Session 3

The entire session will be devoted to a close reading of Scholem's "Jews and Germans," a lecture given at the plenary session of the World Jewish Congress in Brussels in 1966. I am interested in the text for several reasons, some of which might be termed "personal." Scholem's Zionism emerges from the situation of his parents as a Jewish minority within a preponderately Christian, bourgeois society. The son finds the parents' relation to Judaism hypocritical, superficial and insufficient for his own needs. He rejects the pressure to assimilate, and goes to Palestine (1923), remaining there for the rest of his life (he dies in 1982). He writes in both Hebrew and German. I grew up in a household in which any Jewish affiliation was rejected, denied, disavowed. Of course there are important differences between my situation as a young man and that of Scholem--not the least being that while there were inconveniences in being Jewish in the United States where I grew up, there was no danger of being caught up in the Holocaust. Still, the overriding fact of maturing in a situation in which embracing Judaism seemed both necessary and (in its available forms) impossible was common to both myself and to Scholem. 

      Scholem's account of the relationship between Germans and Jews goes beyond what philosophers sometimes term the "incorrigible" realm of first-personal experience. That experience is embedded within a reasoned historical account of the evolution from Jews in Germany to German Jews to the destruction of German Jewry. Since German Nazism was the prime mover of the "Endlösung" (final solution) of the "Jewish question" or "Jewish problem," it seems to me to provide a important data for one who, like myself, would like to try to understand the Holocaust. I say this in full knowledge of the fact that many thinkers (notably Lawrence L. Langer in his Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) have voiced the opinion that the very idea of understanding the Holocaust takes us in a false direction: one that attempts to derive a "positive lesson" from it, or to "preempt" for the purpose of promoting a positive explanatory theory, of enlisting it in a cause of some sort. Others, particularly in France, reject the term Holocaust, a Greek word meaning "whole burnt sacrifice," because it imposes a religious meaning on a catastrophe or a collective atrocity, the victims of which frequently had nothing to do with religion of any kind. They prefer the Hebrew term of Shoah. 

     The reading to be discussed will emphasize the following points or passages:

Part I (71-73) German his mother tongue. “Unforgettable experiences” the “landscape of our youth.” Scholem not opposed to speaking to Germans. The unavoidable pitfalls of the generic terms, “Jews,” and “Germans” (72). 1948 comment by Alfred Doeblin (ibid). ("Jew", a term of abuse. This pejorative sense is prolonged even in 1966 (when the lecture was given) by the avoidance of the term Jew, out of an apparent delicacy. “After having been murdered as Jews, the Jews have now been nominated to the status of Germans, in a kind of posthumous triumph…” A subtle holdover of anti-Semitism in Germany. “Love, insofar as it once existed, has been drowned in blood.” An appeal to “conceptual clarity” and “historical knowledge” (73). A setting aside of the economic considerations of relations between the State of Israel and the German Federal Republic.

Part II (73-80). Eighty percent of Jews lived in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Eastern Europe. Their encounter with the West was Germany: Lessing, Schiller. Assimilation of Jews in Germany to Germans: Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786). German Jews like all other Jews (separated, ghettoized) till around 1820. Those of the “Mosaic persuasion.” Jewish emancipation: 1776 United States of America. First, the Enlightenment, (Haskalah), then Emancipation, meaning the granting of equal rights with other citizens.

Progress of emancipation: 1791, France; 1796 Netherlands; 1808, Kingdom of Westphalia; 1812, Mecklenburg-Schwerin; 1812, Kingdom of Prussia; 1830, Greece; 1832, Canada; 1839, Ottoman Empire; 1842,Kingdom of Hanover; 1849, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg; 1849, Denmark; 1856, United Kingdom; 1861, Italy; 1862, Grand Duchy of Baden; 1863, Danish Duchy of Holstein; 1864,Free City of Frankfurt; 1867, Habsburg Empire; 1869, North German Confederation; 1871, Germany; 1874, Switzerland; 1878, Bulgaria; 1878,  Serbia; 1910, Spain; 1917, Russian Empire; 1923, Romania.

“The Jews [of Germany] struggled for emancipation—and this is the tragedy that moves us so much today—not for the sake of their rights  as a people, but for the sake of assimilating themselves to the peoples among whom they lived” (77).

“The emotional confusion of the German Jews between 1820 and 1920 is of considerable importance if one wishes to understand them as a group, a group characterized by that “German-Jewishness” (Deutschjudentum”) many of us encountered in our own youth and which stimulated us to resistance” (77-78). Importance of Friedrich Schiller.

Part III (beginning pages): 

‘the Germans did not know that they were dealing with such a deep process of decay in the Jewish tradition and in Jewish self-consciousness, and they recoiled from the whole procedure” (81). Alienation.