Pride and shame mingled incongruously and uncomfortably in many Jews’ attitudes to their Jewish heritage. Nowhere were these internal contradictions more often evident than in Germany. Martin Stern, son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist in Essen, recalled his family home in the 1930s:
Mother often admonished us to be and act as “proud Jews.” That did not make much sense to me. After all, we were born as Jews. It was our inheritance, not our choice, and therefore not of our doing and thus nothing to be proud of; just a fact of life. It did not seem to be consistent with an attitude on the part of my parents of wanting to lie low, to be inconspicuous in order not to attract attention or anti-semitism.1
Lying low, however, was not always easy. Jews therefore resorted to a variety of stratagems in order to avoid standing out in the crowd.
One of the most common, particularly in Germany and Hungary, was name-changing. In much of Europe in the 1930s, ears were subtly attuned to the Jewishness or otherwise of names. The traditional tripartite division of Jews into priests (cohanim), Levites, and Israel (the rest) gave rise to surnames such as Cohen, Cohn, Kagan, and Katz (short for kohen tsedek, “holy priest”), as well as Levy, Loewensohn, and Isserlis (son of Israel). All were recognizably Jewish, though some non-Jews in Germany, to their discomfort, were called Kohn. Other common Jewish names were derived from occupations: for example, Cantor, Sofer (scribe), Dayan (judge), or Schneider (tailor). From matronyms: Dworkin (offspring of Dvorah), Rivkin/Rifkind (of Rivkah/Rebecca), and Sorkin/Serkin (of Sarah). From names of flowers, animals, or precious minerals: Rose, Wolf, Wolfsohn, Silber, Gold, Goldman, Perl, and Diamant. Or from places: Ashkenazi (from the Hebrew word for Germany; but the name could also be found among Sephardim), Pollak (Polish), Litvak, Frankfurter, Wilner, Prager, Shapiro and Spiro (from Speyer).
In the modern period, many Jews were given two sets of forenames, one Hebrew, used for religious purposes (shemot ha-kodesh in Hebrew, oyfruf-nemen in Yiddish), the other secular (kinuyim, rufnemen). The former were mostly biblical Hebrew names such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. As for the latter, Abraham might be called Arnold, Isaac could be Ignaz, and Moses Moritz. In the Soviet Union, Russian names came to replace Hebrew ones altogether: for instance, Arkadi for Aron.
Name-changing was nothing new in Jewish history. The Talmud records that “most Jews in the Diaspora bear non-Jewish names.”2 Often the change was a commercial decision: the German-Jewish singer Paula Levi, for instance, decided in 1926 to adopt the stage name Lindberg. A new name might be politically expedient: Moshe Faintuch, for instance, a leading figure in the French Communist Party’s bureau for aid to the Republican cause in Spain, gallicized himself as Jean Jérôme.
In Hungary, where name-changing was particularly common, Joseph Lőwinger, a banker, changed his name, upon ennoblement, to Lukács de Szeged. His son, György, born in 1885, was therefore known as von Lukács. In 1919, when he served briefly as deputy commissar for education in the short-lived Communist regime of Béla Kun, he dropped the von. Writing mainly in German, it was as Georg Lukács that he became the best-known Marxist literary critic of the age.
The Frankfurt School social theorist Theodor Adorno, whose father, Oscar Wiesengrund, was a Jewish-born convert to Protestantism, was registered Wiesengrund-Adorno at birth but later called himself Theodor W. Adorno (from his mother’s maiden name Calvelli-Adorno della Piana—she claimed descent from Corsican nobility). He was baptized a Catholic, although he practiced no religion. Some students of his thought have detected what Martin Jay calls a “muted, but nevertheless palpable Jewish impulse” within it, including echoes of the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.3 But Hannah Arendt sneered at him for what she and others saw as a snobbish (and futile) effort to conceal his Jewish origin.
Anti-Semites often complained that Jews adopted new names in order to hide their Jewishness. In Poland the Sejm passed a motion to limit such changes. They occurred all the same: for example, the Yiddish theater director Mark Arnshteyn, who also directed on the Polish-language stage, used for the latter purpose the name Andrzej Marek.
