Modern Jewish History - Summary

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Lecture #19 - April 5, 1971 - 39:02 min (mp3)
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Most Jews in the West clung to liberalism and to middle class virtues. The notables were in fact representative of the vast majority of western Jews. One famous novel of 1906 by Georg Hermann, “Jettchen Gebert”, the “Jewish Forsythe Saga”, as Mosse calls it, tells the story of a virtuous, chaste middle class girl from a liberal family. The core problem of the novel is the change of morals. Up to 1929, it sold a hundred thousand copies. On the basis of that novel, Stefan Zweig said in 1935 that “the Jews in the most lasting manner exemplified the Germany of the turn of the 19th century.” At the age of sixteen, most girls of good Jewish families received the book. The author was eventually murdered by the Nazis. Those born in the 1860s and 70s wanted to change manners and morals. Now, with racism in the ascendance, conversion like that of Heine was of no use anymore. Individuals reacted by attempting to transcend Jewishness, either through Socialism, through a more complete nationalist assimilation, or through the minority Zionist view. Mosse first takes up the transcendence into a more complete assimilation: racism was not yet on the rise; some Jews could still pass into a nationalist right and become Germans “all the way.” The Jewish stereotype was almost totally accepted by all three Jewish groups. Two examples are Otto Lubausch (1860-1933) and Walther Rathenau.   Lubausch had only unfavorable impressions of his fellow Jews. He was influenced by Marx and his essay “On the Jewish Question.” He also encountered a deep hatred of the Jews among the students at the university. He tried to get into the circles of the nobility, whom he admired, and who had “awe of the Germanic tradition.” First he joined the conservatives, and by 1931, Lubausch approved of the Nazis. His was not an isolated case. Surrounded by anti-Semitism and the hatred of the Jewish stereotype, he wanted a complete disassociation from the Jews. Patriotism meant accepting the German stereotype, and not the Jewish one. Mosse says that one of the difficulties of teaching this course is that things have changed so much since the in last 4 or 5 years. Now, nobody wants to be a “WASP.” He urges the students not be misled by their own feelings, and rather put themselves into the position of a person living in the early 20th century, of someone like Lubausch.

The second example, Walther Rathenau, an industrialist, became German foreign minister and was assassinated in 1923. Rathenau was a man of vast importance from an assimilated, important family. The attitude he expressed in an article titled “Hear, Israel” was that the Jews are a foreign, obtrusive race, overdressed and showing noticeable differences-just like the common stereotype. But Rathenau opposed conversion. Rather, he wanted Jews to correct their “deficiencies” and “physical ugliness” over generations. Rathenau was in tune with some measures to indeed correct them. In 1893, the Jewish Gymnastics Association was founded whose purpose was to get rid of the stereotype by altering the bodily structure of Jews. Furthermore, orphanages were founded for young Jews, who were all to be trained as farmers, following the German “back to the soil” movement. The latter goes hand in hand with Rathenau’s problems. At the end of his article, we’re back with “Jettchen Gebert.” According to Mosse, being loud and pushy is wonderful, actually, but it embarrassed Jews when they saw it on other Jews-but not in gentiles. Rathenau, though, was no conservative: he espoused socialist ideas and did not convert. Yet he was always torn. People like him, who essentially wanted to be good Germans, regarded being a Jew as a misfortune of which you only could try to make the best. The Zionists were in this tradition, and shared an admiration of the Aryan type. The term that was at the time applied to Jews who tried to assimilate to the German ideal was “self hate.” It could also be used for Jews who went into Socialism. Mosse thinks that the term “self hate” can be misleading. Addressing the students, he says: “You are American Jews, it may be different. I don’t understand American Jews, I never have.” Mosse claims that he and all European Jews had at one time been Walther Rathenaus.

It would be wrong to just discount Jewish cultural and political problems as self hate. Another problem that we must understand is that these Jews were cut off from the Jewish community and were unable to make contact with any other community; this at a time when the longing for community was universal. Thus, they tried entering the nationalist community, just as young Freud or Herzl did, or the Socialist community. In other words, some wanted to be part of the nation, while others went to socialism for much the same reasons. “Self hate” is therefore beside the point. Without Hitler, Mosse estimates, there would not have been an indigenous Jewish community in Germany within ten years. The only thing that kept it alive was the immigration from Eastern Europe. It is very difficult to be a man or woman between cultures, to be alone and look for community. This, Mosse tells the students, they must never forget before they condemn. What really was there for Jews but the national culture? He gives the example of a distinguished Jewish family in Berlin, the Scholems. One son became a communist, the other a Zionist, and both were thrown out of the house. Of that younger generation, however, many more went into socialism rather than to the right. The attraction of Socialism was very strong, in part because it took a strong stand against anti-Semitism, but mostly because it championed true equality among men as a whole, not only those of one nation. Jewish socialists were very opposed to taking Zionist socialists into the second international; they wanted a fusion of all humanity. But as they joined Socialism, Jews brought something peculiar to it: a certain idealism that was to isolate them within Socialism. They were also isolated because they were intellectuals, not workers. For the rank and file socialist, “Jew” and “intellectual” became synonymous.

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