Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-82, Its Structure and Culture

Frankfurt on the Hudson

A Publication of the Leo Baeck Institute

Frankfurt on the Hudson

The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture

Steven M. Lowenstein

Copyright © 1989 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48202. All rights are reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lowenstein, Steven M., 1945–

Frankfurt on the Hudson : the German-Jewish community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, its structure and culture / Steven M. Lowenstein.

p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8143-1960-2 (alk. paper)

1. Jews, German—New York (N.Y.) 2. Washington Heights (New York, N.Y.)—Ethnic relations. 3. Immigrants—New York (N.Y.) 4. Orthodox Judaism—New York (N.Y.) 5. New York (N.Y.)—Ethnic relations. I. Title.

F128.9.J5L69 1988

305.8 924’7471—dc19                                                             88-20520

                                                                                                       CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-2385-4 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-8143-2385-5 (pbk)

e-ISBN: 978-0-8143-3751-6

In memory of my father, Max Lowenstein, and my grandmother Lea Sachsendorfer, two models of traditional German Jewry

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS

TABLES

MAPS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Refuge from Germany

2. The Jewish Community in Germany

3. Establishment of the Washington Heights Community

4. Economic Adjustment and Communal Consolidation

5. The Social Structure

6. The Institutional Framework

7. The Religious Spectrum

8. The Immigrant Culture

9. Relations between the Generations

10. A Changing Neighborhood

11. Patterns of Ethnic Identity

12. Reflections on Acculturation and Ethnic Survival

METHODOLOGICAL ESSAY

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

Ft. Washington Avenue and 173rd Street (with J. Hood Wright Park) in 1936

Boys from German-Jewish families shining shoes at 181st Street and Ft. Washington Avenue, c. 1940

German-Jewish men sitting on a park bench in J. Hood Wright Park

Rabbi Joseph Breuer and his family in Frankfurt

Humor about modern life in a Torah binder by Reuben Eschwege

Depiction of a Wedding on a Torah binder by Reuben Eschwege

Returning Passover dishes to storage after the holiday

West 181st Street, one of the main shopping streets in Washington Heights

The groundbreaking ceremony for Congregation Shaare Hatikvah in 1953

Procession with Torahs led by a brass band at the dedication of the new headquarters of Congregation Beth Israel in the 1950s

A speech at a Bar Mitzvah in Washington Heights

Traditional study vigil (Hoschanah Rabbah-Lernen) on the seventh day of Sukkot in Congregation Ernes Wozedek

Jewish veterans of the German army in World War I (Immigrant Jewish War Veterans) saluting the American flag, 1958

Audience at the twentieth anniversary dinner of the Immigrant Jewish War Veterans, 1958

Demonstration for Soviet Jewry, 1971

The funeral procession of Rabbi Breuer, 1980

Dr. Ruth Westheimer at Hebrew Tabernacle

Tables

1. Comparison of Wealthy and Poor Areas of Washington Heights (Health Areas 2.22 and 4)

2A. Distribution of the German Population in Washington Heights, 1940–80

2B. German Population as a Percentage of the Total of the Health Areas in Washington Heights

3. Three Types of German Jews

4. Region of Origin of Refugees in Washington Heights and Other Areas, 1960

5. Region of Origin and Membership in Orthodox and Non-Orthodox Congregations, 1983-84 (German-Austrian Born Only)

6. Rural and Urban Origins of Residents of Washington Heights and Other Areas, 1960

7. Rural and Urban Origins of Members of Washington Heights Congregations, 1983–84

8. Education of Washington Heights Jews, 1965

9. Comparison of Income of Jews in Washington Heights and Jews in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1965

