Glueckel of Hameln

Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), activist for women's rights, born in Vienna, Austria. After her father's death suffered from a psychosomatic paralysis, which was treated by the psychoanalyst Joseph Breuer. Sigmund Freud described her case in one of his most celebrated studies, in which she is identified as 'Anna O.' In 1888 she arrived as a healthy young woman in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where her mother lived. Becoming involved in social work, her passion for social justice was aroused and she founded a national federation for Jewish women, the Juedischer Frauenbund. Pappenheim headed an orphanage for Jewish girls and founded a home for disturbed Jewish girls and unwed mothers. She fought the white slave trade and the selling of Jewish girls into prostitution. She traveled throughout Europe propagating her views. Pappenheim translated into German the memoirs of her ancestor, Glueckel of Hameln.

Metz

Capital of the Moselle department, France

21st Century

Communauté Israélite de Metz
39 rue du Rabbin Elie Bloch
57000 Metz
France
Phone: 03.87.75.04.44
Website: http://www.cimetz.org/fr/\

HISTORY

Even if Simon, Bishop of Metz in 350, was really of Jewish origin (as a later source affirms) this does not prove that Jews were present in the town during that period. However, their presence is confirmed from 888 at the latest; a church council held in Metz at that date forbade Christians to take meals in the company of Jews. There is a reference earlier than the 11th century to a Jew called David perhaps renting a vineyard. It was in Metz that the series of anti- Jewish persecutions accompanying the first crusade began, claiming 22 victims in the town in 1096. Among the scholars of the early middle ages, foremost was Gershom b. Judah ("light of the exile"); although he lived mainly in Mainz he was born in Metz, as was his disciple Eliezer b. Samuel. There was also the Tosafist David of Metz. The medieval Jewish community occupied a whole quarter, the vicus judaeorum, whose memory is perpetuated in the street named "jurue." in 1237 every Jew who passed through Metz was compelled to pay 30 deniers to the town, but was not permitted to live there. In the 15th century successive bishops, whose residence had been transferred to vic, tolerated the Jews under their jurisdiction and granted them privileges (1442). In Metz itself, however, the Jews were permitted to stay only three days.

After the French occupation (1552), the first three Jewish families were admitted to reside there as pawnbrokers (1565/67); they were followed by others, and in 1595, 120 persons established a community which henry iv and his successors took under their protection. Through the arrival of Jews from the Rhine areas, their number increased to 480 families in 1718 and almost 3,000 persons in 1748. Assigned to the Rhimport quarter, they governed themselves by elected trustees and levied numerous taxes, which grew more burdensome after the introduction of the Brancas tax (1715), originally gifts given by the community mainly to the duke of Brancas. The debts of the community became with the consent of the king, the chief rabbi - often renowned for his erudition like Jonah Teomim-Fraenkel of Prague (1660--69), Gabriel b. Judah Loew Eskeles of Krakow (1694-1703), and Jonathan Eybeschuetz (1742-1750) - was chosen from abroad. He judged lawsuits between Jews but from the 18th century the parliament sought to assume this right, and to this end ordered a compendium of Jewish customs to be deposited in its record office (1743).

From the beginning of the 17th century the community owned a cemetery, a synagogue, and an almshouse. In 1689 free and compulsory elementary schooling was introduced, and in 1764 a Hebrew press. The Jews were, however, hampered in their economic activities by legal disabilities. An oligarchy, at whom sumptuary laws were aimed, achieved great wealth. The poverty of the masses, however, increased. Hostility toward the Jews reached its peak at the time of the execution of Raphael Levy (1670) for alleged ritual murder, but before the revolution the jurists Pierre Louis Lacretelle (1751-1824) and Pierre Louis Roederer of Metz, future members of the national assembly, called for their emancipation. The latter organized the famous concourse of the academy of Metz on this subject (1785). In 1792 Lafayette, commanding the army at Metz, assured the religious freedom of the Jews, which was later suspended during the reign of terror (1794). The consistory created in Metz in 1808, which included Moselle and Ardennes, served 6,517 Jews. The yeshivah (Ecole centrale rabbinique), which was promoted to the status of rabbinical seminary of France in 1829, was transferred to Paris in 1859; the synagogue was rebuilt in 1850 and the almshouse in 1867. Debts arising out of taxes not abolished by the revolution devolved on the descendants of the former community. After the German annexation (1871) about 600 Jews moved to France, although immigrants soon arrived from other parts of Germany. After 1918, when the region reverted to France, there was a massive influx of immigrants from eastern Europe and the Saar region. The Jewish population of the city numbered about 2,000 in 1866; 1,407 in 1875; 1,900 in 1910; and 4,150 in 1931. Under German occupation in World War II, Metz, like the rest of Moselle and Alsace, was made judenrein following the flight of the population and particularly brutal expulsions after the entry of the Germans. About 1,500 Jews died after being deported, among them rabbis Bloch and Kahlenberg. The two synagogues and the workhouse were plundered and defiled. The great synagogue was used as a military warehouse. After the liberation the reorganized Jewish community was more united than before the war.

In 1970 Metz had about 3,500 Jews, including some 40 families recently arrived from North Africa, and a well-organized communal body. It was the seat of the consistory of Moselle, which comprised 24 communities with a total of about 5,500 Jews. The largest communities were Thionville with 450; Sarreguemines with 270; Sarrebourg with 180; and Forbach with 300. In Metz itself, in addition to the great synagogue (Ahskenazi rite) with a seating capacity of 700, there are four smaller places of worship, including one polish and one Sephardi. The community also ran a Talmud Torah center with 180 pupils from six to 13, a kindergarten with a kosher canteen, a workhouse, a mikveh, and a chevra kaddisha.

