Sonja L. Mekel History and Jewish Studies

Lecture Course: Jews in Germany, 1807-1945

Course description: The history of German Jewry is often seen as paradigmatic for the modern Jewish experience in Western and Central Europe. The promise of emancipation that began at the end of the eighteenth century was gradually realized in the nineteenth, yet failed to solve many problems facing the Jewish minority. In fact, new political and civil rights created an unprecedented situation for acculturating Jewish communities and individuals that demanded perhaps as much as it conceded. This course will provide students with a foundation for the study of German- Jewish history: it will deal with emancipation, religious and social change, Jewish- Gentile relations, and antisemitism from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Holocaust. Jewish German intellectual achievement, as well as poor and rural Jews, will receive special emphasis throughout the semester. A premise of this course is that Jews were not merely “Germans of the Mosaic Persuasion,” that is, different from Gentile Germans only in their religious beliefs.

Course Requirements: You are required to prepare for and attend all lectures, and participate in the discussion sections. If you miss more than three lectures or sections without a valid excuse, you will get a “Fail” for attendance and participation. Write one review of 4-5 pages of one of the assigned secondary sources, and analyze one of the primary sources in 3-4 pages. In the final paper (12-15 pages), discuss one of the weeks’ topics in detail.

Attendance and participation: 20% Review and analysis: 20% each Final paper: 40%

All assigned readings are accessible via Blackboard/E-Res.  : Primary sources

Mekel Syllabus German-Jewish History 1 Week 1: Introduction

• George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington, 1985).

Week 2: Napoleon and After

• Salo W. Baron, “Newer Approaches to Jewish Emancipation,” Diogenes 29 (Spring 1960): 56-81. • Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (New York, 1973), 191-219. • David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and their Application to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990): 17-33.  “Article 16 (June 8, 1815), The Congress of Vienna,” in Paul R. Mendes- Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York, 1995), 143.

Week 3: Regions

• Dagmar Herzog, “The Rise of the Religious Right and the Recasting of the ‘Jewish Question’: Baden in the 1840s,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 40 (1995): 185-208. • Niels Roemer, “Outside and Inside the Nations: Changing Borders in the Study of the Jewish Past During the Nineteenth Century,” in Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (eds.), Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives (Leiden, 2007), 28-53.  “Reminiscences of Jacob Greenebaum, Sr.” (Rheinpfalz), transl. Henriette Greenebaum Frank, JewishGen/Yizkor Book Project (online)

Week 4: Emigrants and Betteljuden

• Avraham Barkai, Branching Out: German Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914 (New York, 1994), 1-39. • Lothar Kahn, “Early German-Jewish Writers and the Image of America (1820- 1840),” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): 407-39. • Monika Richarz, “Emancipation and Continuity – German Jews in the Rural Economy,” in Werner Mosse, Arnold Paucker and Reinhard Rürup (eds.), Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History (Tuebingen, 1981), 95-116.  Abraham Kohn, “Reflections of a New England Peddler,” American Jewish Archives Journal 3 (1951): 96-102.

Mekel Syllabus German-Jewish History 2 Week 5: The Revolution of 1848/49

• Reinhard Rürup, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Jewish Emancipation,” in Mosse, Paucker and Rürup (eds.), Revolution and Evolution, 1-54. • Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933 (Detroit, MI, 2003), 69-85.  The Frankfurt Parliament, “Religious Equality (December 27, 1848),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 150-1.

Week 6: Reform and Orthodoxy

• Rachel Heuberger, “Orthodoxy versus Reform,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 37 (1992): 45-58. • Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), 100-142.  Zacharias Frankel, “On Changes in Judaism (1845),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 194-7.

Week 7: German-Jewish Intellectuals

• Nathan Rotenstreich, “Hermann Cohen: Judaism in the Context of German Philosophy,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (eds.), Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover and London, 1985), 51-63. • David Sorkin: The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York, 1987), 107-155.  “Statutes (1822), The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews,” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 213-4.

Week 8: The Jewish Middle Class

• Simone Lässig, “The Emergence of a Middle-Class Religiosity: Social and Cultural Aspects of the German-Jewish Reform Movement During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (eds.), Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry (Tübingen, 2003), 127-158. • Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1994), 64-84.  Franz Kafka, “My Father’s Bourgeois Judaism (1919),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 254-5.

Mekel Syllabus German-Jewish History 3 Week 9: Antisemitism

• Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, (Cambridge, MA, revised edition, 1988), 1-119, 185-321. • Gideon Reuveni, “‘Productivist’ and ‘Consumerist’ Narratives of Jews in German History,” in Neil Gregor et al. (eds.), German History from the Margins (Bloomington, 2006), 165-84. • Recommended: Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti- Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002).  Richard Wagner, “Jewry in Music (September 3 and 6, 1850),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 327-31.

Week 10: Unwelcome Strangers?

• Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison, WI, 1982), 58-79; 185- 214. • Shulamith Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in Reinharz and Schatzberg, Jewish Response to German Culture, 195- 211.  Heinrich von Treitschke, “A Word About Our Jewry (1880),” in Mendes- Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 343-4.

Week 11: The “German-Jewish Symbiosis”

• Wolfgang Benz, “The Legend of German-Jewish Symbiosis,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 37 (1992): 95-102. • Sydney M. Bolkosky, The Distorted Image: German Jewish Perceptions of Germans and Germany, 1918-1935 (New York, 1975), 23-73.  Hermann Cohen, “The German and the Jewish Ethos I,” in Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, transl. and ed. Eva Jospe (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1993), 176- 84.

Week 12: German-Jewish Politics

• Marjory Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality (New Haven, CT, 1978), 123-75. • Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893- 1914 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1975), 37-89.  Max Nordau, “Jewry of Muscle (June 1903),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 547-8.

Mekel Syllabus German-Jewish History 4 Week 13: Weimar

• Michael Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei – National-Jewish Communal Politics during the Weimar Republic” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990): 219-243. • Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980), 11-42; 178-194. • Ruth Pierson, “Embattled Veterans: The Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 19 (1974): 139-154.  Hirschberg Goldmann Photograph Album, 1927-1928, Center for Jewish History, Digital Collections (online)

Week 14: Jews in Germany, 1933-1945

• Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, transl. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 53-122.  Heinrich Himmler, “A Secret Speech on the Jewish Question October 8, 1943),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), Jew in the Modern World, 684-5.  David P. Boder Interviews Otto Feuer; August 22, 1946; Paris, France, Project “Voices of the Holocaust,” Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology (online)

Week # 15: Conclusion

Mekel Syllabus German-Jewish History 5