10. Comparison of Income of German-Born Jews in the New York Metropolitan Area and in Washington Heights

11. Occupations of Male Washington Heights Residents

12. Occupations of Male Washington Heights Jews of Various Backgrounds, 1965

13. Age Distribution of Washington Heights Groups

14. Age Distribution in Jewish and Hispanic Parts of Washington Heights (Health Areas 2.22 and 4), 1970

15. Age Distribution in Washington Heights German Congregations (Heads of Household), 1983–84

16. Percentage of Various Age Groups below the Poverty Line in Washington Heights, 1980

17. Jewish Household Size in Washington Heights, 1965

18. Member of Children per Family by Washington Heights Congregation

19. Main Economic Activity of Jewish Women over 18 in Washington Heights, 1965

20. Congregations Founded by German Jews in Washington Heights

21. Synagogue Attendance of Washington Heights Jews and New York Jewish Men

22. Religious Affiliation of New York Jews, 1981

23. Number of Observances Practiced by New York Jews of German background, 1981

24. Religious Self-Identification of Washington Heights Jews, 1965

25. Kashruth Observance of Washington Heights Jews, 1983–84

26. Kashruth Observance of Washington Heights Jews Self-Defined as Conservative, 1983–84

27. Friday Night Candle Lighting among German-Born Washington Heights Jews, 1983–84

28. Ownership of Objects Indicating Types of German-Jewish Culture (Persons Born in Germany), 1983–84

29. Children’s Religious Practice Compared with That of Parents, 1983–84

30. Black and Hispanic Populations of Washington Heights Areas

31. Crimes in Manhattan, Precinct 34 (North of 165th Street)

32. Ethnic Self-Labelling of Washington Heights Jewish Residents (1983–84) Born in Germany

33A. German Province of Birth by Religious Self-Definition, 1983–84

33B. Size of German City or Town of Birth by Religious Self-Definition, 1983–84

34A. Religious Observance in the First Three Years in the United States Compared with Observance in Europe

34B. Religious Observance in 1983–84 Compared with Observance in Europe

Maps

Map 1. Location of Washington Heights in New York City

Map 2. Health Areas (1–9) Census Tracts (221–307) in Washington Heights–Inwood

Map 3. Parkland in Washington Heights–Inwood

Map 4. Homeland of Washington Heights German Jews

Map 5. German-Jewish Institutions near 158th Street and Broadway

Map 6. German synagogues in Washington Heights, about 1950

Map 7. German synagogues in Washington Heights, 1987

Acknowledgments

It is both a pleasant and a difficult duty to thank all the persons who helped me in putting together this book. So many have been helpful in one way or another that it is difficult to remember and list all of them, though it is a pleasure to think back on the helpfulness of so many.

This project was carried out under a generous grant from the Leo Baeck Institute, and this volume is published under the auspices of the institute. Special thanks go to Dr. Fred Grubel for his longstanding aid and advice as well as to Dr. Michael Riff, Dr. Marion Kaplan (now at Queens College), and Ms. Diane Spielman for their advice and for supplying materials from the institute archives and library.

I have also benefitted from a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, for which I am most grateful. Dr. Steven Huberman of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles gave some very valuable advice in the initial stages of this inquiry. Dr. Bruce Phillips of Hebrew Union College gave considerable time and effort in showing me how to prepare the mail survey. Professor Charles Liebman generously lent me material from his early study of Washington Heights. Adolph Oppenheim gave me advice and material both on the Breuer community and on Washington Heights in general. He helped put me in touch with Frank Vardi and Alfred Fuerst of the New York City Planning Commission, who gave me valuable statistical material. Paul Haberman, one of the researchers in the 1965 survey undertaken by the Division of Sociomedical Sciences of the Columbia University School of Public Health and Administrative Medicine, gave me access to original computer tapes of the survey and helped me run new cross-tabulations. Paul Ritterband and Steven Schwartz made available materials from the New York Jewish Population Study of 1981.

Thanks are due to the boards of trustees and the staffs of the Congregation Shaare Hatikvah Ahavath Torah v’Tikwoh Chadoshoh, Congregation Beth Hillel and Beth Israel, and Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation for their generous cooperation in distributing the mail survey. Especial thanks go to Rabbi Shlomo Kahn, Rabbi Robert Lehman, and Rev. Walter Hes.

David Marso gave invaluable aid in programming the data from the mail survey. Thanks are also due to the Computer Center of California State University at Northridge for their generosity in making computer time available to me.

I received valuable suggestions from Professor Sanford Jacoby of UCLA and Rabbi Dr. Levi Meier, both former residents of Washington Heights. I had very fruitful discussions with Manny Kirchheimer, who made a film entitled We Were So Beloved about the reactions of the German Jews of Washington Heights to the Holocaust. Fruitful information also came from a correspondence with Dr. Marion Berghahn, author of a book on German Jews in England.

