Jews in Germany: finally feeling at home again

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There is also a human right of the dead.

The dead have a right to be taken for what they were, a right to be understood, just as they struggled and erred and creatively moved in the freedom and hardship of their presence.

Even after 1700 years of Jewish life in Germany, which will be remembered with numerous events this year, there can be no question of this in the case of the Jews.

Despite all the benevolent remembrance, hardly any politician or publicist is willing to grant this human right.

With consequences for the living.

The Jew remains a stranger.

There is talk of “Jews and Germans”, of the “contribution” of Jews to culture and science, as if they, like guest workers, had only arrived decades ago.

Is it just a matter of politeness that the Central Council of Jews does not forbid any initiative by Annette Widmann-Mauz?

Is the “Federal Government Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration” aware of how inappropriate and also hurtful it is to think that Jews in Germany belong in her field of responsibility - and that after 1700 years on this soil?

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It is time to use the milestone anniversary to free yourself from old thought patterns and to take the Jews of the past for the sake of the present and the future as they saw themselves.

It's time to put an end to the Nazi language that still resides in most people's minds.

Hitler and his henchmen talked about the murder of European Jewry.

The benevolent repeat it today.

Don't you notice that this collective term "European Judaism" is a bow to the madness that carried out this murder?

Those who were murdered were not Jews, but Germans, French, Hungarians and so on ... Especially in not distinguishing between a French gallery owner, a Hessian doctor, a Franconian horse dealer, a Polish rabbi, because they are all "Jews" in this unreal abstraction was the source of the madness from which Europe's Jews perished.

Stop it!

Put an end to this arrogance

No more looking at the 1700 years of Jewish life in Germany from Auschwitz.

History as such never reveals causes, it only shows a mere sequence of unexplained events.

Nevertheless, Jewish history in Germany is still thought of as if the concentration camp had to be its necessary end.

No historian, no keynote speaker would admit it.

Nevertheless, many of them ultimately regard the German Jews before 1933 as poor idiots who ingratiated themselves to the Germans and were almost annihilated for this reason.

No more arrogance!

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Anyone who puts them aside will find wonderful treasures, who can evaluate the history of the Jews in 19th century Germany as the great Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz did in that same time.

Graetz spoke of "a Jewish renaissance on a world-historical scale".

Have the German Jews offered themselves to their Christian neighbors?

If you make a distinction between Germans and Jews, it may be so.

But how did the Jewish contemporaries see it?

At best, Germanness and Judaism can be compared if one pushes one onto the level of the other and thus tears it out of its nature.

The Jews are not a people like other peoples and “despite the naive Vulgarzionism never were”, commented the religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig irritably.

Judaism is a religious community committed to strict monotheism.

The German Jews consequently nothing but Germans - especially before the Holocaust.

“I have and know no other blood than German, no other tribe, no other people.

If I am driven off my German soil, I will stay German and nothing will change ”, wrote Walther Rathenau in 1918. Other feelings would hardly have been possible in view of the centuries-old roots.

Ancestor of Jewish poets with a German tongue

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The Jews had set foot on Germanic soil together with the Roman legions and established communities in all of the larger settlements.

Traces of a deep connection to the non-Jewish environment can be found in these early on.

For example, Süßkind von Trimberg is still considered by most German scholars to be one of the great minstrels of his time.

He can be seen as the ancestor of Jewish poets with a German tongue.

Yehuda Hechassid from Speyer developed an ethic as early as the 12th century that overcame all ghetto walls.

In his “Book of the Pious” the scribe spoke exclusively of Jews and Christians.

Up until the modern age there will not be a single source that speaks of Germans and Jews.

Only with the onset of secularization do you hear of the “Jewish national character”, admittedly without any ethnic undertone.

This was only heard when the specter of anti-Semitism raised its head.

At first, however, the ideas of the Enlightenment permeated the continent.

The medieval ghetto life of a closed community corresponded just as little to the ideas of the emerging bourgeoisie as the compulsory guild.

With the waning of group society, the Jews as a group also had to disappear.