Not all name-changing was for the purpose of concealment: Béla Presser, a rabbinical student in Budapest, magyarized his surname to Béla Berend and became a rabbi. Occasionally name-change could even constitute an act of defiance. In 1932, Günther Stern, a journalist on the leading German liberal paper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was approached by his editor, who suggested that, given the growing influence of the Nazis, it would help the paper to avoid the charge that it was a Jewish mouthpiece if he changed his surname: “Warum nennen Sie sich nicht etwas anders?” (“Why don’t you call yourself something else?”) Stern took the advice literally: he changed his surname to Anders.4
Apostasy had been a significant feature of Jewish life in most of Europe since the Enlightenment. Even in Poland, conversion on a small scale was recorded from at least the sixteenth century onward. As Jews acculturated, as they moved up the social scale, and especially as exogamy grew, conversions increased. Adoption of Christianity might be a matter of social convenience or of religious conviction or a mixture of the two. Whatever the motive, it was a step fraught with consequence and rarely undertaken lightly.
The surrealist French poet and painter Max Jacob decided to become a Christian in 1909 after a series of visions, apparently precipitated by reading a translation of the medieval Jewish mystical work the Zohar, in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. On one occasion, he witnessed what he took to be an apparition of Christ on the wall of his room. Jacob sensed that his defection from Judaism would cause his family pain: when revealing to his cousin Jean-Richard Bloch in 1915 that, after a long period of instruction, he was about to be baptized, he adjured Bloch not to breathe a word to his family: “my father would die if he knew.”5
Jacob’s conversion was certainly one of faith; yet like that of many other authentic converts, it went along with a continuing, intense self-conception of Jewishness, expressed in his later writings. This lack of any feeling of contradiction between Judaism and Christianity, a sense of anima naturaliter Christiana, was a common trope of Jewish converts.
A bohemian and a homosexual, Jacob retreated to eremitic isolation in the 1920s, while continuing to write and paint. In the following decade he was subjected to venomous anti-Semitic attacks, especially by his former friend the writer Marcel Jouhandeau. In January 1939 the Egyptian-Jewish poet Edmond Jabès asked Jacob to speak out against racism. He declined, saying the matter was in the hands of the pope, the cardinals, and the bishops who would intervene with Hitler and Mussolini. In any case, he said, suffering alone was what preserved a race or a society. It was necessary to find again “the martyr whose blood revives” (le martyre dont le sang féconde). As for himself, he averred, “I am prepared for it both as a Jew and as a fervent Catholic.”6
Most conversions, especially in central Europe, were more a matter of facilitating social mobility. Some Jews, while no longer believers, disdained so-called career baptism (die Karrieretaufe), asserting a defiant Trotzjudentum, a refusal out of pride to convert merely for convenience. A few, like Heine, converted in haste and repented at leisure. But most converts tried to put their Jewish pasts behind them and got on with their lives, even if their enemies subsequently dug up their origins for use against them or their descendants. In cases of intermarriage, conversions were usually of the Jewish spouse to Christianity, rather than in the other direction.
In Germany, Austria, and Hungary conversion had long been common as a means of social advancement. The critic Walter Benjamin’s great-uncle Gustav Hirschfeld (1847–95), for example, converted in order to be eligible for appointment as professor of classical archaeology at the University of Königsberg. Of another great-uncle, the mathematician Arthur Moritz Schoenflies (1853–1928), who became a professor at Göttingen in 1892, Benjamin wrote that he was the “kind of Jew with a strong Germano-Christian leaning.”7 Another well-known German intellectual, the journalist Maximilian Harden (1861–1927), adopted Christianity as “the way of life corresponding to the higher culture.”8 This attitude was common among German converts.
German Jewry, in particular, suffered large-scale losses to Christianity throughout the early twentieth century. Even the preeminent German-Jewish religious thinker of the period, Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), had seriously considered baptism until he experienced a spiritual crisis during the synagogue service on Yom Kippur in 1913.9 In 1933 conversions in Germany reached an unprecedented level: 1,440 were recorded. The anti-Semitic political climate no doubt was a major cause. It evidently took some time for the harsh reality to sink in that under the new dispensation baptism brought no relief from the effects of racist legislation.