After I had completed the first draft of this book, Professor Benny Kraut sent me a copy of his article Ethnic-Religious Ambiguities in an Immigrant Synagogue: The Case of New Hope Congregation, which appears in Jack Wertheimer’s American Synagogue: Transplanted and Transformed (Oxford University Press, 1987). Kraut’s study deals with a German Orthodox synagogue congregation in Cincinnati which bears a remarkable resemblance to the community of Washington Heights. It confirms many of the impressions I had of the culture of the Washington Heights community. An expanded version of Kraut’s article is German Jewish Orthodoxy in an Immigrant Synagogue: Cincinnati’s New Hope Congregation and the Ambiguities of Ethnic Religion (Markus Wiener, 1988).

This manuscript was read in its entirety by Rabbi Shlomo Kahn, Rabbi Robert Lehman, Professor David Ellenson, and Professor Ismar Schorsch. I thank all of them for their effort and the very useful feedback they gave me. I would like to thank Mrs. Bruno Stern and the Jan Thorbecke Verlag in Sigmaringen, West Germany, for permission to use photographs from Bruno Stern’s memoirs So war es.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support and patience, which made it possible for me to complete this work.

My mother and father, Yette and Max Lowenstein, provided me with the home environment that was a model of the culture I have studied here. They gave me valuable advice and counsel. I am happy that my father was able to read and comment on the first draft, though I am tremendously saddened that he did not live to see the book in print.

My wife and children deserve special thanks for their patience with a project that ended up taking much more time and effort than I had originally anticipated. My children tolerated my frequent absences from home. My daughter especially showed interest in the project and even offered her own book illustration. Without the help and encouragement I received from my wife, Marilynn, I could never have undertaken or completed this project. She was the one who originally suggested the project and saw both its importance and the necessity of undertaking it before the older generation died out. She was always there with sensible and valuable advice on methods to use and information to seek. Even though her own profession took tremendous amounts of time, she read through the entire draft and gave many valuable suggestions for improvement, most of which I have incorporated. I wish it were possible to show my appreciation properly.

In the course of this project, I corresponded with, and received suggestions and information from, many sources. I would like to thank all of my correspondents and the interviewees who gave generously of their time and effort. I apologize in advance to any person whose name I have inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments.

Introduction

For many years, I have felt a strong relationship between my personal connection with the German-Jewish community of Washington Heights and my interest in the social and cultural history of German Jewry. Certainly by the time I was in college, and perhaps earlier, I noticed the sharp discrepancy between the description of German Jewry found in virtually all books on Jewish history and my perceptions of the Washington Heights community in which I grew up. The almost unvarying picture of modern German Jewry given in history books, and indeed found in the mentality of many American Jews, is that of a highly assimilated community much more closely tied to German culture than to Jewish tradition, wealthy and elite, and looking with condescension on Jews of other backgrounds.

The German Jews of Washington Heights among whom I grew up seemed very different. To them there was no contradiction between German language and cultural habits and a deep tie to Jewishness. Traditional Jewish religious practice was quite common and obvious among them. In fact, the German Jews seemed more traditional and indeed more Jewish than the neighborhood American Jews whose parents had come to America at the turn of the century.

In Washington Heights, most German synagogues were Orthodox, not Reform as the history books would lead one to expect. Though they had certain feelings of snobbishness about Jews of eastern European background, the German Jews I knew could hardly have been considered wealthy members of the elite. Before fleeing Hitler in the 1930s most had come from modest backgrounds, grown up in small towns in closely knit Jewish communities, been small businessmen or white- and blue-collar workers, and could by no stretch of the imagination be called assimilated.

The discrepancy between the traditional German Jews I knew personally and the image of assimilated German Jews prompted my initial research. I was interested in two questions: How did the bulk of German Jewry move from the traditional society in which they had lived until the eighteenth century into a modern assimilated community, and how did a minority of them remain traditional? Finally I was interested in the social differences between the two groups.

Since only very few of the literary sources on German Jewry dealt with the traditionalists in the small towns, I became interested in German-Jewish social history. Through the use of quantitative and qualitative studies of materials left behind by the large number of inarticulate Jews outside the intellectual centers, I tried to reconstruct a picture of the process by which a traditional community becomes less traditional. In the course of this study I came to the conclusion that the process of change was both slower and more complex than that suggested in the conventional picture of developments in modern Jewry.

In this study of the German Jews of Washington Heights, I investigate the end result of the process of modernization of one group of German Jews. I do this with the full recognition that Washington Heights represents only one extreme of the spectrum of German Jewry. But this traditionalist end of the spectrum has generally not received sufficient emphasis in studies either of German Jewry in its original home or of the German-Jewish refugees in America.¹ A balanced view requires a study not only of the assimilated but also of the traditional elements in the Washington Heights community and elsewhere.

