Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923

2. THE AMBIVALENT HERITAGE: Liberal Jews and the Ostjuden, 1880–1914

THE AMBIVALENT HERITAGE zyxwvutsrqponm Liberal Jews and the Ostjuden, 1880-1914 THE year 1881 marked a crucial turning point in modern Jewish history; it was the year that heralded the great demographic redistribution of the Jewish People from East to West.1 Between 1881 and 1914, in the wake of successive pogroms and systemic poverty, millions of East European Jews made their way westward in search of better, more secure lives.2 Although America would be the final destination for the overwhelming majority, it was Germany, once again, that served as the vital gateway, the passage to the West. The task of coping with the physical reality of the exodus fell most acutely upon German (and Austrian) Jews, because it was through their borders that the Ostjuden had to pass. This unprecedented exercise was, moreover, complicated by the fact that the great migrations coincided with, and some claimed had precipitated, the rise of organized political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. Under these historical circumstances the problem of East-West Jewish relations became more real than ever before. The ghetto was moving West. The first pogrom occurred on April 15, 1881—Easter time—in the Russian town of Elizavetgrad. From then until the summer of 1884 there were literally hundreds of attacks visited upon Jews in White Russia, the Ukraine, some parts of F ssarabia, and even the city of Warsaw. To Westerners these events were particularly shocking, for the violence appeared to be officially sanctioned. Respectable opin-zyxwvutsrqp 2 32 THE AMBIVALENT HERITAGE zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ 33 zyxwvutsrqpo ion in Germany, Jewish and non-Jewish, was unanimous: the outbursts were nothing less than barbaric. They were condemned even by many like the philosopher Fritz Mauthner who later publicly voiced their distaste for the Eastern ghetto presencezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTS within Germany.3 The compassion that German Jews felt for their Russian brothers was not feigned. Their outrage fitted the general Franzosian perception that such atrocities were possible and even to be expected in a "half-Asian" environment. From this point of view, social distance, cultural disparity, and political disenfranchisement served to reinforce rather than diminish the German Jewish sense of responsibility for the Ostjuden: German Jews would do all they could to fight for the political and human rights of their Eastern counterparts. But at the same time the pogroms seemed to widen the gulf between German and Eastern Jew even further. Persecution reinforced patronizing German Jewish attitudes. More than ever the relationship was defined in philanthropic, "welfare" terms. The German Jewish response to the problem of Eastern Jewish persecution and mass migration was, then, grounded in an old ambivalence. German Jews approached the problem on the basis of categories inherited from their nineteenth-century experience. Protective and dissociative modes operated side by side in uneasy alliance. German Jews undertook massive charitable work on behalf of the persecuted East European Jews at the same time that they sought the most efficacious means to prevent their mass settlement in Germany. This dialectical tension between responsibility and dissociation was built into the German Jewish liberal approach to the Ostjuden and underlay the way in which German Jews responded to the challenge of the great move West. Four days after the first pogrom broke out in Russia, the main organ of liberal German Jewry, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums , published an editorial entitled "What Our Russian Brothers Have to Do."4 In a sermon dedicated to political instruction, Russian Jews were advised at all costs to stand "on the side of the law and the forces of order." Under no conditions were they to participate in "secret conspiracies or subversive activities." But this was a presumptuous misjudgement of Russian anti-Semitic motivation. At best, radical Jewish activity was the pretext for, not the cause of, the outbursts. Like David Friedlander sixty years before, the editorial indiscriminately projected middle-class West European standards onto a situation where they seemed hopelessly irrelevant. The editorial did not envisage the mass exodus. Until the 1880s, migration seldom had been suggested as a solution to the continuing THE AMBIVALENT HERITAGE zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON 34 problem of East European Jewry. Ludwig Philippson's 1846 proposal was both atypical and highly prophetic. The only way German Jews could help their oppressed brothers in Eastern Europe, he had argued, was to organize their mass migration. Political conditions had made life in Russia intolerable for the Jews, and since there was "no room" for them in...