Elsewhere in central Europe too, the conversion rate rose in response to the growth of anti-Semitism. As religion throughout this region was a matter of civil status, registered with the state, we have precise figures on changes of faith. In Hungary in the late 1930s, as anti-Semitism became part of the official policy of the state, thousands thought to escape persecution by leaving Judaism. Outside rabbinical offices in Budapest, long lines formed of those seeking the necessary preliminary paperwork. The net loss to Judaism through conversions in 1938 reached 8,486, compared with 318 ten years earlier.10 The census of 1941 found no fewer than 61,548 persons who fell into the category “Christians of Jewish Descent.”11
It was not unusual in Hungary to find that some members of a family had converted and others had not. For example, in the wealthy Hatvany family, owners of large industrial enterprises and patrons of the arts, Baron Lajos, a celebrated writer, one of whose central literary themes was the issue of Jewish social assimilation, and his brother Baron Ferenc, an art collector, were baptized. So were their cousins the baronesses Lili and Antonia, both also writers. The baronesses’ brother Baron Bertalan, however, remained Jewish and expressed sympathy for Zionism.
In Poland and Lithuania, conversions remained rare. An estimate for Poland reckons the number of baptisms in the interwar period at no more than 2,000 to 2,500 per annum.12 In Warsaw in 1928 only ninety-seven Jews formally abandoned Judaism.13 Yet even in Poland, many Jews in the 1930s, particularly in the less traditional western regions, opted out of the community, though without necessarily changing religion. Converts included a number of prominent figures, such as Benjamin Mond, the sole Jewish general in the Polish army. The Cracow Polish-Jewish daily Nowy Dziennik caused a sensation when it published the names of all the Jews in the city who had left the faith, including “physicians, lawyers, artists … and a long list of Jewish women who had become nuns.”14 In Katowice, in Polish Silesia, a single issue of the local newspaper in 1933 contained the formal announcements of seventeen persons who had left the Jewish community, which numbered about nine thousand at the time.15
Even in more traditional Sephardi society in the Balkans, conversion, particularly in order to facilitate intermarriage, was increasing. In Bitolj (Monastir), in Yugoslav Macedonia, a Judeo-Espagnol song in the 1920s lamented:
Laz fijiques di aġore
The girls nowadays
no querin noviu ğidió.
Do not want a Jewish groom.
Cuandu salin a la puerte
When they go out the door
in todos miren pur conesir.16
They look to meet anyone.
In Salonica, L’Indépendant reported in January 1939 that a young Jewish girl, Riqueita Benveniste, had disappeared from her home and was suspected of having eloped with her Christian boyfriend with a view to marrying him after converting to Orthodox Christianity.17 In July that year another girl, Renata Beraha, was reported to have been baptized, taken the new name Marina, and immediately thereafter married to a Christian.18 (Civil marriage between Jews and Christians became legal in Greece in 1934 but remained very uncommon; hence these conversions prior to weddings.) Such news items were not uncommon in the Jewish press in southern and eastern Europe; in western and central Europe, on the other hand, such events rarely reached the press: they were so common that they hardly merited newspaper reports—and the girl, in such circumstances, might well not have felt any need to flee her family.
In Italy, where the Jewish community felt relatively relaxed in its relations with non-Jews, conversions were rare but not unknown. Primo Levi recounted that one of his uncles converted, supposedly in order to escape an impossible wife, became a priest, and went to China as a missionary. Levi’s grandmother, like other members of the family, married a Christian and in old age “was torn between Judaism and Christianity, so much so that she sometimes attended the synagogue, sometimes the parish church of Sant’ Ottavio, where she went to confession.”19
Few converts returned to the fold. But external events sometimes led to the discarding of Marrano-like cloaks. In Russia in 1917, as in Amsterdam three centuries earlier, the new freedom accorded to Jews is said to have resulted in at least a hundred retroversions to Judaism in Petrograd alone.20 Sometimes reversion was a public act undertaken in order to make a political point. For example, the bestselling German writer Emil Ludwig, who had been baptized at the age of twenty-one, returned to Judaism after the assassination in 1922 of his friend Walther Rathenau.