The migration from Germany ended the complicated attempt of German Jews to adjust to the demands of German culture while striving to remain Jewish. The new situation was similar in structure to adjustment to Germany but totally different in detail—requiring adjustment to the pressures of Americanization. What makes Washington Heights Jews so fascinating is the fact that they are the product of a double adjustment, first to Germany and then to America. As the immigrants were to find out, traits that helped the adjustment to Germany sometimes hindered adjustment to America.

Like other American Jews, the Jews of Washington Heights faced contradictory pressures to become American and to retain their identity. Every immigrant group that came to America was faced with a similar structural situation; however, the way that each group actually experienced and reacted to this dilemma differed. No matter which parallel reference group I looked at within American Jewry, I found both similarities of general situation with the refugees in Washington Heights and tremendous differences in the details of how this worked out. When compared with the largest and best known group of American Jewish immigrants, the eastern Europeans who came at the turn of the century, the contrasts are clear. The teeming poverty-stricken Lower East Side (the largest eastern European settlement), with its Yiddish street signs and theater, its crowds on the streets, and lively internal conflicts of principle, looked very different from quiet middle-class Washington Heights. Yet the people of Washington Heights, too, had their need to adjust and fit in.

Unlike the eastern European immigrants, the German Jews who came in the nineteenth century were of the same background as the immigrants who came to Washington Heights in the twentieth century. Many were, in fact, distant relatives of Washington Heights residents. Yet their pattern of adjustment was very different. In the nineteenth century, German Jews rose rapidly on the social scale and acculturated equally rapidly, exchanging Orthodoxy and immigrant ways for Reform and bourgeois Americanism within a generation. In Washington Heights the rate of change away from tradition was much slower.

The immigrants to the Lower East Side had come with a very different Jewish subculture from that of the German Jews, though the nineteenth-century German-Jewish immigrants had started out from a similar background but met very different American conditions. Both came to an America very different from that of the 1930s. The German-Jewish refugees of the 1930s differed from the two earlier groups of immigrants in that they had a double set of identity adjustments to make. They were not only a Jewish minority group in a Christian majority culture, they were also a German-Jewish subminority within an eastern European Jewish submajority. They not only shared the usual struggles about how to adjust their Jewishness to America, but were also faced with the issue of whether and to what extent to retain their German-Jewish subethnicity. The interrelationship between adjustment to America at large and adjustment to American Jewry in particular is one of the main themes of this book.

The strong role played by Orthodoxy in Washington Heights leads one naturally to compare Washington Heights Orthodoxy with parallel communities elsewhere. In the Hasidim of Brooklyn’s Boro Park and Williamsburg or the modern Orthodox described by Heilman,² I found many similar developments but even more striking differences in atmosphere. Some of the differences between Washington Heights and other American Jewish communities are the result of differences in internal Jewish content—national origin, relative Orthodoxy, community organization. Others are the result of a different American context. America has changed a lot in the fifty years since the German-Jewish refugees arrived in the United States. The melting pot model, in which all immigrants were to become completely American, has been joined, and partially replaced, by a greater encouragement of ethnicity. The German Jews have experienced both attitudes and have reacted differently at different times even within the short span of their history. So, this study has had to deal not only with the place of the Washington Heights community within the history of German Jewry, nor only with its place within American Jewry, but also with broader questions of the effect of changes in overall American attitudes towards ethnic groups.

The many contexts in which Washington Heights can be viewed give the community significance in the analysis of a number of issues. However, analysis of such far-flung issues was not my only intention in writing the book. I was also interested in preserving a picture of a Jewish subgroup in danger of extinction. I have recorded events and anecdotes that help create a lively picture of this community, even if they do not necessarily answer the big questions. After all, Washington Heights is a living breathing community with an unusual way of life of its own.

CHAPTER 1

Refuge from Germany

In the years before the outbreak of World War II, the hills of northern Manhattan became the home of over twenty thousand refugees from Nazi Germany. The colony they created in the neighborhood called Washington Heights had a special atmosphere. The language and much of the culture was German, but the mentality and style of life differed very much from what could be found in German-American neighborhoods like Yorkville or Ridgewood. They combined Jewish and German traits in a way that differed both from other American Jews and from non-Jewish Germans. Although the German Jews never became a majority of the neighborhood’s population, they gave it much of its distinctive tone.