Germany

Bundesrepublik Deutschland - Federal Republic of Germany
A country in western Europe, member of the European Union (EU)

21st Century

Estimated Jewish population in 2018: 115,000 out of 83,000,000 (0.14%). Main umbrella organization of the Jewish communities:

Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland - Central Council of Jews in Germany
Phone: 49 30 28 44 56 0
Fax +49 30 28 44 56 13
Email: info@zentralratderjuden.de
Website: www.zentralratderjuden.de

 

HISTORY

The Jews of Germany

810 | The First Ashkenazi Elephant

A decree by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 321 CE is the first mention of a tiny Jewish settlement in the city of Koln and other cities along the Rhine – Mainz, Worms and Speyer.
According to the decree, in these places, later to become known as “The lands of Ashkenaz”, Jews enjoyed certain civil rights, but were prohibited from spreading their faith and their share in government employment was limited.
Until the Crusades, which began in the late 11th century, Jews coexisted peacefully with the local population and were allowed to hold property and engage in all trades and occupations.
An historical anecdote tells of a Jew named Isaac, who was part of a diplomatic delegation on behalf of the Emperor Charlemagne to the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Rashid. Historians believe that Isaac was added to the delegation due to the great influence of Jews in the Abbasid court. The Abbasid Caliph, for his part, sent the Charlemagne an unusual gift: an elephant named “Abu Abbas.”
Word of the huge monster, which would peacefully eat from the hand of its handler, spread far and wide. When the elephant walked the streets of Germany during festivals and celebrations, tens of thousands of peasants would throng to the city to witness the zoological wonder, the likes of which had never been seen in Frankish domains before.
According to the sources, the elephant died in the year 810 CE.


1096 | Monogamy, Rabeinu Gershom Style

One of the first yeshivas founded in the lands of Ashkenaz was located in the city of Mainz and was founded by the man known throughout the Jewish world and to posterity as “Rabeinu Gershom Ma'or Hagolah” (“Our Rabbi Gershom, Light of the Diaspora”).
Many students flocked to Rabeinu Gershom to learn Torah from a prodigy who composed commentary on the Talmud and instituted important religious rulings, among them the famous “Ban of Rabeinu Gershom,” which forbade Jewish men to marry more than one wife at once.
The end of the 11th century saw the advent of the Crusades, intended to liberate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where Jesus is believed by the Christian faithful to be buried, from the hands of the Muslims – an act of piety for which all participants were promised a place in heaven. Concurrent with this religious fervor there grew a call to kill the Jewish heretics. This was a violation of the centuries-old policy started by St. Augustine, who maintained that the Jews must not be killed because their existence as second-class subjects was living proof that God held them in disfavor.
The height of the anti-Jewish hate in this period was reached in the year 1096, when the Rhineland Massacres (known in Jewish history as Gezerot Tatnu, or 4856, after the Hebrew date for the year) took place. According to various estimates, thousands of Jews were murdered in these rampages, and many others were injured, robbed and raped.
Several dirges written in memory of the destroyed Jewish congregations, known as the “Shum” congregations (Shpira, Wormeysa and Magenza, or in German Speyer, Worms and Mainz) have survived to this day.
Despite the massacres and the worsened treatment of the Jews, the Jewish population of Germany flourished and grew to become one of the centers of Jewish spiritual endeavor in Europe and the cradle of the Yiddish language.

1196 | A State within a State

Over the years, a community structure took shape in the Jewish population centers in Germany that would come to characterize Jewish communities throughout Europe. The community served as the legislative, executive and judicial authorities, and the synagogue served its members as a cultural, social and religious center.
In the second half of the 12th century, despite the crusades, the small Jewish community in Germany flourished. This was the period in which the Ashkenaz Hasidim formed, and made a crucial impact on the spiritual-religious world of Jews for generations to come, laying down rules regarding penitence, prayer, religious laws and mystical conduct.
The Ashkenaz Hasidim movement (not to be confused with what is now known as Hasidism) was led by Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, known in Judaism as “Rabbi Yehudah Hasid”, author of “Sefer Hasidim” and one of the first kabbalists. Hasid was a scion of the glorious lineage of the Kalonymus family, which came to the lands of Ashkenaz in the year 917, and whose members – scholars, poets, rabbis and kabbalists – made a deep and lasting impression on the world of Jewish thought.
Another religious circle was that of the Tosafists (“Ba'alei Tosafot” in Hebrew) who enriched the volumes of the Talmud with their innovations. The Tosafists, who viewed themselves as continuing the Talmudic tradition of the Amoraim of Babylon, founded batei midrash and traveled from yeshiva to yeshiva to impart their innovations. In 1209 some 300 scholars left these batei midrash, made aliyah to the Land of Israel and settled in Acre and in Jerusalem. Researchers believe that this migration of these scholars was a reaction to the crusades.
The aliyah of the Tosafists took place concurrent with blood libels against the Jews, who were accused of using the blood of Christian children and with desecrating the Eucharist at churches.
In 1298, armed with a Eucharist “desecrated” by Jews, a German nobleman named Rindfleisch embarked on a rampage of mass extermination against the Jews. According to various estimates, these pogroms took the lives of some 20,000 Jews and destroyed 146 communities.

