Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (review)

From 1996 to 1998, the Leo Baeck Institute published a four-volume work on German-Jewish history, which now serves as the standard account of the period 1648 to 1945. An émigré synthesis, it summed up decades of research conducted mainly by German Jewish scholars of the postwar period, centering on the social and political history of the German Jews. Its social history, however, tended to focus on impersonal structures, and its politics were high politics. Now Kaplan, one of the most distinguished historians of German Jewry and of Jewish relations with Christians in the German lands, has edited a wonderful volume with a different emphasis—the intimate and everyday, highlighting the personal more than the political. The four-volume synthesis took the hard facts of social and political history as its starting point, but Kaplan and her contributing authors offer a history of German Jews out of the complex, contradictory, yet no less instructive sources of memoirs, diaries, letters, and rabbinical responsa. The result is a rich history that supplements the four-volume synthesis and points to important new avenues of research.

The volume consists of an introduction and a conclusion by Kaplan, as well as four substantive parts. The first, by Robert Liberles, covers the latter part of the early modern period, from 1618 to 1780; the second, by Steven M. Lowenstein, treats emancipation and integration from 1780 to 1870; the third, by Kaplan, covers imperial Germany; and the fourth, by Trude Maurer, surveys Jewish life in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. The sections are uniformly well written, and the translation of Maurer's essay is felicitous. The sections are also structurally uniform; each section addresses, with slight variation, local environment, family, education, work, religious practice, and social life. The strict categories lend the volume the air of an old-fashioned folkloric account, with its catalog of questions, but the writing and the quality of insight gives the volume an altogether different sense. Though the volume is difficult to summarize, central emphases emerge.

The most important point concerns relations between Jews and Christians. Kaplan's volume interrogates relations between Christians and Jews in a concrete sense, not simply assuming that political arrangements or anti-Jewish violence determined these relations. The sharper contours permit a view of Jews as simultaneously together and apart. Liberles, for example, points out that focus on the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, has obscured a great deal of everyday life, in which most Jews lived in the countryside, in close proximity to, and even in the same houses as, Christians, even though few could read German. Similarly, Jews typically married in their mid-twenties, and their families often had four or five members—like Christian families—rather than the large number that historians often assume.

According to Lowenstein, Jewish emancipation brought greater self-confidence and a higher measure of cultural integration. Synagogues, often hidden in back alleys, moved to main streets, and increasingly assumed a "more German" Romanesque style. Jews became more sedentary; men set up store more often than they took to the road with their wares. Lowenstein also emphasizes the persistence of older religious ways and the rhythms of everyday life; teachers might leave schoolrooms to slaughter an ox or remove the veins from a piece of meat. The change in religious life, which made participation in the community voluntary, did not necessarily mean a decline in Jewish religiosity. In general, Lowenstein paints a vibrant Judaism in this period, at variance with anxious accounts about the deleterious effects of emancipation and acculturation on Jewish life but in accord with the religious revivals and redefinitions in the Christian world (though the latter parallel is not drawn explicitly).

The context of Kaplan's consideration of Jews in the imperial period is the dramatic shift in Jewish residency patterns. In 1871, 70 percent of Jews inhabited rural communities, but by 1910, 70 percent lived in urban environments, making them more bourgeois and more integrated, legally, professionally, and personally...