The German Jews of Washington Heights were only a portion of a larger and equally unusual group of immigrants to the United States. The 150,000 to 190,000¹ Jews (and others) who fled Nazi Germany occupy a special place in the history of American immigration. They did not fit the stereotype Americans had of immigrants to this country. They were certainly not the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus’s famous poem. Few American immigrant groups have been described in such elite terms as the German refugees of the 1930s. One need only quote the titles of some of the books about them—The Intellectual Migration, Illustrious Immigrants, The Refugee Intellectual, The Muses Flee Hitler²— to see how different the image of them is from that of most immigrant groups in the United States.

The literature about the 1930s refugee wave is quite extensive. Most of the works concentrate on the top elite group among them—the intellectuals, the group that was most influential and glamorous. The immigrants of the 1930s had their effect on the American university, on the popular culture of Hollywood, on classical and popular music, and on numerous other aspects of American cultural life. In the natural sciences there was the towering figure of Albert Einstein. In the social sciences, such disparate figures as Erich Fromm, Eric Erikson, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse have had great influence. In music one can mention the composers Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as such leading conductors as Erich Leinsdorf and Otto Klemperer. A catalog of famous names is easy to extend for pages.

Although the intellectuals have attracted the most attention, they were clearly not the majority. Only 18 percent of gainfully employed refugee arrivals were professionals,³ and many of these were doctors and lawyers rather than intellectuals.⁴ The few thousand intellectuals were far outnumbered by refugee businessmen and non-intellectual professionals. Those studies that have tried to present a picture of the social characteristics of the refugee wave as a whole show that the intellectuals were not typical of the wave.⁵ They showed a much lesser commitment to Judaism than other refugees and, in part, showed a cultural alienation from America absent from the larger refugee group.

However different the bulk of the refugees were from the intellectuals among them, they still shared an elite character that differentiated them from the mass immigrants. Davie describes the difference in detail.⁶ His description of the earlier immigrants includes the following characterizations: they came primarily for economic reasons, were mainly lower class or middle class, and usually had an elementary education or less. Most came from small towns, tended to concentrate in immigrant colonies, had a low standard of living, and learned English slowly. The refugees from Nazi Germany were quite different. They came to escape persecution rather than for economic reasons. They were mainly of middle- or upper-class origin and were engaged primarily in business, professional, or white-collar occupations. They came chiefly from cities and many were well educated. They tended not to concentrate in immigrant centers, had a high standard of living, and tended to get into the mainstream of American life. Although Davie somewhat idealizes the ease with which refugees entered the American mainstream,⁷ he does document most of the other elite characteristics of the refugee group.

Many of the refugees had lived comfortably in the best neighborhoods of Europe’s most sophisticated cities. The shock of the Nazi rise to power was traumatic for them in many ways. They felt rejected by the culture in which they had played such a great role; they lost most of their possessions and were forced to leave their homeland, not for the sake of improved material conditions, but to save their lives. Since they had been accustomed to middle-class conditions, they tried to reestablish them as quickly as possible, perhaps too quickly to the minds of some of their native-born neighbors.

The refugee group was unusual not only in the history of American immigration in general but also in American Jewish history. The German Jewish immigrant wave of the 1930s was far smaller than the wave of eastern European Jewish immigration that preceded it. The difference was not only in numbers. Nor was it merely the result of the fact that the newcomers came from a middle-class background. There were also important cultural and social differences. Most earlier Jewish immigrants had come to America poor and religiously traditional. Most of the newcomers of the 1930s were not religiously observant. Their culture seemed to most American Jews to be more German than Jewish. They spoke German rather than Yiddish and usually knew more about German culture and history than about the history and culture of the Jews. In Germany most Jews had viewed themselves as Germans of the Jewish faith, a way of looking at themselves that was bound to lead to conflict with the native Jew, who had a more ethnic self-image.

The Washington Heights community was as atypical a part of the general refugee wave as the refugees as a whole were atypical of American immigrants. The residents of Washington Heights tended to group at the opposite pole of the spectrum of refugee types from the intellectuals. The very fact that they moved to an immigrant neighborhood—even one with as many middle-class features as Washington Heights had—made them atypical for the refugees who tended not to concentrate much. Not surprisingly, the immigrants who moved to this immigrant settlement retained many of their European ways longer than did refugees who avoided their fellow German Jews.