1348 | The Black Death

In 1348 the Black Death plague began, which would wipe out an estimated one third of the population of Europe, including entire Jewish communities. The people of the time believed the plague to come from the water, and from there to declaring the Jews “well poisoners” was but a short distance.
These accusations led to the destruction of 300 Jewish communities in Germany. Many Jews were burned at the stake and many of the survivors fled to the Kingdom of Poland, establishing what was to become the great Jewish community of Poland.
In the 15th and 16th centuries the Jews remaining in the German lands suffered from the cruelty and superstition of the masses, fell victim to the avarice of princes and were forced to deal with ever-increasing intolerance by the Church. Most of the Jews of Germany at this time made their living as textile merchants, pawn brokers, money exchangers, street vendors and itinerant workers. They were allowed to reside only in the big cities, where they were pushed into crowded, poverty-stricken quarters. Many of them wandered the roads all week long, carrying their wares from village to village, only to be met with contempt and degradation from the locals.
This image of the “Wandering Jew” was later expressed in German poetry: “Miserable Jew, doomed to wander, a famished vendor through town and vale, his bones rattle, his teeth chatter, forever crying: Knick-knacks for sale!”

1529 | Josel The Lobbyist

In the 16th century Europe was showing signs of enlightenment. Renaissance culture, humanist ideas, the Reformation movement and more were the clearest signs. Two major German figures who represented these trends were philosopher Johann Reuchlin and theologian monk Martin Luther. The two were in agreement regarding the just cause of the religious reformation in Christianity, but regarding the Jews they took opposite views.
Reuchlin, who specialized in the study of Hebrew, was fond of Jewish culture. Proof of this can be found in the public debate he held with Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Catholic theologian who had converted from Judaism and called to destroy all copies of the Talmud. Reuchlin also gained fame when he published a defense of the Jews titled “Augenspiegel” (“Visible Evidence”) which called for equality and argued that all human beings shared a common source.
Martin Luther, in contrast, published a treatise in 1543 titled “On the Jews and Their Lies”, in which he proposed to burn down synagogues and expel the Jews from Germany. Four hundred years later the Nazis republished the tract and added it to their canon, alongside Hitler's “Mein Kampf” and “The Jew Suess” by Goebbels.
In 1529 a Jew named Josel of Rossheim was appointed to the lengthy title of “Custodian of the Jews in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”. Josel was among the first to fill the role of “shtadlan” - a new figure in the Jewish landscape, serving as a lobbyist of sorts for the Jews in the halls of power. Among Josel's achievements was the procurement of a charter of protection stating that any soldier harming a Jew would be executed, as well as saving 200 Jews who were sentenced to burn at the stake.

1669 | First We Take Vienna, Then We Take Berlin

By the end of the 18th century the German lands consisted of over 100 independent political units under absolute rulers small and large: kings, dukes, counts, bishops and more. Theoretically, they were all subject to the “Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation” who sat in Vienna, but in practice these were autonomous states with borders, laws and currencies of their own. Prussia, which included the city of Berlin, which would eventually become its own capital and that of all Germany, was one of the largest such duchies, and by the second half of the 18th century it became the fifth most powerful country in Europe.
Until 1699 Jews were prohibited from living in or near Berlin, but following the Thirty Year War and the deficits it created in the duchy's budget, things changed. In order to jump-start the Prussian economy, Duke Frederick I (soon to crown himself King) decided to welcome the fifty richest of the Viennese Jews expelled by Austria. These Jews were declared “Protected Jews” (“Schutzjuden”) and signed a contract promising to pay the King 2,000 tallers (approximately $90,000 in today's currency), to establish certain industries and to refrain from building synagogues.
When the Jewish population grew, the King called it “a plague of locusts” and decreed that only 120 families, the “richest and finest”, would be allowed to remain in the city. The rest were cast out. King Frederick's hatred did not extend to “useful” Jews such as Levin Gomperz, who obtained credit from the banks for his excessive expenses, or Jeremiah Hirz, the royal goldsmith. Unlike other Jews, those two were exempt, for instance, of the abhorrent requirement to pay a tax each time they passed through Rosenthaler Gate, one of the Berlin's famous portals.

1734 | The Jewish Socrates

In the fall of 1743 a 14 year-old boy passed through the gates of the city of Berlin. He was small for his age, and suffered from a slightly hunched back and a speech impediment. It was said that “even the cruelest of hearts would soften at the sight of him”, and yet he was blessed with handsome features and his eyes revealed depth, wisdom and brilliance. The records of the Rosenthaler Gate, through which he entered, document the passage of “six oxen, seven swine and one Jew”. When the guard at the gate asked the boy what he was selling, the youngster replied with a stammer but surprising confidence: “W...W...Wisdom”.
Even the most imaginative of writers couldn't imagine that the stammering hunchback, Moses Mendelssohn, would one day become such a central figure in the annals of the Enlightenment movement in general, and of Judaism in particular.
Less than two decades after entering Berlin, and being self-taught, the boy became one of the most important philosophers in Germany, one so important that a 1986 tour guide states that “The history of literature in Berlin begins on that autumn day in 1743, when a 14 year-old yeshiva student named Moses Mendelssohn entered through the gate reserved for livestock and Jews only.”
Mendelssohn, who became known as “The Jewish Socrates”, was an admired example for all German Jews. His “Golden Path” ideology, the mixture he created in his thought between religion and rationality, and the religious lifestyle he adhered to despite the attempts of Christian clerics to talk him into converting in return for tempting favors – all these turned him into the guiding light of the Jews of Germany.
But Mendelssohn – the man who more than anyone symbolized the trend Jewish integration in Germany – recognized the hypocrisy of the German elite. Despite his reputation as an intellectual giant, he never received an academic position and was forced to make his living as a simple factory worker. “My life is so beset on all sides by tolerance,” he wrote sarcastically to one of his friends, “that for the sake of my children I must imprison myself all day in a silk factory.”

