Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923

Front Cover
Univ of Wisconsin Press, Oct 15, 1982 - History - 364 pages

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern “enlightened” Jewry and its “half-Asian” counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

 

Contents

1 GERMAN JEWRY AND THE MAKING OF THE OSTJUDE 18001880
3
Liberal Jews and the Ostjuden 18801914
32
Old Jews New Jews and PreWorld War I AntiSemitism
58
The Ambiguity of Nationalization
80
The Ostjude as CounterMyth
100
Martin Buber and the Reception of Hasidism
121
Germany World War I and the Ostjuden
139
The War and Beyond
185
9 JEWISH IDENTITY OSTJUDEN AND ANTISEMITISM IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
215
10 THE INVERTED IMAGE
246
ABBREVIATIONS
255
NOTES
257
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
307
INDEX
325
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1982)

Steven E. Aschheim is professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has published widely on German and Jewish history, including the books The Nietzsche Legacy, 1890–1990 and Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises.

Bibliographic information