Letters to Hohenems: A Microhistorical Study of Jewish Acculturation in the Early Decades of Emancipation Eva Grabherr Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies University College London 2001 Table of Contents Acknowledgments Prologue 6 1) Introduction 8 2) Letters to Hohenems: The Löwenberg Collection and its Historical Context 19 3) Dense Communication: On the Preservation of Translocal Family Connections and Jewish Letter Writing Culture as a Reflection of Acculturation 49 4) “Everyday Stories”: Everyday Jewish Life in the Early Decades of Emancipation as Reflected in the Löwenberg Correspondence 87 5) Conversions: Jewish Writing and Language Transformation as "Entry Ticket" into the Modern Era 104 6) Multilingualism among the Rural Jews: A Microhistorical Study 138 7) vos vir fir bikher hoben vi folgt! On a Bourgeois Library and the Question of the Actors in Jewish Modernism 165 8) The Letters of the Löwenberg Collection: Jewish Writing and Language Transformation "en détail" 182 9) Conclusion 206 Bibliography 210 Appendix Documents and Databank Acknowledgements Without the support and help of the following institutions, colleagues and friends, this work would not have been possible. A grant of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science in the years 1997 to 1999 enabled me to start with this project. The American Friends of the Jewish Museum Hohenems granted generous support in its final stages. I thank Stephan Rollin and Uri Taenzer from this association for their encouraging enthusiasm. Johannes Inama, my former colleague at the Jewish Museum of Hohenems, provided me with the help and support I needed. I am greatly indebted to Bernhard Purin (Fürth), Sabine Offe (Bremen), Emile Schrijver (Amsterdam), Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek (Vienna), Martha Keil (St. Pölten), Johanna Gehmacher (Vienna), Monika Bernold (Vienna), Kurt Greussing (then Vienna, now Pretoria), Rabbi Dr. Hermann Schmelzer (St. Gallen), Andrea Schatz (Duisburg), Hermann Süß (Fürstenfeldbruck), Michael Schmid (Tromsoe), Marianne Bereuter (Alberschwende), and Rotraud Ries (Herford) for advice, comments, bibliographical suggestions and many productive, incisive and open discussions. Without the very special support of Evelyn and Albert Friedlander in London, I could not have done this project. I am deeply grateful to them for their generous hospitality, which made my years in London a unique experience. I am especially grateful to Hugh Denmam, my supervisor, adviser and supporter in so many aspects of this project. He introduced me to the field of Jewish languages and inspired me to appreciate the richness and complexity of languages as historical and cultural manifestations par excellence. He guided me through the many stages of my research and was consistently generous with his time, resources, and spirit. He keeps on surprising me with his deep and extensive knowledge in so many different fields, and I owe him many thanks for his willingness to share this knowledge with his students. With love and gratitude, I dedicate this work to Reinhard, who believed in me even in times when I had stopped doing so myself, my son Benjamin and my parents. Prologue ... That brings me to the second part of your letter, a Jewish Museum. I am not so sure if it makes sense, and for whom? The history of the Jews in Germany, as far as I can see, falls into three phases. The first, before 1806 when Napoleon forced emancipation, is the history of a community, a group of people, who lived, we must admit, as a foreign body in Germany, with no involvement in the life of the Germans other than economic relations. They lived in small rural communities, which is important – not in cities – with their own religion, their own customs, their own traditions, their own language (which nowadays is called Judeo-German, it is not Yiddish, but related) and with their own writing system. The history of this first long phase can no longer be written since nothing has been preserved other than the memoirs of a few larger families such as Glückel von Hameln, Mendelssohn, Rothschild or Warburg. All documentation disappeared in 1938. The second phase then followed, a beginning period of nearly half a century, during which integration into the German culture steadily gained pace. The account books from H. Landmann & Söhne, my mother’s family, during the first decade of the firm’s existence, 1830-1840, were still written with Hebrew letters in Judeo-German; they were understandably – albeit regrettably – burnt. And my great grandfather on my father’s side – who is described as a "Handelsjud” in the registry office document – definitely spoke German as a foreign language, for his external affairs, so to speak. The assimilation first began with the generation of my father, born in 1854 (!), and my mother’s grandparents (and great grandparents who had already moved to Nürnberg in 1855, and were thus no longer "Landjuden”). One spoke German and became – my generation – patriotic (of course I