The City of Worms in Modern Jewish Traveling Cultures of Remembrance

Traveling is a key element of modernity as a form of mobility, displacement, and change. Jews' urbanization and cultural and religious renewal have signaled their departure from traditional social relations and relocation to larger urban centers. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews migrated in Germany from rural areas and small towns to the larger cities as part of their social advancement. Their experience of dislocation coincided with the proliferation of traveling as a leisure activity, and visits to smaller towns like Worms became fairly common among German Jews. Memories as well as extended family networks continued to connect urban Jews with their former hometowns.¹ Beyond existing kinship ties, the experience of migration and modernization created a culture of nostalgia for Jews that secured the importance of smaller communities, which were otherwise dwarfed by the large urban Jewish centers in Germany. In as much as Jews moved out of the Judengasse (Jewish alley) and away from small and rural areas, they recalled a past that was quickly vanishing.²

The presence of physical markers gave legitimacy and force to the creation of traditions.³ In Worms, the physical perseverance of the synagogue, the cemetery, and religious artifacts and historical documents anchored remembrance and, thereby, bestowed continuity upon the rapidly modernizing Jewish community.⁴ Yet Jewish tourism during the modern age did not follow a simple nostalgic yearning. Rather, an encounter with the history of Worms engendered varied responses. Nostalgia furthers, as Arnold Eisen has observed, religious and secular agendas.⁵ On the surface, Worms's Jewish burial ground, synagogue, and Rashi Chapel appeared as mere constructions of stone; they derived their particular meaning from tourists' engagement with them in a process whereby tourism as practice and discourse emerged as a traveling culture of remembrance. Instead of a return to a distant past, the representation of Worms more often solidified German Jews' self- understanding as culturally integrated members of German society. Nostalgic recollection, therefore, appears less as the antidote to the culturally and religiously transforming Jewish community than as an integral element of this process.⁶ Particularly during the Weimar Republic, the local historical sites reassured Jews of their place within Germany while the veneration for Worms placed Jews in continuity with the past, even as they continued to uphold the notion of a German Jewish symbiosis.

Literary scholars have explored the tensions between exile and return in modern Jewish literature and probed "the blessing of mobility" against a postulated re-territorialization of Jewish cultures in Zionism.⁷ Yet the existence of local memory landscapes and travel destinations illustrates the extent to which Jewish diasporas comprised historical sites that conjured images of origin and belonging.⁸ Urbanization had as its corollary the still largely unexplored traveling culture of remembrance that the German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine astutely invoked in Rabbi of Bacherach. In this historical novel, Heine, who was a prolific traveler and author of many travelogues, drew attention to the interrelationship of travel and remembrance and mapped out a historical territory that included Bacherach, Frankfurt, and Worms, each representing different aspects of the German Jewish past. The tacit but important inclusion of Worms on these intersecting itineraries signals that small provincial communities continued to matter in the age of urbanization, cultural change, and religious modernization.

In Rabbi of Bacherach, Heine portrayed Abraham and Sarah as escaping a pogrom by taking a boat along the Rhine from Bacherach to Frankfurt. Upon their arrival in "the world famous, free, imperial, and commercial city of Frankfurt-on-the-Main," Abraham instructs his wife to keep her eyes shut from the sights of the "magnificent wares" on display at the Easter fair as they journey along the city's historical landscape until they enter the Judengasse (Jewish alley).⁹ This flight, occasioned by a ritual murder accusation, connotes the move from smaller provincial communities to the larger urban centers and the transition from an age of persecution and expulsion to a new period of Jewish history marked by the dynamics of civic emancipation and cultural and religious transformation.

The move that...