German Jewry: The glory that won’t come back

Chapter Two was written after the spread of Christianity when Jews were persecuted, expelled and murdered because they had “killed Christ” and “poisoned the wells”.

Chapter Three shifted from faith to race under the Nazis, who sought to rid the entire world of the Untermenschen. These “sub-humans” had infected the Aryan bloodstream like a raging bacillus.

Chapter Four: snuff out the state of the Jews, as the eliminationist rhetoric “From the River to the Sea” has it. Where are those seven million supposed to go? “Back to Poland”, as one slogan has it? Half of their ancestors came from Muslim lands, which had driven them out. Is it only “anti-Zionism”, as a routine line has it? In truth, it is a bait-and-switch job. It is bad old antisemitism when Jews have to conceal their religious symbols and make themselves invisible. And not only in Berlin.

The numbers spell ‘no future’. Jewish life has been and remains invisible in glaring contrast with a glorious past

Jew-hatred is but the latest chapter of an unending story, though with a new twist. Having outlived the Holocaust, the fourth iteration cannot be separated from the elephant in the room: Jew-hating Islamists, of whom there appear to be a disturbing number amid Europe’s growing Muslim population.

​

THE NEW GERMANY: ‘NEVER AGAIN’

Like Europe, like Germany. Present-day antisemitism has no particular habitat. Still, Germany is a special case, a unique horror story, and the past won’t pale even 80 years after Der Führer. Now savour the better news. After 1945, remorse and amends became an unwritten part of Germany’s constitution.

The government is richly subsidising the Jewish community. It finances Jewish museums and stages regular commemorative rituals with earnest pledges of “Never Again!”. A huge Holocaust memorial in the centre of Berlin reminds locals and tourists of the million-fold murder. The heir of the Third Reich has paid billions to survivors and the State of Israel. It keeps arming Israel with state-of-the-art submarines, a pillar of Israel’s nuclear deterrent – though Chancellor Friedrich Merz this week criticised Israel’s offensive against Hamas, saying it “can no longer be justified”.

A protected species, “Jews are us again”, the reassuring message reads. Since the Shoah, every German government has laboured to revive Jewish life in a nation that had tried to obliterate all traces of it. Now to the darker side. For decades before October 7, synagogues, schools and community centres have been guarded by heavily armed police. Beth Shalom, a Reform congregation in Munich, won’t even divulge an address on its website.

​

THE GLORY OF GERMAN AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN JEWRY

Naturally, the darkening present invites a look back into the glorious past of German Jewry. We simply cannot think of Germany’s breathtaking rise between unification under Bismarck in 1871 and Hitler’s power grab after 1933 without the astronomic contribution of the nation’s Jews – a tiny minority of less than one per cent of the population.

The Hall of Fame abounds with German or German-acculturated Jews. Mould-breakers all, they transformed Western thinking

In fact, it was the German Reich, before the United States, that was the goldene medina, Yiddish for the “Land of Gold”. Jews were vastly over-represented in the sciences and arts, in literature and journalism, law and medicine. Decades before Henry Kissinger became secretary of state, his co-religionist Walther Rathenau was anointed foreign minister of the Weimar Republic.

Some statistics that illuminate the astounding trajectory of Jewry in Central Europe: in Prussia around 1900, less than one per cent of the population was Jewish, but more than five times as many were university students – and 17 per cent at the University of Berlin. In 1925, 16 per cent of physicians and one-quarter of lawyers were Jewish. In turn-of-century Vienna, the numbers were even more spectacular. Sixty-two per cent of the lawyers and almost half of the medical faculty were Jews.

An old Jewish joke makes the point. In a Berlin Gymnasium, the teacher asks Little Hans to list the Minor Prophets. He rattles off: “Reuben, Simon, Benjamin…”, the tribes of Israel, and so the teacher interrupts: “Hans is confusing these prophets with whom?” Little Moishe proudly belts out: “With the department heads at the Charité!”, Germany’s foremost research hospital with its global allure.

The New Synagogue in Berlin. In 1866, Otto von Bismarck, then prime minister of Prussia, and half of his cabinet came to its inauguration (Image: Wikipedia)[Missing Credit]

One-third of Germany’s Nobel Prizes up to 1932 went to Jews. Extend the count to Central Europe, the German “cultural empire” stretching from Berlin and Vienna to Prague, Budapest and Lemberg and also include the Jewish laureates who had escaped in time and were later ennobled in their new homelands and you get the following tally: Jews from Germany garnered 29 awards, from Poland ten, from Austria ten, from Hungary nine. As to Hungary, Eugene Wigner (Nobel winner in physics in 1963) is not exactly a Magyar name. The Hall of Fame abounds with German or German-acculturated Jews. Mould-breakers all, they transformed Western thinking. Arnold Schönberg and Gustav Mahler revolutionised music, Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrlich did the same to physics and medicine. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud, born as “Shlomo”, invented psychoanalysis, which he took to Britain, whence it travelled to the United States. Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein transformed philosophy.

In literature, Joseph Roth, born in Galicia, made his mark by wistfully chronicling the fall of the Empire. Franz Kafka, born as “Anshel” in Prague, occupies a front-row seat in the Pantheon of Literature.

