Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin's edited volume tackles some of the key methodological, historical, and political questions in the field of German-Jewish studies today. It includes contributions from twenty experts in German-Jewish culture, literature, and history. The essays assess some of the distinctive features of modern German Jewry and antisemitism, and how these have been understood, remembered, used, or misused in recent decades. The volume, however, looks forward, with reflections on how today's researchers, curators, teachers, and students could approach the field of German-Jewish studies and define its present-day relevance. This brief review will only discuss a few essays from this rich and illuminating volume.
The history of German Jewry has often been depicted in nearly mythical terms, as a community encapsulating the rise of Jewish modernity and its violent destruction. However, the intensive preoccupation with the historical role of German Jewry did not emerge only in the wake of the Holocaust. Much of the cultural and intellectual work produced by German Jews since the Enlightenment was marked by its sense of historical purpose. In an 1832 work, German-Jewish scholar Leopold Zunz assessed different eras of cultural growth in Judaism, seeing ancient Babylon as a spiritual center of ancient Judaism and lauding the intellectual achievements of Sephardi Jews under Islamic rule in the medieval period. The future, however, belonged to German Jews: “From now on the light shall not come from Babylon, but from Germany—our homeland, whose inhabitants carry in their hearts tolerance and diligence, reason and good will, in a wonderful fusion.” This optimistic belief was not shared by all German Jews, nor did it lack ambivalence. It did, however, help nourish the seductive force of German Jewry for many observers within and beyond German-speaking lands in the modern period. The volume under discussion communicates with these traditions.
The symbolic and historical significance attached to German Jewry was one of the reasons for the fact that in the postwar period it was the most widely and thoroughly studied Jewish community. In recent decades, the field of German-Jewish studies seemed, however, to have reached a point of exhaustion, a sense echoed in some of the essays appearing in this volume. Gideon Reuveni presents the book as a call “for a reevaluation of how the history of Jews in German-speaking lands should be studied in an age in which interest in this history is radically changing, if not dwindling” (xvi-xvii).
Several aspects could help explain the crossroads at which the field of German-Jewish studies seems to be standing; many are discussed in this volume. In the historical profession, as Guy Miron notes in his essay, the field of Jewish studies faces a shift away from nationally confined historiography, and new research engages increasingly with comparative and transnational perspectives on the Jewish past. Moreover, greater attention is allocated nowadays to Jewish communities in East Europe and to Sephardi Jewry. This does not mean that German-Jewish studies should be considered a field out of fashion. Indeed, as Miron suggests, the conceptual apparatus of German-Jewish studies, which revolves around terms such as assimilation/dissimilation, or the view of antisemitism as a “cultural code” (introduced by Shulamit Volkov), could be productive in the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in East Europe and the Middle East. Rather than deeming the study of German Jewry as involved in a competition for scholarly attention and resources, Miron urges scholars to link its conceptual tools with other fields in Jewish studies.
Recent political events have also affected the future of the German-Jewish past as it is reflected in this volume, in particular amid the rise of nationalist, populist, and antisemitic currents across the world. The experience of German Jews in the Weimar period and the Third Reich has recently drawn renewed attention over themes such as the mechanics of social ostracization, refugeedom, and political resistance. As Kerry Wallach shows in her contribution on “digital German-Jewish futures”, this bears particular importance for scholars searching for meaningful and technologically up-to-date ways to communicate the German-Jewish past to students. Wallach discusses a number of ways in which this could be done in the (physical or virtual) classroom, including experiential learning through various online history projects designed by the Jewish Museum Berlin or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; engagement with social media activism; and discussion of streamed television shows that revolve around the German-Jewish past.
One of the main themes that cut through this volume concerns the tension between the abstract quality characterizing the popular memory of German Jewry and its material dimensions. Several essays in this volume – by Joachim Schlör, Michal Friedlander, and Dani Kranz – dwell on these dimensions from contemporary archival, museological, and anthropological perspectives. The tension is also related to key characteristics of the German-Jewish emigration wave of the 1930s. In her insightful essay on intergenerational tensions within the postwar German-Jewish diaspora, Sheer Ganor points out that, in difference to other cases of mass migration, the generational divide within the German-Jewish diaspora took shape at a moment when its culture was facing extinction. The children of German Jews did not have a physical reference point to which they could relate and with which they could identify: “If their parents succeeded in instilling German-Jewishness in them, it was in the form of a remembered and constructed heritage, not as a lived reality” (14). This, it might be argued, contributed as well to the somewhat elusive and often mythical quality that the memory of the German-Jewish past acquired in the following decades, centered chiefly on language and literature.
A second theme highlighted in the volume concerns the intellectual efforts to grapple with—perhaps even transcend—key concepts in the study of antisemitism and Jewish difference. Klaus Hödl takes issue with what he sees as the “tenaciousness of dichotomous thinking” in German-Jewish historiography, which despite growing engagement with Jewish/non-Jewish interrelations in prewar Central Europe, continues to rely on a basic separation between Jewish and non-Jewish domains, while assuming a stubborn, often essential difference between Jews and non-Jews. As a corrective, Hödl calls in his essay for consideration of the concept of “similarity,” which, in his view, “orients us toward cultural overlapping rather than borders and demarcations,” and is intended “to remove the idea of a deeply anchored and seemingly fixed otherness of Jews” (128).
A different approach is put forward by Lisa Silverman, who argues in her essay that the framework of “Jewish difference” could be used with greater nuance as an alternative to the narrower (and, one could add, politically loaded) term “antisemitism.” The framework of “Jewish difference” leaves more room for considering a broad range of attitudes toward Jews and evades the tendency to label a certain act or expression as either antisemitic or not-antisemitic. It aims to explain attitudes toward Jews not only through “its most negative iteration” (137). Drawing on examples from her research on postwar Germany, Silverman makes the point that there have been many forms of constructed and imagined ideas of Jewishness operative in that period. Yet interpreting them through the lens of antisemitism fails to capture their roots and impact and inhibits our ability to historicize them. Silverman advances an organizing framework of Jewish difference that could sharpen scholars’ attentiveness to philosemitism, to ambivalence toward Jews, as well as to its entanglement with other forms of social difference.
Hödl and Silverman's attempts to carve out a broad conceptual spectrum for analyzing Jewish/non-Jewish relations without resorting to the concept of antisemitism is telling. In recent years historians have studied antisemitic violence and prejudice while challenging familiar dichotomies. At the same time, the field of antisemitism studies has been embroiled in various scholarly and political debates over the definition of antisemitism, its alleged instrumentalization for political purposes, and its entwinement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite their differences, Hödl and Silverman's approaches attest to a certain retreat from the concept of antisemitism, deeming it intellectually limiting as well as a political minefield. Moreover, their approach reflects the growing tendency, bolstered by considerable research done in recent decades, to question the old and still-alluring idea of German Jewry as the epitome of Jewish modernity.