Compared with the average member of the refugee wave the Washington Heights settler was less intellectual, less wealthy, more Jewish, and less assimilated. Jewish religion and Jewish ethnic identification were much stronger in Washington Heights than was average for the refugees. Levels of secular education and prestigious occupations were lower. The immigrant culture created in Washington Heights had some of the middle-class character of the refugees as a whole, but lacked the cosmopolitan quality of the life of the famous immigrants of the period. There was still a bourgeois nature in the immigrant culture of Washington Heights. However Jewish the identification of many of the inhabitants, the style of immigrant life contained much that was German. The religion of the refugees was Jewish, but their image of what Jewishness was often contrasted with the eastern European Jewishness of their American Jewish coreligionists.

The immigrant community in Washington Heights came into existence slowly. Although a few of the German Jews saw what was coming in Germany immediately after Hitler came to power, most did not leave right away. In the early 1930s only a few German Jews came to Washington Heights. The bulk of the immigrants came in the fateful years from 1938 to 1940. They moved into the brick apartment buildings that covered the neighborhood and began to reconstruct both their economic and their communal lives. Like many other immigrant groups they started social clubs and mutual aid societies. Within a few years they founded a dozen large synagogues, opened countless small shops, some of them catering to the culinary and cultural habits of the newcomers, and tried to regain their bearings after the traumas of what they had suffered in Germany. The many parks that dotted the neighborhood filled up on the weekends with German Jews who had come to converse or to commune with the only nature available in urban New York.

German-Jewish life in Washington Heights had a threefold character—American, German, and Jewish. The second generation and much of the first as well learned how to speak English and incorporated American culture into their lives. On the other hand, the people retained much of the culture they had brought with them. This imported culture had a special quality because of its composite nature. The refugees were both German and Jewish—a combination especially hard to maintain in the face of the Nazi Holocaust. Much of their lives still seemed very German, especially to outsiders observing their language, their food, or their formality and punctuality. Yet, many of the residents thought of themselves as Jews, not as Germans. Jewish religious institutions played an important role in communal life, and Jewish religious practice was rather widespread. Even in their most Jewish cultural institutions—synagogue, liturgy, customs—however, the German cultural element was rarely totally absent. Characteristic of the community was the inextricable mixture of the German and Jewish elements in the culture.

CHAPTER 2

The Jewish Community in Germany

The German-Jewish community differs from most immigrant communities in that the culture from which it derived, German Jewry, no longer exists in its original setting. The immigrant communities provide the only surviving examples of the culture. They therefore offer insights not only into the Americanization process but also into the development of a German Jewry that can no longer be studied in living form in Europe. The Washington Heights community is thus the product of the long history of Jews in Germany and a mirror for the study of the last stages of that history.

THE INTEGRATION OF THE JEWS IN GERMAN SOCIETY

The culture that the immigrants brought to the United States consisted of the partial merger of German and Jewish (Western Ashkenazic) features. The relationship between the two elements varied within the community itself. Among some the German elements were stronger than among others. The German Jews in the course of the nineteenth century had already undergone a complex process of adaptation to the larger German culture. Despite the popular view of the German Jews as completely assimilated, the end result of the process of adaptation was much more complex than simple assimilation. German Jews on the eve of the rise of Nazism were to be found all along a complex continuum of relative acculturation and religious attitude.¹

The creation of modern German Jewry began in the mid eighteenth century. There had always been natural geographical variations within traditional Jewish society, but before the eighteenth century no one would have argued that German Jews were different in kind from other Jews. Jews in Germany, like the Jews of eastern Europe, were Ashkenazim.² Within Ashkenazic Jewry there was a noticeable difference in liturgy and customs between the western Ashkenazim (west of the Elbe River) and the eastern Ashkenazim, but these differences were only slightly greater than the regional differences between subgroups of eastern Ashkenazim such as the Lithuanian and the central Polish Jews.³

Because of their different paths towards modernization, German Jewry and eastern European Jewry became progressively more sharply different. Before the process began, Jews in virtually all countries lived a life patterned by traditional Jewish religious practice. In most countries they lived in semiautonomous communities which had substantial financial and judicial powers. Though the Jews were not totally isolated from the dominant culture, they still had their own separate educational systems and languages.

This state of affairs was changed radically through the twin processes of political emancipation and economic and social change. The process of change has now touched virtually every Jewish community in the world. Its first battleground, however, was Germany, and it was there that many of the paradigms for Jewish response to modernity were created. Among these responses first to emerge in Germany were Reform Judaism, Modern Orthodoxy, and assimilationism. German Jewry also had considerable influence on the emergence of Zionism, of the anti-Zionist Orthodox Agudath Israel, and of the neotraditional philosophies of Buber and Rosenzweig.