Conversion to Judaism of persons with no previous connection with the religion and no Jewish marriage partner was very unusual and, in the 1930s, almost unheard-of. Perhaps the most remarkable case of this kind was the mass conversion of an entire community of Italian peasants from the mountain village of San Nicandro Garganico in Apulia. Eighty followers of a local visionary embraced Judaism, braving the hostility of local ecclesiastics and government officials, Fascist anti-Jewish laws, and the skepticism of Italian Jewish leaders, among them the chief rabbi of Rome (who himself later converted to Christianity). This was not a case of proselytization, since the converts had had next to no contact with Jews or Judaism. The peasants, primitive illiterates, seem to have found their own way to Zion and, once arrived, stuck with remarkable pertinacity and refused to budge.21
Christian missionaries, often themselves converts, were deeply unpopular among Jews. Discussion of the issue in the Jewish press often recalled the role of apostates in medieval polemics against Judaism. Accused of predatory enticement of Jews from their faith, missionaries were sometimes subjected to violence. In Vilna they handed out cups of cocoa and sugar buns to poor children in winter, sponsored a children’s summer camp, and, according to Max Weinreich, were “detested by every member of the Jewish community.”22
Most Jews, whether religious or secular, regarded converts with distaste as something close to traitors. Isaac Babel, in his first published story, “Old Shloyme” (1913), describes how an old shtetl Jew, on hearing that his son has decided to “leave his people for a new God,” hangs himself at night outside the door of his house. In 1938, when two Jewish women in Rotterdam were reported to be contemplating conversion in return for an offer of housing, a Jewish resident of the city persuaded a policeman to intervene and ask them whether they were being baptized of their own free will. But, as the chief rabbi of Rotterdam wrote sadly, “it was useless to ask this question in the church.”23
Integration of converts into Christianity did not proceed without obstacles. In Poland they were not always welcome in the Church. A current of Catholic opinion urged caution in admitting Jews, advising that the motives of the would-be convert should be carefully examined to ensure that baptism was not being sought for opportunistic reasons.
Most converts, especially recent ones, rarely mentioned their Jewish roots, generally regarding them, if not as shameful, then as something they wanted to forget and leave behind. Jacob Bock, for example, was an Austrian socialist schoolteacher who converted to Catholicism with his wife soon after their marriage. Their son, Rudolf, born in Vienna in 1915, did not become aware of his Jewish background until he was sixteen years old.
Often, ex-Jews resorted to elaborate measures to conceal their origins. But they seldom did so with total success. As Gustav Mahler observed, the converted Jew remained an object of suspicion. He himself felt “thrice homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.”24
Not all former Jews, however, wished to abandon every vestige of their backgrounds. Family ties, common interests and tastes, as well as lack of acceptance by non-Jewish society often pulled them back into Jewish social frameworks. Even after two or three generations as Christians, some continued to mix largely with Jews or descendants of Jews, as in the case of the family of Felix Gilbert in Berlin. Descended through his mother from Moses Mendelssohn, his family, Christians since the beginning of the nineteenth century, remained “conscious and proud of their Jewish heritage.”25
Dora Israel, born in Vienna in 1894 to Jewish parents, was converted to Protestantism in 1897 together with her siblings, as her father “was very worried that we would be subjected to anti-Semitism as children, especially with the name ‘Israel.’” At the same time the family name was changed to the non-Jewish-sounding Iranyi. The family never set foot in a synagogue and had a Christmas tree at home every year until 1938. Yet they continued to move in almost wholly Jewish social circles. Dora did not recall any non-Jewish friends of the family, apart from some literary acquaintances of her father, a writer and translator.26
Conversion, indeed, was not incompatible with a deep sense of fellow feeling with Jews. Few Jewish writers of the interwar period can match the sensitivity with which Joseph Roth wrote about the mentalities of Jews from small towns like his native Brody. He unerringly depicted their rootedness in the shtetl and their rootlessness in the big cities of Europe to which so many of them, like him, migrated. His novels, travelogues, and feuilletons (he was a master of this mitteleuropäisch literary form) look back nostalgically to the Habsburg dual monarchy and to the traditional world of east European Jewry, particularly that of the Habsburg lands. He admired the solid, inherited values of the Ostjuden and despised what he saw as the hypocrisy of the assimilationists. An elegiac melancholy and gentle irony infuse his writing.
