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In the year 2021, Germany is celebrating the Jews.

The state decreed to celebrate 1700 years of German-Jewish life, the beginning of which is dated to the year 321 AD.

In addition to a ceremony in Cologne, numerous cultural events are planned in all parts of the country as well as the publication of publications.

What speaks against the Federal Republic cheering on its citizens to cheer for the Jews?

Nothing!

It honors the representatives of this state.

In the year 321 AD, large parts of today's Germany belonged to the Roman Empire.

In that year, Emperor Constantine signed a decree that for the first time allowed Jews to be appointed to the Cologne city council.

It is only the first written record of German-Jewish life.

In fact, there were certainly Jews on German soil about 300 years earlier.

Because: Where Rome was and where Rome was going, numerous Jews lived and came, around the Mediterranean Sea and beyond - even before the European diaspora forced by Rome in 70 AD with the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple.

Constantine needed the Jews

Constantine and Jewish participation - that suggests Constantinian tolerance.

There can be no question of that.

This emperor forbade Jews to accept proselytes and Christians to convert to Judaism.

He promoted the conversion of Jews to Christianity.

Constantine's humanity was kept within the narrowest limits.

Five years after his seemingly tolerant edict, he had his wife Fausta and his eldest son Crispus murdered.

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Constantine didn't want the Jews, he needed them.

In the highly developed, but already crumbling, crisis-ridden Roman Empire, and especially in the then underdeveloped Germania, citizens were needed who - to put it more sharply: unlike the few indigenous people and the many barbarians who immigrated or immigrated - read and write or money and Could operate long-distance trade.

Jews lived on the "German Rhine" before the Germans who mostly immigrated later.

Constantine's Jewish policy characterizes a cross-epoch German-Jewish, yes, diaspora-Jewish existence.

Jews were not wanted in what was soon to be a completely Christian West.

They were only welcome where, when and for as long as they were needed.

The law of ice-cold utility applied.

From this follows: Jewish life was, not only in Germany, existence on revocation.

Magnificent testimony to self-confident Judaism: the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin, inaugurated in 1866

Source: picture-alliance / dpa

Christian anti-Judaism, discrimination against Jews by Christians, was as old as Christianity.

But in late antiquity and early medieval pre-Germany, as well as in western and southern Europe until the middle of the 11th century, Jews were almost never liquidated.

Because Jews were needed.

Not every Jew engaged in money or long-distance trade, but every Jew who did money and long-distance trade needed a Jewish infrastructure.

As a result, “the” Jews were tolerated.

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But in the middle of the 11th century the time had come: Now the non-Jewish pre-bourgeois population - also in Islamic Spain - could and wanted to get into the lucrative business or become debt-free.

This was also true, for example, for many participants in the First Crusade (1096-1099).

On the way to the Holy Land, the impoverished rural and urban rabble on the Rhine and Moselle wanted to make their homeland Jewish-free and debt-free - through massacres, supported by desperados from eastern France, Flanders and England.

"Anyone who has a problem with Jews is in the wrong country here"

For the second part of the WELT politics portrait with Cem Özdemir (Greens) we meet in the government district in Berlin.

Here the 54-year-old speaks about his work in the NSU committee, anti-Semitism and political mistakes that he regrets to this day.

Source: WORLD

Giving in to economic pressure from below - not only from Germany - the Vatican intensified the anti-Jewish pace theologically in the 13th century.

Anti-Semitism was put on display as a fashion, both textually and visually.

The vulgar motif of the "Judensau" was popular in German churches more than anywhere else.

Jews had to be recognizable as Jews by their hats and, like prostitutes at the time, by their yellow clothing.

The Nazis later followed up on the Jewish yellow.

The sociology of anti-Judaism is remarkable.

On German soil and beyond, until the first half of the 20th century, discrimination against Jews, which was not only religiously legitimized, united the local upper, middle and lower classes.

The upper classes, including the Catholic and later Protestant classes, placed themselves protectively in front of the Jews.

They did this less out of “Christian charity” than out of economic reason.

They enriched themselves personally in the Jews through protection money, and they needed the generally better educated and mostly better-earning Jews for economic purposes.

The political survival of the authorities depended on the relative prosperity, at least of their clientele.

When and because the lower and middle classes rebelled against the authorities and prevailed politically, the Jews were usually threatened with murderous danger.

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That is why it was not just the German Jews who were anything but “revolutionaries” or “disturbers of the peace”.

For them, authorities were generally a protection against liquidation, despite constant discrimination.

But if the authorities of their own accord gave in to anti-Jewish pressure from below, the Jews would be lost.

This is what happened in "Germany", Western and Central Europe in the age of the plague pandemics from 1348 to the early modern upheavals that triggered chain reactions of expulsions of Jews into the early 16th century - for example from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497 and finally from Regensburg in 1519.

Now the center and west of Europe were practically “Jew-free”.

The authorities only let Jews into the country again after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War.

Like Emperor Constantine once in a while, for example, Brandenburg's Great Elector brought Jews to his country in 1671.

He needed citizens with intellectual and entrepreneurial skills - Jews and, from 1685, Huguenots.

Graves in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne

Source: picture-alliance / dpa

During the First Industrial Revolution in the first half of the 19th century, the need for capable modernizers, not least Jews, was greater than ever before in Germany.

The second industrial revolution from the late 19th century wanted to shape the non-Jewish middle class itself.

As always before, the “Jews out!” Wave strengthened.

From 1933 onwards the Nazis strived for a “Jew-free” Germany and Europe as part of the “Final Solution”.

They succeeded six million times over.

Not quite.

Thank the Allies.

After 1945/49, Jews were not invited here by either the old Federal Republic or the GDR.

Some came anyway.

You couldn't get away from Germany.

In spite of everything, after everything.

From 1990, in the era of reunification, when the "fear of Germany" was rampant, the new Federal Republic needed image cultivation.

Chancellor Kohl snatched away around two hundred thousand Jews from Israel who were supposed to come to the Jewish state from the Soviet Union.

Without them, the tiny Judaism in Germany at that time would have died out.

So it has survived in the meantime.

Permanent?

Members of a sports club for Jewish girls in 1925

Source: Getty Images

Today Germany is highly regarded even without Jews.

A large part of the supposed intellectual “elite” of Germany, large circles of the left and right bourgeoisie, as well as right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists and many Muslims, diaspora Jews are generally considered to be the fifth column of Israel.

Again, the Jews are threatened with danger from below.

Unlike since 321 AD, we Jews are no longer dependent on grace.

We have Israel.

A "Jew-pure" Germany would lose urgently needed Israeli and Jewish know-how in general.

Germany has a choice.

Source: picture alliance / dpa / dpa

Michael Wolffsohn

is a historian and journalist, university professor of the year 2017. He wrote, among other things, “German Jewish lucky children” and “Tacheles”.