The transition from feudalism to democracy is never an easy one and usually involves bloodshed. This was the case in France and even Britain. Germany, however, seems to have had particular trouble with modernization. While Germany had to overcome many problems in the 19th century, two of the most important involved Christian/Jewish relations. Germany had to decide what place Jews should occupy in German society as well as what it meant to be a German. The way that Germany dealt with these two questions had a significant influence on the way that Germany treated its Jewish minority in the early 20th century.
Although the remnants of feudalism could be found throughout Europe in the 19th century, the feudal system was especially strong in the German speaking areas. Here, “the special status of the nobility was embedded in the legal systems of the 39 German states…though they had lost their position as virtually autonomous sovereigns, [they] remained a special group with rights guaranteed by the articles of German Confederation.” Germany’s history of being a loose confederation of independent states meant that German nobles retained more of their power in the 19th century than did French or British nobles.
The power of the nobility ensured that governments in Germany were particularly conservative among “democracies” in Europe. Unsurprisingly, they were resistant to calls for liberal reforms. After all, those with power had nothing to gain from democratization and they had everything to lose. In Prussia, elites maintained power by implementing a three tier voting system which gave the nobility more representation than the common people. Even after Bismarck finally forced unification upon the rest of Germany, the new government was still relatively illiberal. Sovereignty rested with the king, not the Reichstag.
The transition from feudalism to democracy is never an easy one and usually involves bloodshed. This was the case in France and even Britain. Germany, however, seems to have had particular trouble with modernization. While Germany had to overcome many problems in the 19th century, two of the most important involved Christian/Jewish relations. Germany had to decide what place Jews should occupy in German society as well as what it meant to be a German. The way that Germany dealt with these two questions had a significant influence on the way that Germany treated its Jewish minority in the early 20th century.
Although the remnants of feudalism could be found throughout Europe in the 19th century, the feudal system was especially strong in the German speaking areas. Here, “the special status of the nobility was embedded in the legal systems of the 39 German states…though they had lost their position as virtually autonomous sovereigns, [they] remained a special group with rights guaranteed by the articles of German Confederation.”[1] Germany’s history of being a loose confederation of independent states meant that German nobles retained more of their power in the 19th century than did French or British nobles.
The power of the nobility ensured that governments in Germany were particularly conservative among “democracies” in Europe. Unsurprisingly, they were resistant to calls for liberal reforms. After all, those with power had nothing to gain from democratization and they had everything to lose. In Prussia, elites maintained power by implementing a three tier voting system which gave the nobility more representation than the common people. Even after Bismarck finally forced unification upon the rest of Germany, the new government was still relatively illiberal. Sovereignty rested with the king, not the Reichstag.[2]
In a time of increasing industrialization, the German Confederation, the German Empire, and provincial governments could not resist all attempts at liberalization. One of the most obvious signs of Germany’s democratization was its increasing tolerance of Jews. These reforms came despite the fact that “Conservatives found it easy to dismiss anything they disliked in the modern world as foreign, Jewish, or both.”[3]
The relaxation of anti-Jewish legislation had an important effect on the Jewish population. According to Tipton, “…legal emancipation [for Jews] opened the possibility of moving to previously forbidden occupations without conversion. Higher levels of literacy, particularly of women, and experience in mobility enforced by population restrictions in the separate Jewish quarters of the cities, prepared Jews to take advantage of the opportunities of an expanding economy….Talented Jews came to be overrepresented in banking, the professions, entertainment, and higher education.”[4] As Germany repelled its anti-Jewish legislation, the Jews flourished.
The Jews did not have the good will of enlightened politicians to thank for their emancipation. Rather, their own usefulness was the sole reason that governments relaxed the restrictions on Jews. Speaking of Frederick the Great, Elon says that, “The Jews who lived in his domain…remained an economic resource to be tapped when needed and evicted when not.”[5] The new industrial economy, which placed a premium on education, needed the Jews. Unless German leaders wanted to harm their own growing economies, they had to make concessions to Jewish people. Successful Jews were an essential part of this new economy.
