psychoanalysis was. He calls it »a story about acculturation; about how individuals adapt and fail to adapt to their cultures, and about the costs of such successes and failures.«22 European Jews, living as a minority in different societies, experienced the ambivalence of modernisation—the »Dialectics of Enlightenment«—more deeply than most of their contemporaries. »Now two things seem to be going on here: Jews are going to know about assimilation and adaptation. And they are going to know about the cost of assimilation. But that is also true of any colonized group. It knows it has to adapt in order to survive. And that adaptation is going to make you feel a lot of things very intensely.«23 Phillips finds a convincing way to place this Jewish experience in its wider context:

Yes, it is Jewish in the sense that it’s bound up in Jewish history. But it’s also to do with modern history, where there have been generations of colonial and imperial invasions. That said, it does want to make a different kind of Jewish life possible. It’s a kind of democratic wish: that as Jews you can be citizens and that you can politically participate. But at the same time that you could be more self-defining, and less defined than the people who are hostile to you.24

In an atmosphere of growing anti-Semitism, particularly in Vienna, Freud’s work and public eminence created a counter-narrative to the seemingly successful history of modernisation. Modernity came at a price for each individual and his or her relationship not just with others, but with the self. Family and gender relations, sexuality, and the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting could now be discussed in public. Loneliness, melancholy, depression, and ill health came to be regarded—and researched—in their relation to the society and its apparent progress. Failing father-son relations, insecurities about love and marriage, the challenges of bureaucracy and modern technology, or in more general terms, the »indecisions« of identity and belonging are central themes in the work of Franz Kafka whose short life has been marked by so many experiences of loss and failed attempts at belonging. Neither the Jewish family heritage, nor the promised homeliness of Yiddish theatre, nor the promised future of a new life in the Hebrew language could offer security for a writer who in his professional life absurdly acted as an expert in life insurance for workers in his native Bohemia. For a short while, the diversity offered by the city of Berlin in the early 1920s, damaged and torn by war and revolution, but more creative and more open to creativity than any other place at the time, offered a temporary refuge, and we can today follow the traces of Kafka through the streets of Berlin, to coffeehouses25 and places of learning, and we can read his novels and short stories as broken mirror of the hopes and the disappointments of modern culture. Zionism offered a seemingly easy solution, the national one, that was rejected both by the »orthodox« and by the »assimilationist« elements of the Jewish community. Artists involved in the Renaissance movement created an area of in-between-ness, with translations of Ḥasidic tales (Martin Buber) into German,26 with the creation of modernist journals in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and German, and with old-new experiences on the theatrical and musical stages.

Recent research in the area of »cultural change« and its consequences for the Jewish community in Europe and the United States has tried to go beyond the »dichotomy between the traditional and the new.« Instead of looking at overly simplified attributions such as traditional vs. modern, or reform vs. orthodox, or indeed German vs. Jewish, scholars in Jewish Studies have begun to study areas and instances of negotiation and translation, and of »co-construction« where such boundaries are crossed and, if possible, overcome. The study of responses to different forms of cultural change—to modernization—allows for a discussion of questions »about the resilience and coping strategies that groups develop when confronted with deep-reaching, sometimes existence-threatening social change in an increasingly complex world«.27 Modern culture can be regarded as one such area where religious and linguistic practices, forms of knowledge-transfer, translation, and representations of what »self« and »other« mean both for the majority and the minorities, are being made public: visible, audible, touchable. Can Jews, in a modernizing society, be part of this development?

This, albeit in a less contemporary wording, was the question put forward by a young man named Moritz Goldstein in 1912. Born in Berlin, in 1880, Goldstein grew up in a family that had »made it« in the big city, moving from its Western outskirts right into the very centre of Berlin’s urban culture, the Passage—a department store and an arcade following the famous examples of Paris, at the corner Unter den Linden and Friedrichstraße—where his father worked as a financial director. Having earned a PhD in German literature, Moritz Goldstein worked as an editor of German classical literature in Bong’s publishing house. How much further can one get? And yet, prevailing anti-Semitism in the business made him doubt his own role and write down a sentence that needs to be quoted here: »We Jews manage the intellectual property of a people who deny us both permission and the ability to do so.«28