Toward the end of his life Roth appears to have converted to Catholicism, possibly out of deep identification with the cause of Habsburg restoration. He died in Paris in May 1939 of a heart attack prompted by news of the suicide in New York of his friend and fellow exile, the playwright Ernst Toller—or, according to other accounts, the attack was a consequence of too many glasses of Pernod. “I’ve known many Jews and I’ve known many drunkards,” commented the attending doctor, “but I’ve never known a Jewish drunkard.”27
Since no witness could definitely verify Roth’s baptism, he was accorded a “conditional” Catholic funeral. Jewish friends caused a stir among the assembled Habsburg loyalists, Communists, exiled writers, and former drinking companions of the dead man by reciting Hebrew prayers at the grave. The headstone, in the Catholic section of a suburban Paris cemetery, bears neither a cross nor a Star of David.
In general, Jews, even in mainly Catholic countries, preferred to convert to Protestantism rather than Catholicism. Dora Israel notes that “since Catholicism was the state religion of Austria, it would have been much more sensible to convert to Catholicism as my father’s uncle … had done with his family. Father couldn’t bring himself to do that.” So Dora found that she exchanged one form of exclusion for another: “instead of belonging to a Jewish minority in school, we belonged to a Protestant one. There were never more than two or three Protestants in our classes, and they never accepted us.”28
Some Jews converted in order to escape anti-Semitism; for others, apostasy involved an embrace of it. The philosopher Simone Weil, born in Paris to well-off Jewish parents, both freethinkers, beat Simone de Beauvoir into first place in the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1928. She sympathized with Marxism in the early 1930s and served briefly as a volunteer with the Republican fighters in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 she experienced a mystical vision in the chapel of Saint Francis in Assisi and moved close to Christianity, though she never adopted it formally. She wrote in early April 1938 that she would prefer German hegemony over France to war. If the price of that were “certain laws of exclusion against Communists and Jews,” she, in common, she thought, with the majority of the nation, would have no objection.29 Weil’s interpretation of public attitudes in France in the late 1930s was probably correct. She lived “a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation,” as Susan Sontag later put it.30 What was both absurd and contemptible was not her readiness to court martyrdom for herself but her willingness to drag others en masse onto her sacrificial pyre.
A different and more impressive kind of self-sacrifice was sought by another woman convert, Edith Stein. Born in Breslau in 1892 to a Jewish merchant family, Stein too had a brilliant university career as a philosopher. She was baptized in 1922, a few months after reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, founder of the Carmelite order of nuns. Whereas Weil wrote that she had felt Christian all her life, Stein declared, “I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God.”31 In 1930 she wrote: “After every encounter in which I am made aware how powerless we are to exercise direct influence, I have a deeper sense of the urgency of my own holocaustum.”32 (The word, of course, had a more restricted meaning then, conveying the ancient sense of a sacrificial offering.) Stein’s conversion caused acute pain to her mother. In 1933, insisting on her unity of destiny with the persecuted Jews, Edith entered the cloistered community of Discalced Carmelite nuns at Cologne-Lindenthal.
Not all Jewish conversions were to Christianity. In a few celebrated (or reviled) cases, Jews were attracted to other religions, such as Buddhism or the Baha’i faith. One of the most colorful apostates of the period was Leopold Weiss. Born to a Jewish family in Lwów, he traveled as a journalist in the Middle East in the 1920s, reporting for the Frankfurter Zeitung. In 1926 or 1927 he converted to Islam and was henceforth known as Muhammad Asad, living for much of the 1930s in Saudi Arabia. He has been called “the twentieth century’s most influential European Muslim.”33 His book The Road to Mecca (1954) became the most celebrated work of its time by a Muslim proselyte.
