"Ostjuden" and "Westjuden"

Cultural Transfers between "Ostjuden" and "Westjuden" German-Jewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/42/1/67/1069721 by guest on 29 September 2021 1897-1930* BY DELPHINE BECHTEL "The Western Jew first feared the Eastern European Jew, then he pitied him. Now he is beginning to understand him, and soon, he will envy him." Fabius Schach, 'Jiidische Aphorismen'.1 This aphorism, which appeared in a German-Jewish Volkskalender in 1918, sum- marises the changing opinions of German Jews about their Eastern European brethren from the end of the nineteenth century and during the first third of the twentieth. Inter-Ashkenazic cultural contacts had persisted throughout the centuries since the eastward migration of the majority of Jews from German-speaking countries, and since the centre of gravity of Ashkenazic Jewry had moved from Western to Eastern Europe around 1500. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, waves of Eastern European Jews remigrated westward, in particular after the Chmelnicki massacres.2 During the Enlightenment a breach developed between the two branches of Ashkenazic Jewry, and a few decades later the former unity of Ashkenaz had given way to a cultural gap between East and West. Through the process of emancipation, assimilation and acculturation, the majority of German Jews had become part of the German middle class, identify- ing with a denationalised Judaism defined as Glaubensgemeinschaft. Eastern European Jews, in contrast, were still living in the shtetlekh under the influence *A first draft of this paper was presented under the title 'The Reception of Yiddish literature among German Jewish Writers and Intellectuals, 1908-1933' at the Fourth International Conference for Research on Yiddish, held at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in May 1992. Support towards further research has been granted by the Alexander von HumboldtStiftung, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Franz Rosenzweig Center at the Hebrew University. I am very indebted to Steven Uran for his invaluable help and constructive criticism of this paper. "Der Westjude hat den Ostjuden zuerst gefurchtet, dann bedauert. Nun fangt er an, ihn zu verstehen und er wird ihn bald beneiden." Fabius Schach, in Hickls Wiener Jiidischer Volkskalender fur das Jahr 5679 (1918/1919), Briinn-Vienna 1918, p. 55. 2On the Jewish migrations during the early modern era, see Moses A. Shulvass, From East to West. The Westward Migration of Jews from Eastern Europe during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Detroit 1972. 67 68 Delphine Bechtel of Orthodoxy or Hasidism, although they were increasingly confronted with modernity in the cities. Jews in Germany adhered to the German concepts of Bildung and Kultur, while Eastern European Jews had developed a cultural bilingualism,3 combining Hebrew, the language of religious Orthodoxy as well as of Zionist-orientated cultural revival, and Yiddish, which completed its evolution Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/42/1/67/1069721 by guest on 29 September 2021 into a modern literary language at the same time as Hebrew. The negative attitude of German Jewry towards Eastern European Jews crystallised during the nineteenth century. For the philosophers of the Enlighten- ment, and later the representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Hasidism was a synonym for obscurantism and corruption of the mind. The Yiddish language they had just cast off was seen as a reflection of this backwardness. For Moses Mendelssohn, the Yiddish language "had contributed not a little to the immorality of the common man"; the historian Heinrich Graetz called Yiddish "eine halb-tierische Sprache"; and Leopold Zunz described it as "eingeschlossenes, ausgeartetes Deutsch".4 Polish Jews were reproached for their unattrac- tive behaviour, such as wearing the traditional caftan and sidelocks; or for maintaining religious rituals that seemed undignified. The stereotype of the "Ghetto Jew" was epitomised in the title of a successful collection of short stories about Jewish and non-Jewish life in Galicia by Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904), Aus Halb-Asien (1876). In fact, Franzos's stories did not simply portray Galician Jews as poor, dirty, superstitious and ignorant. On the contrary, a very charac- teristic story, 'Schiller in Barnow', relates how a group of small-town would-be intellectuals, reflecting the diverse national backgrounds in Galicia, achieve Bildung, humanism and brotherhood through reading a commonly-owned copy of Schiller's works. But the actual title of Franzos's collection became synonymous with the world German Jews wanted to dissociate from, both geo- 3Traditional Eastern European Jewish culture was characterised by a situation of diglossia, in which Hebrew was used as the language of high culture and Yiddish as the language of low culture. On this distinction, see Charles A. Fergusson, in Word, 15 (1959), pp. 325-340; Joshua A. Fishman, 'Attract- ing a Following to High-Culture Functions for a Language of Everyday Life. The