Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith

7. Wissenschaft on Trial

7 Wissenschaft on Trial The unification of Germany in 1871 finally universalized Jewish emancipation and promised the possibility of unity without homogeny by bringing diverse regional and religious cultures together into one nation. This diversity provided ample justification for Jewish selfassertion as a distinct ethnic group and renewed attempts at overcoming internal Jewish disunity. The existing French Jewish consistorial system and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, and the Board of Delegates of American Israelites served as the models for constant appeals to unite German Jewry.1 To this end, a few Jewish communities had already formed the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund (German Israelite community organization) on June 29, 1869. This voluntary association aimed to represent the communities before the state authorities in matters regarding social welfare and communal administration and subsidized Jewish education and community religious instruction. When in April 1872 the Gemeindebund had enlisted one hundred communities, it finally became a permanent association and established its place in Leipzig before moving to Berlin in 1882. Nevertheless, during its early years of existence, the Gemeindebund confronted formidable resistance from the communities, which struggled to uphold their age-old autonomy. It was only during the 1880s and 1890s that it finally succeeded in enlisting the support of the majority of German Jewry.2 81 In respect to Jewish scholarship, the political unification of Germany intensified anticipation for a constructive cooperation and reconciliation . In its response to Germany’s unification, the Conservative Israelitische Wochenschrift expressed the hope that Jewish historiography would overcome its partisan character and unite the Jewish denominations .3 Yet in 1880, the same periodical remarked “that it seems hardly thinkable that any kind of unity can be achieved in view of the existing gaping contradictions.”4 The continuing friction notwithstanding, German Jews joined forces when faced with revitalized anti-Semitism during the Kaiserreich. The virulence of these new challenges and rebuffs created, however, a profound dilemma for German Jewry that resulted in self-questioning and a fundamental reevaluation of liberalism. In order to face the new contestations, German Jews relied on liberal ideals of tolerance and equality that had emerged in the Enlightenment. From a political point of view, civic equality could only be defended in alliance with the liberal camp. From a cultural perspective, however, German Jews became fearful of the secular and homogenizing principles of the Enlightenment that threatened to unravel German Jewish communities.5 German Jews, therefore, had to defend their civic equality with liberal arguments and reassert their distinctiveness by tacitly reformulating their relationship to the cultural politics of liberalism. These opposing tendencies manifested themselves in the refashioning of modern Jewish scholarship during this period. As Jewish historians were sharply attacked on numerous fronts and drawn into public trials about the Talmud, the inherent tension between Wissenschaft as a science and as an agent of Jewish self-definition resurfaced in public debates. Instead of furthering political emancipation and the religious and cultural reform of the Jews, Wissenschaft acquired the task of reconciling German Jews with their heritage without, however, abandoning the ideal of scholarly objectivity. These debates, together with the popularization of Jewish history, profoundly refashioned Jewish scholarship and revitalized a sense of a collective past for German Jews. In the years preceding the unification and increasingly with the onset of the Great Depression in 1873, anti-Semites had targeted German Jews. While the Kulturkampf of the early 1870s accentuated the differences between Protestants and Catholics, the German chancellor Bismarck jettisoned his liberal alliances in 1878–79 in exchange for those of the conservative Catholics of the Center Party. This precarious political and economic climate contributed to the revitalization of an 82 challenges and responses anti-Semitic movement led by the court preacher Adolf Stöcker and his Christian Social Party. In 1881 the anti-Semitic movement presented the German government with a petition bearing some 250,000 signatures that demanded the revocation of Jewish emancipation.6 Renewed attacks on Jews and Judaism fueled these campaigns. Jewish scholars not only refuted the claims of notorious antiSemitic compilations like August Rohling’s 1871 Der Talmudjude (The Talmud Jew), but also participated in an array of public debates and trials that received in-depth coverage in the German-Jewish press.7 In the Tiszaeszlar blood libel, the notorious Rohling, professor of Hebrew literature at Charles University in Prague, volunteered to testify under...