Converts made a conscious choice not to be Jewish. But there were those who had no choice: these were so-called half-Jews, born to non-Jewish mothers or fathers. In accordance with Jewish law, the former were not recognized as Jewish by religion. According to the Nazi racial taxonomy, however, humanity was divided into Aryans, non-Aryans, and Mischlinge (persons of mixed race), that is, persons with one non-Aryan parent or between one and three non-Aryan grandparents. In many countries, even before explicitly racist laws were enacted, a certain social stigma often attached to people of partly Jewish origin. In Germany under the Nazis they formed their own association, which sought to emphasize their loyalty to all things German, in the hope thereby to escape the full measure of persecution meted out against so-called full Jews.
Many Mischlinge had never, before the advent of the Nazis, thought of themselves as Jewish. Gerhard Langer, whose father was a gentile and whose mother was “¾ Jewish,” was a teenager in Jena in the 1930s. In spite of his tainted racial background, which was either concealed or overlooked, he was accepted into the Hitler Youth, was assigned to a communications unit, and took part in an Aufmarsch in Weimar in which, with his comrades, he passed in review before visiting Nazi dignitaries Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler. In August 1939, after receiving clearance from the Hitler Youth, he left with his mother for the United States, ostensibly on a tourist visit.34
Both the Nazis and the “half-Jews” themselves conceived various gradations of affiliation of Mischlinge to Jewishness. Gerhard Neuweg, son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, was born in 1924 in Landsberg an der Warthe, a small town in the province of Brandenburg. Although his father was nonobservant, attending synagogue only on the high holy days, Gerhard was circumcised and for a few years was sent to Hebrew classes. In school he was given the offensively derisive nickname Itzig and subjected to (by the standards of the day) mild anti-Semitic abuse by one of his teachers. Nazi maltreatment of such children led relief organizations also to deal with them as if they were Jewish. Gerhard thus became eligible for a program that sent German-Jewish children to certain British private boarding schools. But the various procedures for securing permission to leave Germany were time-consuming and at the end of August 1939 Gerhard was still waiting for the green light to go to England.
In countries such as France and the Soviet Union that officially paid little or no attention to the religion of their citizens, it was possible for Jews to cease practicing Judaism without taking any formal step out of the Jewish community. But in Germany, Austria, and other central Europe states, matters were more bureaucratically organized. Each citizen was assigned a religion by parents at birth. On that basis, a small Kirchensteuer (church tax) was levied and shared among the institutions of each faith. It was possible to declare oneself konfessionslos, thereby opting out of the Jewish community. This demonstrative act of dissociation was a minority choice but the number taking it increased in Germany to about sixty thousand (more than 10 percent of the community) in the Weimar period.
Marie Jahoda, a Viennese-born middle-class socialist and agnostic (later a pioneer social psychologist), decided to resign from the Jewish community in 1933 at the early age of sixteen. She spoke for many when she declared, “My Jewish identity only became a real identification for me with [the rise of] Hitler. Not earlier. It played hardly any role in my thinking and feeling.”35 Jahoda’s resignation was an affirmative act, based on her secular, left-wing Weltanschauung. Others left the community for opportunistic reasons, hoping to ease their way into general society while at the same time avoiding the renegade status accorded by many Jews to those who underwent baptism.
In western Europe and the Soviet Union, where no such formal exit was required, growing numbers of Jews were opting for civil marriage and refrained from circumcising their sons. For many Jews throughout the continent, Christian holidays, often in a secular guise, accompanied or superseded Jewish ones. Christmas was widely celebrated among non-orthodox Jews. Richard Koch, who grew up in Frankfurt in the 1880s and 1890s, recalled that “it was no longer an exclusively Christian holiday but had become a really cosmopolitan feast.”36 His family ate plum pudding and exchanged presents. At Easter there were colored eggs and a sponge-cake bunny. By contrast, “Passover was not much of an event. There was some saltbeef and a packet of Mazoth as well as Matzoball soup.” On the Day of Atonement only his grandmother fasted, though the entire extended family joined her for the celebratory meals before and after the fast.
