On the Margins <UN> Muslim Minorities Editorial Board Jørgen S. Nielsen (University of Copenhagen) Aminah McCloud (DePaul University, Chicago) Jörn Thielmann (Erlangen University) volume 34 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mumi <UN> On the Margins Jews and Muslims in Interwar Berlin By Gerdien Jonker leiden | boston <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Cover illustration: The hiking club in Grunewald, 1934. PA Oettinger, courtesy Suhail Ahmad. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jonker, Gerdien, author. Title: On the margins : Jews and Muslims in interwar Berlin / by Gerdien Jonker. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: Muslim minorities, 1570–7571 ; volume 34 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019051623 (print) | LCCN 2019051624 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004418738 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004421813 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Germany--Berlin--Social conditions--20th century. | Muslims--Germany--Berlin--Social conditions--20th century. | Muslims --Cultural assimilation--Germany--Berlin. | Jews --Cultural assimilation --Germany--Berlin. | Judaism--Relations--Islam. | Islam --Relations--Judaism. | Social integration--Germany--Berlin. | Berlin (Germany)--Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DS134.3 .J65 2020 (print) | LCC DS134.3 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/404315509042--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051623 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051624 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-7571 ISBN 978-90-04-41873-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42181-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Gerdien Jonker. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Every advance in culture, it has been said, commences with a new period of migration and movement of populations. … One of the consequences of migration is to create a situation in which the same individual finds himself striving to live in two diverse cultural groups. The effect is to produce an unstable character – a personal- ity type with characteristic forms of behaviour. This is the ‘marginal man’. … It is in the mind of the marginal man – where the changes and fusions of culture are going on – that we can best study the processes of civilization and of progress. ROBERT E. PARK, Human Migration and Marginal Man (1928) ∵ <UN> <UN> Contents Acknowledgements IX List of Illustrations XI Glossary XII Map of Muslim and Jewish Places in West Berlin XVI Introduction 1 1 Contents of the Book 4 2 Approaches 5 3 Muslims and Jews, or Migrants and Minorities? 6 4 Global Imaginings 11 5 The Sources 15 Part 1 The Setting 1 Crossroads 23 1 Migrants and Minorities in the European Metropoles 27 2 German Imperial Politics 32 3 Contact Zones in Berlin 35 4 A Muslim Ecumene in the West 39 5 Echoes in Berlin Society 44 6 On Being Neighbours 47 2 The Spaces in Between 52 1 A Survey of Indian Missions in Weimar Berlin 53 2 Experimenting with Indian Secularism 57 3 Glimpses from Private Archives 60 4 The Visual Archive 62 5 Lucie Hecht’s Memories of the Indian Bureau 71 6 Shared Goals 75 Part 2 Case Studies 3 The Hiking Club: S.M. Abdullah and the Oettinger Women 81 1 Islam in Berlin during the Weimar Republic 84 2 The Founding of the German–Muslim Society 89 <UN> viii Contents 3 New Men and New Women 95 4 After Hitler’s Seizure of Power 102 4 An Artist’s View: Lisa Oettinger between ‘Civilizations’ 108 1 1937: Establishing a Muslim Household with Jewish Heirlooms 111 2 1957: Looking Back 116 3 Links with the Jewish Past 119 4 Links with the Mughal Past 122 5 How Memory Creates a Family 126 5 The Sting of Desire: Hugo Marcus’s Theology of Male Friendship 129 1 Coming of Age around 1900 132 2 The Novelist 139 3 The Muslim Theorist 144 4 Looking for a Friend 149 6 The Rebels: Luba Derczanska and Her Friends 152 1 A Jewish Girl from Vilna 153 2 Russian Berlin 156 3 The Jewish Network 160 4 Micro Strategies of Globalization 169 5 The Journey Home 174 7 An Indian Muslim in Jewish Berlin: Khwaja Abdul Hamied 180 1 