1780 | Signs of Enlightenment

By the end of the 18th century it seemed that the Jews of Germany were integrating admirably into German society. Austrian Emperor Joseph II gave them the “Edict of Tolerance” and in 1781 a senior Prussian official, Christian von Dohm, called for the political and civic emancipation of all German Jews, which set off a widespread public debate.
Two years later, in 1783, Berlin's main theater staged the play Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, one of Germany's leading playwrights of the time. Lessing's protagonist was an enlightened, wise, tolerant Jew who believed in universal brotherhood – a complete opposite to the greedy, corrupt, nefarious Jewish character which was a staple of European culture at the time.
Jewish reaction to these expressions of enlightenment were mixed. Many responded with enthusiasm and euphoria, expressed among other in the book “Divrei Shalom Ve'emet” by German-Jewish poet Naftali Hirz Wessely. Others expressed concern that the same old toxic hatred was hiding behind the smokescreen of tolerance, and that the true aim of the “tolerance” was to wipe out the Jews' religious identity.

1790 | The Literary Salons

Among the most fascinating expressions of the pluralistic spirit that characterized the upper class of Berlin at the end of the 18th century were the literary salons held by Henrietta Herz and Rachel Levi. Anyone holding themselves to be erudite wished to be invited to these salons, where intellectuals and artists, writers and musicians, entrepreneurs and thinkers – Jews and Gentiles alike.
Since in those days no university had yet been established in Berlin, and the court life of Prussian King Frederick II was boring and limited, the literary salons offered an outlet for young people who hungered for intellectual nourishment. They spoke of art, literature and poetry, enjoyed drinks and hors d'oeuvres, and exchanged forbidden kisses in secluded rooms.
Berlin of those days was home to many rich Jewish families (as mentioned above, the poor ones were expelled from the city), and the fact that Jews took such an interest in art, and Jewish women no less, was exceptional. The daring of these women was doubled, as they were both Jews and women. For the Jewish guests the salons were “a small slice of utopia”, as Jewish writer Deborah Hertz. French writer Madame de-Stael said upon visiting Berlin that Henrietta and Rachel's salons were the only places in all of Germany where aristocrats and Jews could meet freely.
The war between Prussia and France ended the phenomenon of the literary salons. “Everything sank in 1806,” wrote Rachel Levi, the most fascinating of the salon hostesses, “went down like a ship carrying the finest gifts, the choicest of life's pleasures.”

1806 | Romance In The Air

While famous German philosopher Frederick Hegel watched from his home balcony as the conqueror Napoleon entered the city of Jena and felt that he was witnessing “the end of history”, a Jewish boy of nine named Heinrich Heine looked at his father proudly wearing his blue-and-red uniform in his new position as a patrolman securing the streets of Dusseldorf. Unlike Hegel, this boy, destined to become one of the most important poets in Germany, felt that he was witnessing the beginning of a new history.
The Franco-Prussian war, which ended with the Prussians defeated, heralded a new age for the Jews. In the territories annexed to France, among them Dusseldorf, Jews were accorded full political rights, and for the first time in the history of Germany Jews like Heine's father were allowed to serve in public capacities. Even in the territories left to Prussia, whose size shrunk by half, reforms took place. The liberal Prussians who came to power abolished the medieval guilds, banned corporal punishment and gave the Jews – albeit only the rich ones – a municipal status, if not a country-wide political one.
But unlike in the United States and France, where liberation was the product of a popular revolution, in Germany the ideas of equality and enlightenment were handed down from above, by the regime. In those days, the Romantic movement spread in Germany, replacing the universal ideals of the Enlightenment with that of nationalism, and called for a sacred bond between people, church, and state.
One of the principles of the Romantic movement was to define nations in organic terms and the German nation as an ideal, homogenous and most importantly Jews-free specimen thereof. A new kind of Jew-hatred began to appear, one that combined religious sentiment and racial arguments with a disdain for the rationality of the Enlightenment, which was identified with the “Jewish mind”. The main proponent of this view was German philosopher Johann Fichte, who said that “We should cut off their (the Jews') heads in one night and replace them with others, in which there is not a single Jewish idea.”

1819 | Hep Hep Hep

In 1819 riots broke out in the city of Wurzburg, as a result of the rise of the nationalist Romantic movement, the cancellation of Napoleon's emancipation edicts and the increased anti-Semitism of the German aristocracy. The rioters broke into Jewish homes and shops, looted them and laid them to waste while shouting the “Hep Hep Hep” cry (a Latin acronym for “Hierosolyma est perdita”, or “Jerusalem is lost”) which, unfounded tradition has it, served to recruit fighters for the crusades in the Middle Ages. Another theory is that the cry was a traditional one for shepherds in German.
Three years earlier Germany suffered a severe economic crisis, which also led to these riots. The fact that 90% of German Jews were desperately poor mattered not one bit to the marauders, who stayed away from the areas in which wealthy Jews lived (mostly in Prussia).
The Jews reacted to the riots with restraint. Those of the upper-middle class, most of whom lived in Berlin and were not exposed to the riots, felt little shared fate with their brethren. The rate of conversion in these communities grew and many, among them the poet Heinrich Heine, hoped that if they shed their home-given language and dress, the historical hatred towards them would vanish. But many discovered that nothing had changed even when they “crawled to the cross”, as Heine put it.
A few weeks after the riots three extraordinary young Jews – Edward Gans, Leopold Zunz, and Moses Moser – met in Berlin and decided to found a “culture and science association”, in order to bring the Jews closer to German society and thus to crumble the walls of hatred. The founders of the association applied the principles of modern research to the study of Judaism, hoping that if European society became acquainted with Judaism and its contribution to world culture, antisemitism would cease to exist. Carried on the waves of optimism he shared with his friends, Gans applied for a position at the University of Berlin. He was rejected out of hand.