Reformers such as Christian Wilhelm von Dohm demanded that the Jews be granted all the rights that their Christian neighbors enjoyed so that they could merge as equals among equals in the community.

The Jews grasped the opportunity presented to them with emancipation.

From time immemorial the years in the ghetto had rolled by like smooth, silent wheels, without the conditions and duties, the rites and traditions having changed.

But now the gates of the Jewish quarter opened.

A fresh wind blew into the miserable ghetto alleys.

He gave their residents new hope of freedom and equality.

Hardly any Jew doubted that a new era had dawned in which everything would change.

In the eyes of most Jews, there was something dusty about their religion that no longer seemed appropriate to modern times.

Today's historians often turn up their noses at this.

They refer to the loss of tradition, wave baptismal lists and speak disparagingly of "assimilation".

Injustice.

Indeed, many Jews got rid of the centuries-old rituals.

In that, however, they were nothing special.

No one, whether Christian or Jew, German or French, was spared the consequences of industrialization.

It not only shook Judaism, but also the entire political system on the continent and shook all traditions from “divine right” to “good old law”.

In this upheaval, the Jews assimilated just as little as they acculturated.

They bourgeoisie - and faster than their Christian neighbors.

The change in no way led to an “atomization” of the Jews, as one can often read today.

Rather, it set free an inner Jewish and social creative urge that can only be compared with the creative power of the Jews in Spain before their expulsion.

Even in the Middle Ages, Jewish personalities had an impact far beyond town and country in Germany, but in modern times the German Jews gained their own profile.

More than that: They shaped, they created modern Judaism.

German Jews not only formed the modern synagogue, they also devised the Jewish community with its own welfare and sick care, as it can be found all over the world to this day.

Moreover, they put Jewish life and learning on an academic basis and saved both from the wear and tear of the passing time.

To this day, the “Science of Judaism”, as conceived by Leopold Zunz (1794 to 1886) from Berlin, is regarded as a model for the development of all Judaic courses all over the world.

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Zunz endeavored to preserve the Jewish religion and culture with all his might because it was the only great thing in Judaism.

The Jews are "just a religious community, like any other denomination living in the state," declared Zacharias Frankel in 1842 and spoke from the heart to almost all German rabbinical colleagues.

At that time, most of the Jews considered themselves a German tribe of the Mosaic faith who were active for the good of the country.

Whether Teutons or not, over the centuries the Jews had grown into their earthly fatherland without giving up the "portative" fatherland, the Bible.

They had long been connected to the non-Jewish environment - no “ecstatic illusion of being at home”, as the Israeli religious philosopher Gerschom Scholem wrote, rather a fruitful coexistence, despite smoldering hatred of Jews and flaring anti-Semitism.

Generally the hatred of Jews.

He should not be forgotten at this point.

Of course it existed - through all ages: as wild pogrom greed during the Crusades in the 12th century - the first example of collective Jewish martyrdom on European soil - as Catholic hatred of Jews that echoed solemnly through cathedrals, as poisonous, cold Protestant anti-Semitism, as noble whitewashed contempt for Jews by some politicians and professors, ultimately as the Nazis' extermination policy until 1945.

Correspondence as evidence of friendships

Yet!

Mutual shaping and fertilization between Jews and non-Jews could be found at all levels of German society.

Significant correspondence testifies to this as well as evidence of friendships between Christian and Jewish villagers who have lived side by side for generations.

Most Germans were just as uninterested in the fact that Hugo Preuss, the father of the Weimar Constitution, was Jewish, as was the origin of the actress Elisabeth Bergner, who lay at Berlin's feet.

"Until Hitler, German was the language of the natural sciences, after 1933 it was English with a German accent," wrote Walter Laqueur rightly.

Did Einstein just curry favor with the Germans?

Who is so foolish as to say so?

And after 1945?

Jewish life in Germany was destroyed.

But today it's back, not nearly as big and significant as it was before 1933, but at least it's back.

A good 70 years after the Holocaust, most Jews in this country feel at home again.

It is all the more embarrassing to believe that you have to integrate them.