Toleration brought some attempts at assimilation. Moses Mendelssohn, for example, taught himself German even though doing so could have gotten him expelled from his Jewish seminary and evicted from the city of Berlin.[6] By the time of his death, this “German Socrates” was a leading man of letters and the first German Jew to achieve prominence throughout Europe.[7]
Because their religion prevented them from participating fully in German society, many Jews went a step further and intermarried with Christians or even converted. One such pragmatist was the poet Heinrich Heine who deliberately echoed the words of Henry of Navarre when he said, “Berlin is worth a sermon.”[8] Indeed, conversion did open doors for some including Eduard Gans who obtained a position at the University of Berlin shortly after converting to Christianity from Judaism.[9]
Although conversion opened doors for some Jews, it did little to improve their standing in the Christian community. At the same time, converts found they had alienated themselves from the Jewish community. Former Jews were attacked by Christians and Jews and even each other. Speaking of Gans, Heine said that if Gans had converted “out of conviction, he is a fool, if out of hypocrisy, he is a knave.”[10] Obviously, a great many Jews who converted eventually regretted doing so.
Some Jews were not content with merely being tolerated when they were useful or when they converted. Understandably, they wanted to create a more egalitarian Germany where they would enjoy the same rights as their neighbors. It is little wonder that Jews were disproportionately represented among the revolutionaries in 1848. For example, out of the 230 Berliners shot by Prussian troops during the uprising, twenty-one were said to be Jews.[11]
Unfortunately, their participation in the uprisings did not help the German Jews achieve any lasting reforms and did even less to endear them to the Christian population. In fact, their actions became yet another excuse for anti-Semitism in a country already full of Jew haters. Many years later, Adolf Hitler would cite the supposed connection between Judaism and Marxism as one of the reasons why the Jews were enemies of the Nazi movement and the German people.[12]
It should not be supposed that Germany was the only anti-Semitic country in Europe in the 19th century. In fact, Jews were relatively well off in Germany. As Tipton points out, “Jew moved from Russia and the Austrian Empire to Germany to find a better life and relief from discrimination, not the other way around.”[13] Well before 1900, most of the restrictions on German Jews had been lifted. Although Jews were still excluded from some civil service and the military positions as late as 1910, Jews in Germany made significant progress towards equality during the 1800s.[14]
By 1900, however, aggressive nationalism throughout Germany and Eastern Europe had ensured that Jews would not be recognized as Germans for several decades to come. In an area where national boundaries rarely separated different ethnic groups, nationalism was based upon race instead of citizenship.[15] Not only did this new nationalism threaten to ignite violence in Germany and Austria-Hungary, but it established institutionalized prejudice against minorities like Jews. Although they might not have been openly persecuted as much as they had been in the 1700s, Jews could no longer count on a gradual series of reforms ultimately leading to full toleration. This new nationalism meant that anti-Semitism would not be going away for a long time.
The same conditions that made Germany particularly conservative among most industrialized European countries made it logical to many Germans at the time that the new national identity should be upon race. It was much easier for Germans at the time to define who they were not instead of who they were.[16] This racial definition of nationalism stands in stark contrast to the citizenship definition which was used in other countries like Britain and France. In France, the Jews were French as soon as they were granted the legal right to become French citizens. In Germany, it did not matter how “German” a Jew may act, the best they could hope for was to be “German citizens of the Jewish faith.”[17] In the eyes of many, Jew would never be “Germans.”
Tragically, this aggressive nationalism had a profound effect on German history in the early 20th century. By the time that Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, it was easy for him to blame the Jews for Germany’s problems. While few Germans were as race conscious as the Nazi party, large sections of German society had developed a sense of national identity which excluded Jews. These people believed that being German and being Jewish were incompatible.
This belief arose out of intense nationalism caused by years of confusion about national identity. The fact that Germany was industrializing while it was developing this new racial definition of national identity meant that these nationalistic, anti-Semitic ideas could be distributed quickly, widely, and easily. It did not take long for them to take root in many who already had anti-Semitic biases. While these new ideas did not cause a fiercely anti-Semitic party to come to power in Germany in the 20th century, they laid the ideological foundation that made it possible. No one could have predicted it in 1900, but Germany was already on the path to Auschwitz.
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[1] Frank B. Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 40.
[2] Roland Spickermann, “Modern Germany” (lecture, UT Permian Basin, Odessa, TX, September 17, 2007).
[3] Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815 , 228.
[4] Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815, 107 – 108.
[5] Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 – 1933 (New York: Picador, 1970), 17.
[6] Elon, The Pity of it All , 45.
[7] Elon, The Pity of it All , 34.
[8] Elon, The Pity of it All , 126.
[9] Elon, The Pity of it All , 125.
[10] Elon, The Pity of it All , 125.
[11] Elon, The Pity of it All , 164.
[12] Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889 – 1936 Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 245.
[13] Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815, 226.
[14] Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815, 227.
[15] Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815, 226.
[16] Roland Spickermann, “Modern Germany” (lecture, UT Permian Basin, Odessa, TX, September 10, 2007).
[17] Tipton, A History of Modern Germany Since 1815, 110.