In the Footsteps of Muslim Modernists 182 2 Among Indian Revolutionaries in Berlin 187 3 Gateways to German Society 193 4 The Journey Home 196 5 Forging the Connection 200 6 Solidarity on the Margins 202 Summary and Conclusion 207 Archival Materials, Websites, Copyrights of Images 217 References 220 Index of Names 239 General Index 244 Acknowledgements This book took seven years to record and without the people I met underway it would never have surfaced. My heartfelt thanks go to Christina Anisah Rani and Suhail Ahmad in England, Yusuf K. Hamied in Mumbai, Harald Hecht in Sweden, Myriam Mahdi in Berlin, and Azeez Amir in Berlin who supported me in every possible way, entrusting me with the papers and photographs in their possession, and sharing their memories with me. Marat Gibatdinov looked for traces of the Derczanski family in Russian ar- chives. Noah Benninga tried to find out what happened to Esther Tenenbaum after she left Berlin in the direction of Jerusalem. Judith Berlowitz helped es- tablish missing parts in the different genealogies, of which there were many. Maria-Magdalena Fuchs enlightened me on the topic of Muslim modernism in Lahore around 1900. Razak Khan helped me understand the different place of male homosexuality in European and Indian society. Botakoz Kassymbekova translated the Russian letters, explaining to me the finer points of Russian en- dearments. Sophie Lichtenstein beautifully rendered the Yiddish texts into German. Martina Voigt traced the Jewish families who survived with the help of the Soliman sisters. Margaret Green and Connie Valkin, themselves descen- dants of the Manelowicz family in Vilna, read the Hamied chapters and offered invaluable advice. At various stages of the manuscript, audiences inside and outside Germany listened to me struggling with individual chapters. Two anonymous reviewers took upon themselves the hardships of reading through a manuscript that merges disciplines usually at odds with one another. Jason and Selina Cohen of Oxford Publishing Services edited the manuscript and made it ready for print- ing. Brill editor Nienke Brienen-Molenaar accompanied the process with cheerful confidence. The German Research Council gave me generous support. Theresa Wobbe read all the chapters. Her never faltering curiosity has been of the essence. This is the place to thank every single one of you. Berlin, June 2019 <UN> <UN> Illustrations 1 Map of Muslim and Jewish places in West Berlin XVI–XVII 2.1 The Indian Bureau, c.1925 64 2.2 Ahmadiyya missionary Sadruddin at a meeting with the Indian Bureau, c.1926 67 2.3 Indian–German couples in the mosque garden, c.1929 69 2.4 Eid al-Fitr at the mosque, 1929 70 2.5 Zakir Husain behind the spinning wheel in Berlin-Halensee, c.1925 74 3.1 (3 photographs). S.M. Abdullah’s first visit to the Oettinger home, 1928 85 3.2 The founding board of the German–Muslim Society, 1930 90 3.3 The Ahmadiyya community, c.1935 94 3.4 Young men in the mosque kitchen, Eid al-Fitr 1933 99 4.1 Lisa’s trunks in Woking 117 5.1 Marcus and his students, c.1924 147 6.1 Luba Derczanska at the age of 21 157 6.2 The Red Club, 1926 172 6.3 Luba with Bulganin and Khruhchev in Bombay, 1953 179 7.1 Hamied’s hand-drawn map of ‘Hindustan’ 181 7.2 Hamied, student leader and rebel, 1921 187 <UN> Glossary abajee father (Urdu) adab behaviour (Arab) Islamic etiquette Ahmadiyya followers of Ahmad (Urdu), Indian Muslim re- form movement Al mu’tamar al islamiya al ‘amn General Islamic Congress amajee mother (Urdu) Anjuman Ishaat we Islam Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement for the Propagation of Islam Aryan noble; the supposed speakers of an archaic Indo- European language; identifier of a racist ideology Begum honorific title for Muslim women in Northern India Berliner a person who identifies with Berlin (German); Berliniy-ha (Persian); Berlini (Urdu); Berlintschik (Yiddish) chali empty (Urdu) Cheder Hebrew primary school Chinchpokli Jewish cemetery in Mumbai for survivors of the holocaust Chinesien exotic China (German), a fictitious place in Ger- man songs and literature civilization paradigm a belief in equality between world civilizations, first launched as a concept