1848 | The Spring Of Nations

“I should have been either healthy or dead,” said the poet Heinrich Heine, semi-paralyzed and bed-ridden in exile in Paris, when he received the news of the revolution in Germany. And indeed, although the “Spring of Nations” revolution has been called a parody of the French Revolution, Heine was excited by the possibility that Germany would lose the confinements of nationalism and royalty and adopt the values of freedom and equality.
Despite its failure, the revolution was a turning point in the lives of Germany's Jews. The fact that many Jewish liberals took an active part in it heralded a deep change in the mind. For the first time in the history of Germany the traditional Jewish passivity began to give way to active political involvement. After several decades in which the Jewish elite almost disappeared in the first wave of conversions, a new generation rose: A generation of Jewish leaders proud of their Jewishness.
The revolutionary Ludwig Bamberger, Orientalist Moritz Steinschneider, the charismatic physician Johann Jacoby and writer Berthold Auerbach were but a few of the Jews who were determined to make the ideals of the revolution a reality. This was the first time, writes historian Amos Eilon, that the representatives of the Jews were so scathing, firm, and aware of their rights.
Another person who stood our during this time of tumult was the scion of a long line of rabbis – the revolutionary Karl Marx. A few weeks after publishing his “Communist Manifesto” Marx quickly joined his revolutionary friends in Cologne and Dusseldorf, and spread his ideas from there. Marx had no sympathy for Judaism. He saw emancipation, for instance, not as the liberation of Jews in Germany, but “the liberation of humanity from the Jews”. His aversion to religion and his famous quote that religion is the opium of the masses would turn out to be ironic as he founded a new world religion, Communism, whose results were written in blood. The irony is doubled when one learns that this famous quote was not penned by Marx but by his Jewish comrade Moses Hess (who later reconciled with his Jewish identity and was an early herald of Zionism).

1870 | Indeed?

In the mid-19th century, some 1,000 small Jewish communities flourished in the towns and villages of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Hessen, Westphalia, and the Rhine Valley. Most Jews were observant, spoke Yiddish in a western dialect and worked mostly in the cattle and horse trade.
The Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in 1870 and ended in a crushing Prussian victory, gave the Jews an excellent opportunity to display their loyalty. Between 7,000 and 12,000 Jewish fighters took part in the battles. “It was,” wrote author Theodore Fontane, “as if they had vowed to themselves to put an end to the old notion of their aversion to and incompetence at war.”
Jews were also active in high places. The Jew Ludwig Bamberger, a veteran of the 1848 Revolution, followed the advances of the Prussian forces into Paris from his exile in that city. Upon the occupation of the city, he joined the personal staff of the “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck and served him as a senior adviser, dues to his experience as a revolutionary.
At the German headquarters in Paris he met another Jew, Gerson Bleichroder, who was Bismarck's all-powerful banker. Bleichroder, who seemed cast in the mold of the “Court Jew”, was in charge of the secret funds with which Bismarck bribed the kings and dukes of the principalities of southern Germany, in order to persuade them to unite all the independent countries in Germany under a single rule – a mission eventually crowned with success.
In 1871 the Emancipation Law was passed and applied to all of Germany. As equal citizens the Jews began to reap success in all walks of life. Over 60% of them belonged to the settled middle-class. They achieved remarkable prominence in the worlds of publishing and journalism, and more and more young Jews, the sons of shopkeepers, innkeepers, cattle traders and street vendors enrolled in the universities.
The Jews began to slowly assimilate into the general population and adopt the German identity. Organs were introduced into the synagogues, and traditional prayer was abandoned. Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen declared that serving Germany was as holy a deed as serving God, whereas the successful Jewish-German author Berthold Auerbach, who was styled “The German Dickens”, stated that the process of integration had been successfully completed.
But had it, indeed?

1880 | The New Antisemitism

On November 22nd, 1880 writer Berthold Auerbach sat in the visitors' gallery of the Prussian parliament. The delegates discussed a proposal to revoke the civil rights of the Jews. Auerbach returned to his home morose and depressed, opened his notebook and wrote: “I have lived and toiled in vain.”
Like many other Jewish activists, Auerbach too devoted his life to the cause of Jewish integration in Germany. A few years before that parliamentary debate he had even declared that upon the granting of Jewish emancipation, their integration into German society had been completed. Now he was broken and despondent.
The 1873 German stock exchange crash is viewed by many historians as the watershed moment. The rage and frustration of the masses found a new target: “The nouveau-riche” (which is to say, the Jew) who exploited the naiveté of the honest Christian and profiteered off his hard-earned money. To the old anti-Semitism a new fear was added. If in the past the Jews were accused of being beggars, immoral and of low hygiene, now they were described as devious and endlessly powerful. Major Jewish figures, among them railroad magnate Henry Strasburg and banker Gerson Bleichroder were depicted as having corrupted the German economy and the main culprits in the suffering of the Germans.
In the German climate, where strong ties to the feudal system still lingered, the Jews – bearing the flags of liberalism, democracy and the free market – were considered to be responsible not only for the crisis, but for the founding of capitalism itself, which was equated with materialism, exploitation and degeneracy. Prominent German figures, such as Protestant chaplain Adolph Stoecker and historian Heinrich von Treitschke, gave the new anti-Semitism the veneer of the Church and Academia. Bismarck and his noble friends, who had themselves become rich at the public's expense, gave it the imprimatur of aristocracy.

