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

3. CAFTAN AND CRAVAT: “Old” Jews, “New” Jews, and Pre-World War I Anti-Semitism

CAFTAN AND CRAVAT zyxwvutsrqpo "Old" Jews, "New" Jews, and Pre-World War I Anti-Semitism Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German? . . . Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans. . . . The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.1 WHEN Hitler wrote the words above he was appealing to an established cultural tradition that was bound to have resonance for his German and Austrian readers. The historical memory of the "ghetto Jew" was never erased in Germany. Once German Jewry itself became modernized and no longer seemed to fit the traditional image, unemancipated East European Jewry served as a constant 58 CAFTAN AND CRAVAT zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH 59 reminder of the mysterious and brooding ghetto presence. Ostjuden, in reality and myth, kept the stereotype alive. They were increasingly regarded by many as the living embodiment of a fundamentally alien, even hostile, culture. In this sense the modern German perception of the Jew was profoundly affected by the disjunction between emancipated and unemancipated Jewry. We should not forget that German progressives, Jews and antiSemites alike, appeared to repudiate the physical and spiritual characteristics associated with the ghetto. For them, the ghetto Jew symbolized all that was wrong with the Jew of old. As George L. Mosse has pointed out, even those writers most responsible for the articulation of the nineteenth-century stereotype of the Jew were in favor of assimilation,2 a view that was of course antithetical to racism, for it presupposed both the desirability and possibility of Jews escaping the ghetto and submerging themselves radically in Germanism. "Good" Jews were portrayed as assimilated Jews. The problem lay with the "old" Jews, Urjuden, intent on maintaining traditional, unethical ghetto practices and unwilling to change their national loyalties and dubious values. Gustav Freytag's famous rendition of Veitel Itzig, the quintessential Jew, in Soil und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855) was based upon his observations of Eastern Jews who had penetrated into his city of Breslau. Wilhelm Raabe's Hungerpastor (1864) portrays Moses Freudenstein as a demonic Jew who has inherited the age-old ghetto hatred of the Christian and ruthlessly seeks self-aggrandizement. The animus against Eastern ghetto Jews was not expressed in popular literature alone; agitation in the political arena, using similar imagery, began early. In 1852, long before the rise of organized political antiSemitism , Polish Jews were identified to the Prussian Chamber as habitual thieves and criminals.3 The subject of Russian and Polish Jewish refugees was, as we have seen, always a concern to the political authorities. Treitschke's famous 1879 warning on the dangers of an Eastern Jewish invasion was thus addressing an already familiar theme: while accepting the possibility of German Jewish assimilation, Treitschke argued that further influx from the East constituted a fundamental danger to German national integrity.4 In his History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, Treitschke enunciated the stereotype in classical form. He described early nineteenth century Posen as a "fermenting mass of Jewry . . . for here there had occurred a precipitation of all the filth in Polish history. There was nothing German about these people, with their stinking caftans and their obligatory lovelocks, except their detestable mongrel speech."5 CAFTAN AND CRAVAT zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI 60 A major demand of the famous 1881 Anti-Semites' Petition, signed by 250,000 German citizens and one of the high points of the early anti-Semitic movement, was for the cessation of immigration of alien Jews.6 Many contemporaries did not regard this as fortuitous...