This sentence, and the whole article to which it belongs, Goldstein’s »Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass« in the journal Der Kunstwart, has been discussed widely. In our context it is important because it sums up the ambivalent atmosphere shortly before World War I—in which German Jews eagerly showed their loyalty to the country and were later bitterly disappointed by the lack of acceptance and by the continuity of prejudice and mistrust. With the collapse of the Kaiserreich and the establishment of a democratic republic, this ambivalence reached new heights. With all formal restrictions gone, the Weimar Republic witnessed an unprecedented degree of Jewish integration into all spheres of German life and, at the same time, the growth of political and cultural anti-Semitism. It would surely be wrong to judge the democratic experiment from its horrible ending, but still, the shadows of violence and destruction loomed over this short period that saw an outbreak of creativity in all areas of culture like none before. As one of the correspondents for the Gedenkbuch der ermordeten Juden Berlins wrote in a letter to a research group at Berlin’s Freie Universität:

It was perhaps symbolic that my childhood began with the rise of the Weimar Republic and ended with its decline. The bloody riots that broke out at the beginning of the Weimar Republic were the precursors of that hell, which in 1933 brought a terrible end to the first democratic German republic and also swept my family away.29

The German Jew Hugo Preuss drafted the constitution of the Weimar Republic, Hugo Haase and Walter Rathenau played an active part in its first government. The Berlin-born painter Max Liebermann’s work for the acceptance of modern impressionist painting earned him the Presidency of Berlin’s Academy of Arts. Lesser Ury’s urban street scenes illustrated the specific atmosphere of the new metro­polis. Max Reinhardt was the central figure of theatre life, while Arnold Schönberg revolutionized modern music. Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, and among the Nobel prize winners in Germany up to 1938, 24 percent were Jews (nine out of thirty-eight). Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, Gabriele Tergit, Arnold Zweig and many other writers contributed to the creation of a new and modern (and urban) German literature. Publishers such as Samuel Fischer and art dealers like Alfred Flechtheim or Paul Cassirer provided the artists with a growing network of contact and exchange. In popular culture, the 1930 premiere of the operetta »Im weißen Rössl« in Berlin’s Großes Schauspielhaus, written by Ralph Benatzky and including songs by Robert Gilbert, became a symbol for the successful cooperation of Jewish and non-Jewish artists (and even managed to put a Jewish figure on stage who was neither a »Nathan the Wise« nor a »Shylock«).

But what does all this really mean? For the anti-Semites, including the growing National Socialist movement, these were signs of a dangerous »Judaization« of German culture. From within the Jewish community, critical voices could be heard that saw in this form of acculturation a kind of weakness, a loss of Jewish self-awareness, an illusion of belonging. They argued for a continuation of the Jewish Renaissance, a return to the sources that Judaism provided (biblical literature, the Hebrew language, the history of the Jewish diaspora) as topics for creative work. They also partly supported the small but growing and internationally very relevant German Zionist movement, without intending to join the new project in Palestine, though. In fact, only around 2,000 German Jews contributed to the construction of a new Jewish society in Palestine, albeit important thinkers and writers among them such as Gershom Scholem (for whom a chair in the study of Jewish Mysticism was created at the Hebrew University), the medical doctor Elias Auerbach, or the architect Lotte Cohn. But the large majority of German Jews remained in a Germany they regarded as their home. Diana Pinto has coined the term »Jewish Space« for cultural activities in post-1990 Europe that brought Jews and non-Jews together in a common interest to save the European Jewish cultural heritage—or rather, what was left of it after the destructions brought about by the Holocaust and later, in Eastern Europe, under Stalinism—and to create new forms of Jewish culture.