1900 | Progress, Secularism and Religion

The 25 years preceding the outbreak of WW1 were described by Jewish-German writer Stephan Zweig as “the golden age of security”. The “years of anxiety”, as the 1880s later came to be known, had passed. The expressions of anti-Jewish discrimination were marginal, and the wave of anti-Semitism that characterized the previous decade had died down. Future Zionist Richard Lichtheim went so far as to state that prior to 1914 he had never felt anti-Semitism. Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin noted that he had grown up “completely certain of himself and his resilience”; the feeling imbued by his grandmother's villa, which stood in a well-to-do suburb of Berlin, he described as “unforgettable sensations of an almost eternal bourgeoisie security”.
Against a backdrop of economic prosperity, technological progress and stable law and order, the number of Jewish entrepreneurs rose steadily, and they founded some of the new industries in Germany. Among the most famous ones must note banker Max Warburg, coal magnate Edward Arnhold, cotton magnate Jason Frank and “The Bismarck of the German electric industry”, Emil Rathenau, whose son, Walter, would one day serve as Foreign Minister in the Weimar regime.
At the same time, Jews were becoming increasingly detached from their traditions, which were replaced by modern patterns – whether the “Experiential Judaism” advocated by philosopher Martin Buber, or the Reform Judaism model founded in the mid-19th century. Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer told how right after his father was awarded the position of “deputy preacher” at the new Reform congregation in Berlin, his mother entered a non-kosher butcher's shop and bought “mixed sausages, a bit of each”. When they returned home the mother said, beaming: “This is what others eat. Now we can eat it too.”
Many Jews stopped circumcising their children or holding bar-mitzva ceremonies. More and more Jews became secular, and others chose to convert to improve their social standing. In 1918, for example, some 21% of the Jewish men in Germany converted to Christianity.

1914 | WW1 – More Catholic Than The Pope

The significant integration of the Jews in German life manifested in many ways, from admiration of German music and theater to joining in the patriotic wave that washed over Germany upon the outbreak of WW1 in 1914. Many of the Jews abandoned their cosmopolitan views and their traditional support of the socialist parties who stood for the brotherhood of nations, and exchanged them for a sentimental festival of nationalism.
Among the most zealous advocates for war, the Jewish intellectuals were most prominent. Hermann Cohen, the author of “Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism”, believed that the most sublime ideals would be realized as a result of this war. Stefan Zweig, an avowed pacifist who claimed that he would never touch a gun, not even at an entertainment booth at a country fair, waxed enthusiastic of “having the privilege of being alive at such a wonderful moment”. Felix Klemperer, a renowned brain surgeon, was surprised at his own excitement over “the splendor of war”, and Martin Buber extolled war, claiming it was a liberating cultural experience. These are but a few of the Jewish intellectuals who were swept away by German nationalist patriotism.
The only one who saw through the stupidity of war was Jewish industrialist Walter Rathenau. When he heard of the outbreak of WW1, “a terrible paleness spread over his face”. But despite his opposition to the war Rathenau enlisted in the patriotic effort and took the management of the national emergency economy upon himself.
Later on various historians would note that if not for Rathenau and the skilled officials working under him, Germany would have collapsed within a few months. 12,000 Jews fell in battle during the war, and over 7,000 were decorated for bravery – far beyond their share of the population.

1933 | The Weimar Illusion

The success of the 1918 revolution, which overthrew the corrupt monarchical regime in Germany, disproved Lenin's claim that German revolutionaries would never conquer a train station without first buying tickets.
Weimar, the city of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schiller, was chosen as the home of the new German republic, and the patriotic war slogans were replaced with fiery speeches calling for the establishment of a constitution based on the principles of human rights.
In the new republic the Jews finally won full equality not only in theory, but in practice as well. In a single moment the dam was broken, and a tidal wave of Jewish intellectuals flooded the fields of learning. The philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Ernst Cassirer, Max Reinhardt's theater and more are but a fraction of the immense Jewish contribution to European culture in those years.
But under the surface there were seething currents, drenched in anti-Semitic filth. The skyrocketing inflation, increased unemployment and the German pride, trampled underfoot by the Versailles peace agreements that ended WW1 were just as powerful, if not more so, than the illusion of Weimar enlightenment.
The last straw was the severe economic crisis that broke out in 1929, which caused many of the middle-class to join extreme right-wing parties. The Jews were accused of “stabbing the nation in the back” and one fine day they found themselves assigned to one of two groups – the “capitalist swine” or the “Bolshevik swine”.
In time historians would come to believe that the seeds of disaster from which the Nazi Party bloomed were planted back in the failed revolution of 1848. The culture of militarism, the racism, the defeat in WW1 and the dire economic crisis watered and fertilized it up to January 30th, 1933, when Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

