German Jews

“ This persecution was probably epidemic rather than indigenous in its nature, its germ distinctly traceable to those conscientious and comprehensive attempts of Louis the Saint, in the preceding year, to stamp out Judaism in his dominions. At any rate, for German Jews, an era of protection began under Frederick Barbarossa, and the Frankfort Jews among the rest, during the next hundred years, enjoyed the ‘no history’ which to the Jewish nation, pre-eminently amongst all others, must have been synonymous with happiness. ”

“ The temptations to cultivated society, which hardly assailed them, they regarded with bitter hatred and contempt, and they clung to their own distinctive ways and customs and modes of dress and speech, with a fervour of anger as well as of religion. Thus it came to pass that the main body of the Jews in Germany continued to be almost as little as ever German citizens, and social prejudice against Jews remained at its old high-water mark till Napoleon’s wonderful series of conquests, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a change in the position. ”

“ Life in Germany.—The English Jews who went further, and found a refuge in the German states, like the Continental Jews who joined them there, when exiled a century later, were certainly no better off. Germany, so called, extended from Russia in the east to the Netherlands in the west; and Jewish settlements existed in all the principal states and provinces. In the flourishing cities on the banks of the Danube or the Elbe, on the Maine or the Rhine, the Jews were all nominally ‘serfs of the Imperial Chamber,’ and avowedly under the protection of the Emperor. ”

“ German Jews were the Emperor’s Jews—his absolutely. He might sell them, or pawn them, or make presents or legacies of them. And, as a rule, the Emperors did protect this property of theirs from other depredators. If the vassal princes of the various states desired to plunder the Jews, they had to do it after a fashion that should not be found out. For this ‘protection,’ the Jews, of course, had to pay a tax to their protector. On some occasions it was raised so high as a third of each man’s ascertainable property. ”

“ I’m not a pro-German, Marcus, but there’s a kinship between English Jews and German Jews and Russian Jews and Italian and American and Polish and Roumanian and Austrian Jews, that no war ever waged can entirely destroy. ”

“ The sixteenth century finds a large number of German Jews resident in Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania. As is frequently the case with immigrants, the Jews in those distant countries developed a greater intellectual activity than their brethren at home, and this is indicated by the prominence of the printing offices at Prague and Cracow, and the large number of natives of those countries who figure as authors of Judeo-German works up to the nineteenth century. ”

“ The German Jews affect the quaint long coat and low wide-awake of the land of their origin. None of the Ashkenazim are permitted by their Rabbis to learn Arabic. Their domestic life is that of the Western Judenstadt. But they all cultivate the long ringlets which the Levitic law prescribes. Not less marked is their difference in character, “The Sephardim,” a recent traveller attests, “are tolerant, easy-going, and sociable. They earn their living largely by manual labour, are fishers at Tiberias, porters at Jerusalem and Jaffa. ”

“ There were other elements which had created a milieu peculiarly favourable to the transplantation of the German craze. In the first place the medieval anti-Semitism was still an integral part of the polity of the empire. The Jews were cooped up in one huge ghetto in the western provinces, “marked out to all their fellow-countrymen as aliens, and a pariah caste set apart for special and degrading treatment” (Persecution of the Jews in Russia, 1891, p. 5) . ”

“ During the German occupation of Poland, the Germanic character of the Yiddish vernacular and the readiness of certain Jewish elements to enter into relations with the winning side, induced the enemy to employ Jews as agents for various purposes and to grant the Jewish population not only exceptional protection, but also the promise of autonomy. ”

“ The Jews in Poland are deeply Germanized, and German carries you over Poland because Jews are everywhere. So the Germans found everywhere people who knew their language and could work for them. It was with Jews that the Germans set up their organization to squeeze and drain Poland—Poles and Jews included—of everything it had; it was in concert with Jews that German officials and officers toward the end carried on business all over the country. In every department and region they were the instruments of the Germans, and poor Jews grew rich and lordly as the servants of the masters. ”

“ THE JEWS IN GERMANY AND CENTRAL EUROPE. The condition of the Jews in Germany, Prussia, and Austria, at the outset of the eighteenth century, was, if we may believe the historians of the time, an unusually wretched one. The accounts given by the eminent German Jew, J. M. Jost, of the sufferings of his countrymen at that period, cannot fail to move the reader’s compassion. ”

“ It seems that on account of the hatred which surrounds him on all sides, the German Jew is determined to estrange himself from Judaism as far as possible, and endeavors even to deny his race. No reform of the Jewish religion, however extreme, is radical enough for the educated German Jew. But the endeavors are vain. Even conversion itself does not relieve the Jew from the enormous pressure of German Anti-Semitism. The German hates the Jewish religion less than the race; he objects less to the Jews' peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses. ”

“ The race may have its faults, but the five or six thousand Jews of Posen province play a most important business and financial rôle. They have always understood the advantages of German Kultur far better than the Poles. There is a Jewish Volksrat here that tries to keep independent of both the other elements of the population; but the great majority of the Jews stand with the Germans. ”

“ The distinguished German Imperialist informs us that the Jews are pre-eminently a servile people, and he draws, amongst many other conclusions, the startling inference that Christ was not a Jew, but an Aryan. ”

“ Many a traveller has no doubt shaken his unbelieving head, and asked himself how it is that no real historian should ever have mentioned the migration of the Jews to the Far West, whether it took place under Nero or under one of the later Flavian [pg 288] Emperors. Yet all the Cornish guides are positive on the subject, and the primâ facie evidence is certainly so startling that we can hardly wonder if certain anthropologists discovered even the sharply marked features of the Jewish race among the sturdy fishermen of Mount's Bay. ”