Can this notion (which will be discussed in detail below) be also used for the period before 1933? Can we imagine the Weimar Republic, at least in parts, as a kind of »Jewish Space«, a »Jewish Landscape« (Ellenson)? How have »Jewish« places been constructed and negotiated, and what was the role of languages and of translations in these processes? David Roskies has described the relationship between Jews and non-Jews as a »market place of voices«.30 Research in this area means trying to make sense of the »discourses« acted out in such places, to analyze the importance of translation and transfer in Jewish/non-Jewish relations, to consider the significance of »place« in such relations from a geographical, historical, and cultural point of view, and to address questions of authenticity and appropriation in acts of cultural transfer and exchange.31

Berlin shortly before the Nazi’s rise to power, Vienna between 1933 and 1938, Paris before the outbreak of World War II, New York during the war years, but also the cities of post-War Europe can be regarded as very specific »arenas«, locales where ethnic and religious boundaries are challenged and crossed. For example, Robert Gilbert’s life and work can illustrate this discussion. Robert David Winterfeld was born in the poor eastern part of Berlin in 1899. He was the son of Max Winterfeld, a circus orchestra conductor and composer, who already had changed his name to Jean Gilbert—in a city that aspired to become a European metropolis and, in those years, saw Paris as its role model. With one successful operetta (Die keusche Susanne, 1912), containing the hit song, »Püppchen, Du bist mein Augenstern«, Jean Gilbert managed to fulfil for his family the Berlin dream of moving westward and living in a villa on the Wannsee shore. After fighting in World War I, Robert returned a pacifist and a socialist. He had inherited his father’s musical talent and hoped to put it to use supporting the political left in Weimar Germany. His song »Stempellied«, composed by Hanns Eisler and interpreted by Ernst Busch, became an icon for Germany’s worker’s movement, an indictment of the capitalist system, and of »those above« (»die da oben«) for sending the unemployed masses into misery and despair. Gilbert collaborated with Hanns Eisler and performed at festivals for New Music, for example in Baden-Baden 1927. When he married and felt the need to earn serious money, Gilbert started to work for movies and operettas, and within a very short time he became Germany’s most prolific and highest-earning songwriter. With Werner Richard Heymann (1896‒1961), Gilbert wrote the songs for Die drei von der Tankstelle, for Der Kongreß tanzt, and for Ralph Benatzky’s operetta Im weißen Rössl32 he wrote the songs that made the play so successful. In the period that ended so abruptly in 1933, Gilbert was a major actor in, and contributor to, Germany’s popular music industry.

Recent research has shown that a musical dialogue and exchange between Europe and the United States had taken place in the early decades of the 20th century and partly replaced Berlin’s love-affair with Paris and everything Parisian (the reason the Winterfeld family had changed their name to Gilbert); while shows and plays on Broadway had drawn from the European (particularly Austrian) operetta, the new American musical innovations in turn influenced and inspired this short-lived but intense heyday of ambitious and sophisticated German popular and entertaining culture; already a two-way street of transatlantic contact and exchange before 1933. Erik Charell, the director of Im weißen Rössl, had visited the United States in the 1920s where he saw the »Ziegfeld follies« on Broadway and imported the ideas of big revues, chorus lines, and dancing troops back to Germany. In a convincingly pragmatic way, Swiss researcher François Genton sums up: »Around 1930, a popular culture emerged in Germany which was modern, part of the avant-garde, but at the same time conscious of tradition, and leading the field in Europe. Many of the protagonists of this culture were educated and qualified German Jews.«33 While being Jewish or of Jewish origin had meant little for Robert Gilbert during this most creative period of his life, it became the defining factor of his future after January 1933.

3  From Berlin to Tel Aviv and Los Angeles: The internationalisation of Jewish modernity

This culture was destroyed by the National Socialists—in Germany and later in Austria. Jewish artists were excluded from public appearances and forced into the ghetto of the »Jüdischer Kulturbund«. The photographer Abraham Pisarek (1899‒1982) has documented the attempts of the Kulturbund organisations, not just in Berlin, but all over Germany, to provide Jewish artists with work opportunities and to maintain their close relationship with the musical and theatrical works of the German and European tradition. In general, Pisarek’s photographs illustrate the »shrinking world of German Jewry« (Jacob Boas) and the Nazi policy of marginalisation and exclusion. Beyond that they also show the admirable efforts of the remaining Jewish community to »keep up the spirit«, to re-assemble in synagogues and hospitals, in libraries and concert halls, and to prepare at least the young generation for an emigration out of Germany. Since many of Weimar culture’s Jewish protagonists, Robert Gilbert and his composer Werner Richard Heymann among them, managed to escape Germany and to find refuge