1939 | Twilight of Civilization

In 1933 the Nazi Party came to power and antisemitism took center stage. Hate had a sovereign, and he was determined and monstrous. The anti-Semitic snowball gathered more and more supporters and believers. Books written by Jews were burned at the university square in Berlin. In 1935 the racist Nuremberg Laws were passed and in 1938 the Night of Broken Glass, or Krystallnacht, took place – an organized pogrom against the Jews. The Holocaust was at the doorstep.
The old technology of the pogrom was updated to state of the art means of murder: The extermination camps. The town square calls to massacre the Jews were replaced by respectable committees whose members drafted official documents with a glass of fine wine at dessert. The old myths were replaced by sophisticated propaganda that equated Jews with insects, rodents, and other pests.
Many Jews believed that this was but another wave of anti-Semitism, soon to pass, but many others realized that this time it was something different, methodical, organized and massive, and began to pack in order to emigrate (see table of data on Jewish emigration from Germany between 1933-1939).
On May 19th, 1943, Germany was declared to be “Judenrein” (German for “Clean of Jews"). Most of those who survived were Jews with Gentile spouses and a handful of Jews who survived underground with the help of those Gentiles whose courage and moral rectitude earned them the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
The rise of the Nazis in Germany and the Holocaust of Europe's Jews spelled an end for one of the most fascinating and creative communities in the history of the Jewish People. From a persecuted tribe of shopkeepers, cattle traders and itinerant vendors the Jews became a flourishing community of writers, entrepreneurs, poets, musicians, scientists, publishers and political activists, who were in many regards the leaders of modern Europe. WW2 put an end to all that.

Emigration of Jews from Germany in the years 1933-1939

Destination No. of Immigrants
United States 63,000
Palestine 55,000
Great Britain 40,000
France 30,000
Argentina 25,000
Brazil 13,000
South Africa 5,500
Italy 5,000
Other countries in Europe 25,000
Other countries in South America 20,000
Far East countries 15,000
Other 8,000
Total 304,500


Early 21st Century

At the end of WW2 only a few dozen thousand Jews remained in Germany, some of them displaced Jews from other places and some German Jews who survived the war. Many insisted that their stay in the “cursed country” was but temporary, but in the early 1950's calls were heard for reconciliation with German society. The Jewish communities, headed by that of Berlin, were rebuilt, and in 1967 the number of registered members of the community stood at some 26,000 people.
Upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union the German government opened its gates to the Jews, and some 104,000 immigrated into it, mostly from Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries. As of the early 21st century, Germany is home to the third-largest Jewish community in Europe, with some 115,000 live there, of these some 10,000 are Israelis. The Jewish community of Germany consists of approximately 90 renewed Jewish congregations. Berlin is the largest, followed by Frankfurt and Munich.

Hamburg

A major port city and state in Germany. Since 1937 it has included the towns of Altona and Wandsbeck.

In 2004 there were approximately 3,000 Jews living in Hamburg. There was one synagogue, the Hohe Weide Synagogue, one kindergarten, the Ronald Lauder Jewish Kindergarten, and kosher food was sold by one man, Shlomo Almagor, a native of Israel.

HISTORY

Jews have lived in Hamburg since the end of the 16th century, when wealthy Marranos from Spain and Portugal arrived in the city via the Netherlands. They unsuccessfully attempted to observe Jewish customs and rituals; when they were discovered, some of the Christian residents of the city demanded their expulsion. However, the city council opposed the measure, pointing out the community's economic contributions. German Jews began to be admitted to Wandsbeck by 1600, and in 1611 some of them settled in Altona, both of which were under Danish rule. By 1627 German Jews began to settle in Hamburg itself, although on festivals they continued to travel to Altona in order to worship, since in 1641 the Danish king had permitted the official establishment of a congregation and the building of a synagogue there. The rabbi of the Altona congregation was also responsible for mediating any disputes that arose within the congregation.

The Jews of Hamburg worked as financiers, and some helped found the Bank of Hamburg in 1619. Other Jewish residents of the city worked as shipbuilders, importers (particularly of sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies), weavers, and goldsmiths. Their taxes were high; in 1612 the Jews of Hamburg paid an annual tax of 1,000 marks, a sum which had doubled by 1617.

The original Jewish community of Hamburg continued to maintain ties to their countries of origin. The kingdoms of Sweden, Poland, and Portugal appointed Jews as their ambassadors to Hamburg. Those who had come to Hamburg from Spain and Portugal continued to speak the languages of their native lands for two centuries. There were about 15 books printed in Hamburg in Portuguese and Spanish from 1618 to 1756, which was a major development in Jewish printing in the city; from 1586 Hebrew books, especially the Bible, had been published in Hamburg by Christian printers, often with the help of Jewish employees.

As early as 1611 Hamburg had enough of a Jewish community for three Sephardic synagogues, whose congregations jointly owned burial grounds in nearby Altona. In 1652 the three congregations combined under the name of Beth Israel.

The philosopher Uriel da Costa, who wrote the controversial book, "An Examination of the Traditions of the Pharisees," fled to Hamburg from Amsterdam in 1616 after his excommunication for blasphemy. The community, however, did not accept him (the fact that he did not understand German was an additional difficulty). The local physician Samuel da Silva wrote a pamphlet attacking him and his excommunication was announced publicly in the Hamburg synagogue. Da Costa returned to Amsterdam after one year.