volunteered for the war in 1916-18). But socially, actually, one still had contact only with Jewish families from the same social class. But there was always the exception of the “great” Jewish families, who had for the most part converted to Christianity, thereby bringing the assimilation, as they believed, to its logical end. Mendelsohn, Bleichröder, Haber, and so on; not Warburg or Mosse, they remained Jews ...1 1 Letter from Prof. Dr. Richard Krautheimer from 30 December 1988, sent from Rome to Dr. Dagmar Salomon in Fürth on the question of establishing a Jewish Museum in Fürth. Richard Krautheimer was born in Fürth, Germany, in 1897, emigrated in 1933 to Italy and in 1935 to the USA. He studied Italian art of the early period to the Renaissance and has written standard works in this area. He died in 1994 in Rome, where he had lived since being granted the status of Professor Emeritus. The letter from which I am quoting can be found as a loan in the collection of the Jewish Museum of Franken in Fürth, whose director, Bernhard Purin, I thank for referring me to the document. 1) Introduction Richard Krautheimer’s 1988 letter to Dagmar Solomon of the German town of Fürth would be a suitable abstract for my dissertation. But it seems a bit too audacious to simply hand over the task to this world-class historian of early Christian art who migrated from Germany to the USA by way of Italy in 1933. I will remain satisfied with the pleasure of having discovered Richard Krautheimer as an unexpected witness to the historical picture I sketch out based on newly found historical sources. Although my scholarly historical text relativises Krautheimer`s family history in terms of a few nonessential details, for the most part his version based on his family history over the past four generations in Bavarian Franconia confirms the course and the dynamics of the process that I outline: the Jews’ entry into national bourgeois society. The present work outlines the history of the early decades of this political, social and cultural process based on the example of upper class Jewish families of the southern German realm. According to the Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov, at the end of the eighteenth century roughly 80 percent of the Jews in the German-speaking areas numbered among the lower social classes. They lived, so to speak, from hand to mouth. The Jews in Germany seemed to be hopelessly distanced from the social group that already at that time could be described as the “German bourgeoisie”. In 1871, however, the year of the founding of the German Empire, the majority of the Jews could be considered part of the German bourgeoisie according to generally recognised criteria such as juridical status, “Bildung”, and property. Apparently, between about 1800 and about 1870, says Volkov, the Jews seem to have ‘made it’.2 The general political and social conditions that led to these radical transformations in the Jewish community were the formation of the modern bourgeois nation states and the resulting integration into a central state of the former subjects of the diverse groups of rulers, autonomous corporations and communities. This development affected and changed not only the Jewish community; it also changed the basic political, social and cultural conditions in the European states as a whole. In these decades of dismantling feudalisation and of secularisation in Europe, not only were the tracks laid for modern Jewish history and its 2 Shulamith Volkov, ‘The "Verbürgerlichung" of the Jews as a Paradigm’, in Kocka and Mitchell, eds. (1993), 367-8. challenges (acculturation, nationalism); but can also find the roots of our current political and social system in the events of these decades. What was decisively new about all of these transformations was the formation of an active, formative and also tutelary state that aimed at securing wide-scale access to the affairs of its subjects. It demanded and assumed (and certainly also provided) responsibilities that had previously been carried by the community and corporations. The goal of this “new” state was a “productivisation” of the subjects, which went well beyond the level commonly prevalent in feudal society. Along the way, this led to the formation of a “new” community (the nation) at the cost of the “old communities”. The inner borders between the communities were relaxed through the creation of a “common” national culture and the external borders – to other nations – were tightened. These changes constituted a massive challenge to the “old” communities (for example, the Jewish community) and their members. Up for debate were not only their relationships to the other groups, but also mainly their relationship to the newly forming community: the nation. For Diaspora communities such as the Jewish community, this relationship to the nation presented a special challenge as it involved the degree to which the “own” and “particular” characteristics were endangered by taking on those that had previously been clearly “other”.