Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (review)

This book is exceptional in many respects. First and foremost, it is remarkable in its ambition to apply key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu regarding social and cultural change to German Jewish history. The author, now director of the internationally renowned Georg-Eckert-Institut für Schulbuchforschung, formerly member of staff of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., has published widely about her first area of interest, the regional history of Jews in Saxonia, a rather rare species in the history of European Jewish communities. Jews in Saxonia for centuries lived under one of the most restrictive regimes in the Holy Roman Empire, and harsh settlement restrictions persisted even into the 19th century. From a Saxonian perspective, the social, cultural, and economic advance of German Jewry in the course of the 19th century as a whole is even more striking than from a more liberal standpoint, and this issue is at the core of this impressive study. In order to understand this advance “that had no equivalent in contemporary Europe” (p. 13), Simone Lässig doubts that one can fully explain it as a simple process of acculturation or assimilation in the sense of becoming similar to the surrounding civil society (“bürgerliche Gesellschaft”) and be successful within this new framework. She rather proposes to apply the concept of Pierre Bourdieu about the various forms of social, symbolical, and cultural capital that determine the perspectives for social advance in civil society, and postulates a strategic and collective option for those forms of capital prevalent at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries in the German speaking areas. In a broad introductory part, the precarious situation of Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire, the enlightened discourse about the necessity of “embetterment,” and the role of the state and of state legislation for “civilizing” the Jews are presented (p. 41–100). The core of Lässig’s analysis, the second part, deals with “media and forms of cultural-religious civilization,” though here the German term “Verbürgerlichung” means civilization in the sense of becoming a member of a given civil society. Lässig describes cultural, religious, and social practices for three areas: education, religious and community life (analyzed following the broadly discussed term of confessionalization of German Jews), and the development of a Jewish public sphere. In a third part, “cultural aspects of socio-economic verbürgerlichung” are discussed, based on statistical analysis of social and occupational mobility and on a presentation of individual case studies.

In other words, the author undertakes more or less a complete social and cultural history of German Jewry in the 19th century until the founding of the second empire in 1871, based on an impressive analysis of the rich scholarly production of the past generations, and especially the highly dynamic historiography of German Jewry of the past three decades, and on a wide variety of published and unpublished sources the author has worked with in the archives of Dresden, her home turf, and, as a liberal contrast, in the archive of Karlsruhe, documenting Jewish life in the communities of Badenia, especially Karlsruhe and Mannheim. Most of the author’s discussions are highly inspiring. To give just one example, the author presents the process of confessionalization of Judaism in the German Jewish communities as finding expression in a “feminization of the religious system” through the bat mitzvah, new religious textbooks in accessible languages and more (p. 326–61). The author’s argument is always precise and carefully checked with both the contemporary views and her archival findings. This wealth and this precision also constitutes a certain problem, as few readers will work their way through this book as a whole. However, any student of German Jewish history will have to take into consideration the rich material presented in this study. This pertains especially...