Many Jews, fleeing from persecution in Ukraine and Poland, in 1648 arrived in Hamburg in 1648, and were helped by the local Jews. However, these refugees soon left for Amsterdam since tensions with the Christian community were rising, culminating in the expulsion of the Ashkenazi community in 1649. Most of those who were expelled left for Altona and Wandsbeck; only a few remained in Hamburg, residing in the homes of the Spanish-Portuguese Jews in order to obtain legal status in the city.

The expulsion proved to be temporary; after a few years, many of those who had been driven out returned to Hamburg. In 1656 a number of refugees from Vilna also arrived, adding to the Jewish presence in the city. The three Ashkenazi congregations, Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck, united in 1671 to form the AHW Congregation; the community's rabbinical headquarters were in Altona. One of the most famous rabbis of the merged congregation was Jonathan Eybeschuetz, who was appointed to the post in 1750. His equally famous adversary, Jacob Emden, lived in Altona. The congregation ceased to exist in 1811 when the French authorities imposed a single consistorial organization on the city; at that point, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim united to form one congregation. The Altona community retained its own rabbinate, which was also recognized by the Jews of Wandsbeck until 1864.

Sabbateanism swept the community in 1666; the community's governing body even announced that the community buildings were for sale, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the Messiah. Rabbi Jacob B. Aaron Sasportas was one of the few who was not swept up into the enthusiasm and he became a fierce opponent of the Sabbateans.

In 1697 the city unexpectedly raised the annual tax levied against the Jews to 6,000 marks. Consequently, the majority of the wealthy Jews of Hamburg moved to Altona and Amsterdam.

The Reform movement, which began in Berlin, eventually reached Hamburg. A Reform temple was dedicated in 1811, and in 1819 a new prayerbook was published that better suited the needs of the new congregation. The Reform community of Hamburg, however, faced extreme opposition from the other rabbis in the community. The rabbinate in Hamburg published the opinions of noted Jewish scholars that sought to discredit the temple, and they prohibited the use of its prayerbook. During Rabbi Isaac Bernays' term leading the community (1821-1849), controversy flared again when the Reform congregation built a new synagogue building and published a more radically abridged and revised version of the prayerbook, "Siddur HaTefillah," in 1844. Rabbi Bernays, for his part, was a proponent of Modern Orthodoxy, and sought to endow the traditional service with greater beauty; he also modernized the curriculum of the local Talmud Torah and regularly gave sermons in German. Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger, a fierce opponent of Reform Judaism, founded an anti-Reform journal around the same time.

Other German Jews of note who lived in Hamburg included Glueckel of Hameln, the merchant and philanthropist Salomon Heine (the uncle of Heinrich Heine), Moses Mendelssohn (as well as Rabbi Raphael Kohen who was fiercely opposed to Mendelssohn's translation of the Pentateuch into German), the poets Naphtali Herz Wessely and Shalom B. Jacob HaCohen, the author of Dorot HaRishonim Isaac Halevy, the art historian Aby Warburg, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the psychologist William Stern, the shipping magnate Albert Ballin, and the financiers Max Warburg and Karl Melchior. The municipal library and the library of the University of Hamburg contained a large number of Hebrew manuscripts. Nearly 400 Hebrew books were printed in Hamburg between the 17th and 19th centuries; during the 19th century, Jewish printers mostly issued prayer books, the Pentatuch, books on mysticism, and popular literature.

The Jewish congregation of Hamburg became the fourth largest community in Germany. In 1866 there were 12,550 Jews in Hamburg; by 1933 that number had risen to 19,900 (1.7% of the total population), including more than 2,000 who lived in Altona. The last rabbi of the community before World War II was Joseph Carlebach (the father of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and Professor Miriam Gillis-Carlebach) who was deported in 1942 and killed by the Nazis.

Between 1933 and 1937, after the Nazi party came to power in Germany, more than 5,000 Jews from Hamburg emigrated to other countries; another 1,000 Polish citizens were expelled on October 28, 1938. Shortly thereafter, on the night of November 9, 1938, there was a pogrom that came to be known as Kristallnacht. Most synagogues were looted and vandalized. This led to another surge of Jews leaving Germany. A deportation took place in 1941, when 3,148 Jews were deported to Riga, Lodz, and Minsk. 1,848 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt in 1942. Between 1941 and 1945 there were 17 transports of Jews from Hamburg to Lodz, Minsk, Riga, Auschwitz, and Theresienstadt. By 1943 there were 1,800 Jews left in Hamburg, most of whom were married to non-Jews; the official liquidation came in June of that year.

Approximately 7,800 Jews from Hamburg were killed during the Nazi era, including 153 who were mentally ill and executed, and 308 who committed suicide. During this period the community was led by Max Plaut and Leo Lippmann (who committed suicide in 1943). A concentration camp, Neuengamme, was located near the city; a total of 106,000 inmates passed through its gates, more than half of whom were killed.

On May 3, 1945 Hamburg was liberated by British troops, who offered aid to the few hundred Jewish survivors. On September 18, a Jewish community was organized and managed to reopen the cemetery, old age home, mikvah, and hospital. By March 18, 1947 the community numbered 1,268, its numbers fluctuating due to emigration, immigration, and a high mortality rate.

In 1960 a hospital with 190 beds was opened, and a large modern synagogue was consecrated. Herbert Weichmann was elected Buergermeister in 1965 and the Institute for Jewish History was founded in 1966, which worked to promote Jewish-Christian understanding. During the sixties a number of Jews arrived from Iran, sent by the shah in order to import Persian carpets.

In January 1970 there were 1,532 Jews in Hamburg, two-thirds of whom were above 40 years old. Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union began arriving in the 1990s.