The process of change in Germany began with two related phenomena—the European Enlightenment and the political Emancipation of the Jews. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century challenged many of the ideas of previous generations, including the authority of revealed religion. Enlightenment ideas of natural human rights and the primacy of human reason implied a new way to treat the Jews. Enlightened thinkers in France, Germany, and elsewhere proclaimed that the Jewish problem could be solved by increased education and political integration for the Jews.

The Enlightenment’s influence was not restricted, however, to Christian society. Beginning in the late eighteenth century it made progressively greater inroads in the Jewish community of Germany as well. Although the first great representative of the German-Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, took a rather conservative stance with regard to Jewish traditional practice, many of his followers were much less respectful of the tradition. They turned the rationalist critique of the Enlightenment on the traditional practices, beliefs, and institutions and found them wanting. They also called for a reform of Jewish educational institutions to introduce the secular knowledge now available and to eliminate the former concentration on study of Talmud and Jewish lore. Somewhat later, beginning in the Napoleonic period, calls for change in the liturgy and in Jewish religious law were also made.

The influence of the Enlightenment and of secular thought in general on Jewry was very much increased by the coming of the Emancipation to German Jewry.⁴ The Emancipation implied the removal of restrictions on individual Jews in order to integrate Jews into the larger society. It was assumed that the solidarity of Jews as a group would be weakened or perhaps disappear. In the words of Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre the Jews would be given as individuals everything, as a nation nothing. Judaism was to become a religion only and no longer to constitute a nationality.

The German officials dealing with the Jewish question did not give Emancipation all at once as the French did. Rather the move towards equality was a long drawn out process of nearly three-quarters of a century. In Germany, more than in France, the idea was strong that Jews should show themselves worthy of equality. Many German states granted some opportunity, while denying other rights, with the idea that, if the Jews would begin to change their cultural and economic way of life, further improvements would be granted. The German laws of the early nineteenth century were intended as educative. The Jews were expected to make changes in their way of life in exchange for their new rights.⁵

The new legal situation had profound implications for Jewish life in Germany. For the first time, issues arose that had never existed before. What aspects of Judaism were religious and could be retained and which were national and would have to be dropped? Jews were now considered citizens and thus liable to conscription, whereas formerly they had been exempt as foreigners.⁶ How was a Jew in the army to observe the Sabbath and obtain kosher food? How were such political aspects of the Jewish religion as the belief in a Messiah who would bring the Jews back to their own land to be treated now? The Emancipatory laws reduced the powers of the Jewish communities considerably. Jews were now required either to attend government schools or to set up their own schools following government approved curricula. They were taught loyalty to the state and German patriotism. They were forbidden to use Yiddish or Hebrew in their ledgers, but were encouraged more and more to adopt the German language in all aspects of their daily life.

Cultural changes of various types took place because of this new political situation. Under the impact of compulsory secular education, Jews began to identify with the history and patriotism of the states within which they lived. Within a few generations German replaced Yiddish as the spoken and written language of German Jews. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Jews were already overrepresented among German secondary and university students. In increasing numbers, Jews entered the professions and began to contribute to German literature, science, and general culture.⁷

There was another side to this cultural change, however. The rapid increase in German culture among German Jews brought along with it a decline in the force of Jewish traditional culture in Germany. Instead of comprising the only type of study, religious instruction was now reduced to a supplemental status, and secular education was considered more important. For the first time, Jewish lore and values were confronted with Western ones, and many German Jews began to feel that Jewish tradition did not quite measure up to its secular counterpart. The old yeshivas (schools for higher Talmudic learning) closed down. More and more younger and acculturated Jews began to drop such traditional practices as Sabbath observance and kashruth. In response to these changes a movement for the reform of traditional Jewish practices developed in the early nineteenth century.

Reform Judaism was both a product of the new critical approach to tradition and an attempt to prevent the acculturated from dropping their Jewish identity. It called for a westernizing of the Jewish prayer service and for a modification of Jewish religious law. In the period between about 1850 and 1870, Reform Judaism (or Liberal Judaism as it preferred to be called in Germany) gained the allegiance of the majority of German Jews. Its greatest strength was in the larger cities and in certain regions of Germany, for instance