“ Intellectual Problems of the German Jewish Youth
THE Jewish university men in Germany, whom we commonly call Jewish students, take more interest in Jewish life than do our university men in this country. This is chiefly due to the peculiar position of the modern Jews in Germany. German Jewry, by the total disappearance of its laboring class during recent times, has ceased to be a people by itself and has become a part of the middle class of the general German population. ”

“ More speak Yiddish, called in Europe “Judeo-German,” than any other language, since the largest modern population of Jews borders on eastern Germany and has been longest under German influence.
Physically the Hebrew is a mixed race. In every country, however, they are found to approach in type the people among whom they have long resided. The two chief divisions of the Jewish people are the northern type, and the Spanish or southern type. The latter are now found mainly in the countries southeast of Austria. ”

“ The German-speaking Jews abroad are a kind of German-speaking province which is well worth cultivation. Nine-tenths of the Jewish world speak German, and a good part of the remainder live in the Islamic world, which is Germany's friend, so that there are grounds for talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry. ”

“ But as soon as they crossed the Alps into Germany they breathed raw air, politically as well as atmospherically. Few Sephardic fugitives visited this inhospitable land. The German population was as hostile to Jews as the Spanish. True, the Germans had no occasion to envy Jews on account of the position and influence of Jewish magnates at royal courts, but they grudged them even their miserable existence in the Jews' lanes in which they were penned up. They had been banished from some German districts, from Cologne, Mayence and Augsburg, and not a Jew was to be found in all Suabia. ”

“ It is that through some neutral Power an offer should directly be made to the German Government to receive Jews in territories of the British Empire and, so far as they agree, of the other Allied Nations on a scheme of so many each month. ”

“ The German nations, by nature more religious, and therefore more fanatical than the French and the other Romance nations, often indeed made existence for the Jews a veritable hell upon earth; but as emperors and princes protected them, the hatred against them could not produce any material effect. ”

“ Lassalle and Marx, the chief names in German socialism, as well as great numbers of their followers belong to the same race, and more than one English example of political eminence will occur to the reader. In both German and Dutch literature Jewish names are frequent and they are nearly everywhere prominent in journalism. In the army they have been much less distinguished. Many Jews no doubt serve in the great continental armies with honour, but the Jew is naturally a pacific being, hating violence and recoiling with a peculiar horror from blood. ”

“ But the German is no match for the American in business, because he is too considerate. The Jews get on about the best of any here; they soon adapt themselves to the manners and customs of the country, begin in a small way, and do not let either painstaking or shame discourage them—and become rich. ”

“ Jews have been represented among the arrivals to this country since early colonial times. They appeared in considerable numbers as an accompaniment and sequel of our German immigration and were then derived largely from the German Polish provinces, but now the Jewish as well as the Polish immigration from these provinces has practically ceased. The Hungarian Jewish immigrant has likewise disappeared. ”

“ But the bulk of the race still is a people of wanderers; and their hope of restoration little more than a beautiful, melancholy dream. There are at the present hour upwards of ten million Jews, scattered to the four corners of the earth. Nine of these millions live in Europe: two-thirds of them in Russia, Roumania and Poland. In the Middle Ages persecution in the West had driven them Eastwards. Lately persecution in the East has turned the tide Westwards. There is no rest for Israel. ”

“ It was especially virulent in Russia and Austria, while in Germany an Anti-Semitic League was formed in Berlin in 1880, to “prevent the Judification of Germany.” The Judenhetze, as it was called, was carried to such lengths as to call for the interference of the Emperor. Still later the crusade against the Jews extended to France, where the anti-Semitic party is strong. As a consequence of this persecution, thousands of Jews have emigrated from the Continent to England and to the United States. ”

“ Unlike England and France and Spain, Germany never went to the length of expelling her Jews altogether, but she would hunt them, now and again, from place to place in her dominions, and the hospitality she extended to them was, at best, the hospitality of a sponging-house. There is not a state, nor a province, nor a city of now united Germany which has not, at some time or other, taken its evil share in ill-treatment of the Jews. Prague, in Bohemia, could, perhaps, tell the most sensational tales of all, if it were well or wise to write out such sad stories in sober pen and ink. ”

“ But though Germanized, the accusation of the Poles that the Jews are devoted to Germany is unfounded * * * They have no more loyalty to Germany—the home of anti-Semitism—than to Poland. The East Jews are Jews and only Jews. ”

“ One may become acquainted with a rapid succession of towns where the population is almost entirely Jewish, or half Jewish, or to a large extent Jewish, and also with others in which residence is practically prohibited to Jews, which, therefore, to speak in anti-Semitic jargon, are almost "clean of Jews." In western Europe there is neither the one nor the other. ”

“ There was only one country, Poland, in the centre of Europe, where the kings, desiring to build up their cities, invited the Jews, and hither the persecuted race fled from the East before the Russians, and latterly from the West, driven out by the Germans. When finally, a hundred years ago, the remnant of the Polish Empire was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Jewish population in this favored area had become the largest aggregation of that people since the destruction of Jerusalem. ”

“ The Jew comes from many countries. The greater part of all our recent Jewish immigration comes from Russia, from what is called the “Jewish Pale of Settlement” in the western part of that country. Other Jews come from Austria, Roumania, Germany and Turkey. In 1914, the Jews were the fourth largest in numbers among our immigrants, nearly 143,000. [31]
We must also bear in mind that all of these millions who came to America do not remain with us. There is a constant emigration going on, a departure of aliens back to their native land either for a time, or for all time. ”