Role of the Tsher- novits Language Conference in the Rise of Yiddish', in idem (ed.), Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, The Hague-New York 1981, pp. 369-394. This diglossia progres- sively developed into bilingualism, so that at the turn of the century most writers were writing in both languages and often published their work in two versions. See the essay of Bal Makhshoves (Israel Eliashev), 'Tsvey shprakhn — eyneyntsike literatur', in idem, Geklibene verk, New York 1953, pp. 112-123. Moses Mendelssohn's Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by G.B. Mendelssohn, 7 vols, Leipzig 1843—45, vol. V,, pp. 505—506.; Graetz is quoted by Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. A Study in Jewish Cultural History, Cranbury 1976, p. 38; Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin 1878, vol. II, p. 110. The complete quotation reads: "Polen besorgte bekanntlich einige Jahrhunderte hindurch den groBten Theil von Deutschland mit Jugendlehrern und Rabbi- nern, die ihr seit mehreren hundert Jahren in Polen und Litthauen eingeschlossenes, ausgeartetes Deutsch, mit ihrer Unwissenheit und der Rohheit des Landes, das sie aussandte, verbreiteten, so daB bei Vernachlassigung aller Kenntnisse, selbst der hebraischen Grammatik und der Bibelkunde, Aberglauben und Finsternis urn sich griffen." 5See, for example, Ritchie Robertson, 'Western Observers and Eastern Jews. Kafka, Buber, Franzos', in The Modern Language Review, 83 (January 1988), pp. 87-105. Cultural Transfers between Ostjuden and Westjuden 69 graphically and chronologically.6 By the end of the nineteenth century, the gap between Westjuden and Ostjuden seemed impossible to bridge. The ups and downs of history soon provided a new opportunity for an encounter between East and West. The pogroms which erupted in Russia in 1881 trig- gered a huge wave of westward emigration. The number of Eastern European Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article/42/1/67/1069721 by guest on 29 September 2021 Jews in Germany swelled from 15,000 in 1880 to 78,000 in 1910. It reached 90,000 in 1914 and 107,000 in 1925. During the First World War, 70,000 workers were brought to German territory by force (although the majority returned to the East after the war).7 As a result German public opinion started to fear a veritable invasion of Ostjuden, as they came to be known at the turn of the century. In the press and in parliament there were fierce debates on the desirabil- ity of closing the border, a measure which was enforced in 1918. The same phenomenon could be observed in Vienna, where poor Galician Jews flocked to the capital of the then Habsburg Empire. During the war, the German occupa- tion of Poland resulted in direct contact between Germans, among them German Jews, and the native Jewish population. Hundreds of Feldpostbriefe were published in the press, and the new literary genre of Kriegsliteratur featured a confrontation with a Polish-Jewish ghetto as an almost obligatory scene. It is important to stress that while immigration and war made the face-to-face encounter between German and Eastern European Jews possible, assimilated Jews in the West had already been familiar with literature about their Eastern counterparts since the beginning of the century. The impact of antisemitism in Western Europe and the pogroms in the East had given a powerful impetus to Zionism, which was intimately linked with the Jewish intellectual renaissance. German Zionist ideology regarding Eastern European Jews evolved from a paternalistic and philanthropic condescension which was based on a feeling of cultural and social superiority. But German Jews increasingly recognised that Eastern European Jews could be regarded as a source of authenticity, and that they could be credited with intellectual and cultural pre-eminence because they had never broken the "golden chain" of Jewish tradition. A fruitful exchange could be envisaged to which German Jews would contribute economic and finan- cial superiority, while Eastern European Jews were expected to bring fresh blood and vitality to German-Jewish culture. The concept of the spiritual superiority See Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Con- sciousness, 1800-1923, Madison, WI 1982; Sander L. Gilman, 'The Rediscovery of the Eastern Jews. German Jews in the East, 1890-1918', in David Bronsen (ed.), Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933. The Problematic Symbiosis, Heidelberg 1979; idem, Jewish Self-Hatred. Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Baltimore, MD 1986; Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918-1933, Hamburg 1986 (Hamburger Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Juden 12); Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Stran- gers. East European Jews in Imperial Germany, Oxford-New York 1987. 7See S. Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880-1940. £ugleich eine Geschichte der Organisationen, die sie betreuten, Tubingen 1959 (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts l),pp. 164 ff.

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