Arthur Schnitzler and Elias Canetti (Nobel laureate in literature 1981) sit not far behind. Carl Laemmle, the son of a Jewish-German cattle trader, invented Hollywood. Think about Casablanca with its cast of Jewish émigrés from Central Europe like Peter Lorre and its director Michael Curtiz, née Mano Kaminer.

During the Manhattan Project, Hungarian Jewish scientists such as Edward (Eduard) Teller, John von Neumann and Leo Szilard invented the bomb that revolutionised war. That glory is no more.

​

THE AFTERMATH: WHERE DID ALL THE JEWS GO?

During the Weimar Republic, some 600,000 Jews lived in Germany, about one-third of them in Berlin. In 1945, 19,000 had somehow survived inside the Reich. Some were sheltered by their Christian friends; others were “U-boats” in Gestapo lingo. These Jews had submerged with forged documents.

After liberation, many of those who had beaten the gruesome odds saw no future in the new Deutschland. So, they sought a new life far away from the accursed land of their ancestors. The assimilated majority, by the way, were dyed-in-the-wool patriots.

Post-Hitler Germany threatened to become judenrein (cleansed of Jews) again. So, no more Jews in the Fatherland? Not quite, given a bizarre twist in a story that goes back to Roman times. Suddenly, some 200,000 “Displaced Persons” (DPs) surged in – those who had survived the camps or escaped into the primeval forests of Lithuania where they linked up with Jewish fighters. For the triumphant Hollywood version of this tale, watch Defiance with Daniel Craig of James Bond fame.

Why would the survivors flock into Germany of all places? Actually, they did not go to Murderland, but, as it were, to the United States. With its Western allies, the US ruled that part of occupied Germany that would become the Federal Republic in 1949. By no means did the newcomers want to sink roots in this accursed land. But with the US in charge, West Germany beckoned as a safe haven and springboard for emigration – mainly to the US and Canada.

So it was a temporary resting place and Hitler’s satanic dream of a judenrein Germany might soon materialise after all. But, some newcomers from the East stayed behind because children were born. They moved into small-time business requiring few cultural skills. Others were simply stuck because they could not snag a treasured visa to the US.

German émigrés trickled back, longing for their beloved deutsche Kultur, and so Jewish life revived a bit. Some 20,000 Jews sank shallow roots – above all, east Europeans. At home, Yiddish was spoken. And all of them sat on packed bags. Until 1990, the community stagnated at around 30,000, remaining practically invisible. No more Nobelists and literati among them. Nor are there Jewish politicians. The 118th US Congress boasts 37. In this century, some 30 Jews have been MPs.

​

REVIVAL AND DECLINE

So, how would yesterday’s splendour shine again? Two enemies stand in the way. One is history that cannot be undone. The dead and émigrés had left a lasting void. Logically, the best and the brightest who had perished or escaped can neither inspire nor set the model for the next generation. Uprooted trees don’t produce new seed, nor do they grow new branches. The lucky ones went off to the US and Britain. The book Hitler’s Gift chronicles the breathtaking achievement of 2,600 who ended up in Britain where 20 of them would win the Nobel Prize. This author’s outstanding teachers at Harvard might have taught in Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Riga.

Without this free gift, would US and UK universities now make up the global Top Ten? German higher learning was once the envy of the world. Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins (known as “Göttingen in Baltimore”) copied the German research university. Today, Heidelberg shows up in 50th place.

The University of Goettingen was once the envy of the world and was copied by Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins (known as “Göttingen in Baltimore”). Without Jewish immigration, would American and British universities now make up the global Top Ten? (Image: Alamy)[Missing Credit]

The second foe is just as implacable. It is not terror by local offshoots of Hamas et al., nor home-grown neo-Nazi thugs. It is biology and demography – faceless scourges. To put it harshly, Germany’s Jewish community is literally dying. A footnote: antisemitism, as measured by opinion polls, is lower in Germany than, say, in Hungary or Poland.

The demography of today’s German Jewry is a first-rate disaster. In 2006, the organised Jewish community reached a peak of 107,000 after a vast influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union, invited in by special dispensation. That number is shrinking, and if the trend persists, Germany will indeed be judenrein by century’s end. The enemy is a fatal mismatch of birth and death rates. Births in 2023 were 179, and deaths numbered 1,519. Why this bizarre gap? The population of community members is ageing rapidly. The three largest age cohorts range from 50 to 80-plus years. Naturally, the females are well past fertility. Nor can a mere trickle of immigrants undo the shrinkage of the demographic base.

These numbers spell “no future”. Jews actually don’t need any advice to slink off into the shadows. Jewish life has been and remains invisible in glaring contrast with a glorious past.

In 1866, Otto von Bismarck, then prime minister of Prussia, and half of his cabinet showed up at the inauguration of Berlin’s New Synagogue. The ceremony was a fitting symbol of German Jewry’s dawning Golden Age.

This is past history, not only in Germany, but also throughout Europe. The vanishing of Jews across the continent may be the saddest part of the story. In the 1930s, about ten million Jews were living in Europe; now the number of self-identifying Jews is down to 1.3 million.

Like Germany, like Europe. The Jewish future has wandered off to Israel and North America while holding on in Britain and France.

​

Josef Joffe, whose parents hailed from Vilna, grew up in postwar Berlin, then went to the US where he earned his PhD at Harvard. A Distinguished Fellow at Stanford, he has taught politics there as well as at Johns Hopkins and Harvard