Yet even completely secularized Jews often felt a backward tug to the old customs and loyalties. In December 1930 in Vienna, Sigmund Freud wrote in a preface to a projected Hebrew edition of his book Totem and Taboo:
No reader of [the Hebrew edition of] this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion—and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: “Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?” he would reply: “A very great deal, and probably its very essence.” He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind.37
Another Viennese Jew, Franz Bienenfeld, a lawyer, expressed a similar outlook in a lecture to the Sociological Society of Vienna in 1937: nonreligious Jews, he argued, notwithstanding their abandonment of religious belief, retained a common “mental attitude” that set them apart from non-Jews and bound them to other Jews: “Most of them, and especially their intelligentsia, present to the world a common countenance since the foundations of their spiritual life are identical.”38 In support of this theory, Bienenfeld cited, among others, the examples of Marx and Rathenau, in each of whom, he maintained, “the principles of the Jewish religion, apparent in their doctrines without their knowledge and against their will, have broken through the cloud of unconscious memory.”39
This reductionist proposition may be hard to sustain but what is undeniable is that even many thoroughly secularized Jews in the 1930s adhered to the main rites of passage of Judaism: circumcision, religious marriage, and burial.
Another stubbornly maintained component of traditional culture was food. Helene Ziegelroth, daughter of a cantor in Warsaw, who became one of the earliest woman doctors in Germany, declared herself konfessionslos as a young woman, was baptized upon her marriage in 1904, and thereafter refused to discuss Judaism and discouraged her daughter from associating with Jewish children. Yet, we are told, she baked “egg bread” (challah) on Friday and ate “flat bread” (matzot) around Easter-time until her dying day. Her daughter was baptized but returned to Judaism late in life.40
Soviet Jewish attitudes to Jewishness were often a complex and inconsistent jumble. Lev Kopelev, in 1932 a worker in a locomotive factory in Kharkov, later recalled that the secretary of his local Komsomol (Communist youth organization) committee was astonished to find that Kopelev, on receiving his first internal passport, which from that year had to show the holder’s nationality, had registered himself as Jewish. The man pointed out that he could just as easily have registered as a Russian, thereby (went the half-spoken implication) avoiding much trouble. But Kopelev insisted that “so long as I knew I would hear the reproach, ‘Aha! You’re ashamed, you’re hiding it,’ I would count myself a Jew.” Yet Kopelev was far from being any kind of “nationalist chauvinist,” as Soviet Jews who laid too much stress on their nationality were often called. In his role as editor of the factory newspaper, Kopelev insisted it should appear only in Ukrainian: “I was absolutely convinced of the need for Ukrainianization—socialist culture should be ‘national in form.’” When a co-worker asked to issue a page in Yiddish, pointing out that fifteen hundred of the employees in the factory were Jews, Kopelev strongly objected, maintaining that many of them probably did not know Yiddish, and anyway “why artificially unite them and separate them from their other comrades? Purely on the basis of nationality? Ridiculous!” The applicant, who claimed unimpeachable proletarian credentials, angrily berated him as a bourgeois intellectual, whereupon Kopelev “lost [his] self-control and let out such a roar that at the next meeting of the Komsomol cell … I received a reprimand ‘for making statements of an anti-Semitic nature.’”41
Could a Jew be an anti-Semite? In the early twentieth century, many Jews, across all social and ideological boundaries, internalized elements of anti-Semitic discourse. Not a few succumbed to what Theodore Hamerow has called psychological surrender. “The most destructive result of anti-Semitism,” he writes, “was that so many of its victims, while vehemently disagreeing with their victimizers in public, agreed or half-agreed with them in private.”42 In some cases, the agreement was not so private. The conservative, French-Jewish cultural critic Julien Benda, for example, though a former Dreyfusard, was capable of writing about Jews and their relationship to French culture and society in terms more commonly associated with anti-Semites like Charles Maurras.43
Jewish anti-Semitism was often termed “Jewish self-hatred,” a phrase popularized, though not coined, by the German-Jewish philosopher and sexologist Theodor Lessing, who wrote the classic study of the subject, Der Jüdische Selbsthass, in 1930. In his early life, Lessing, who converted to Christianity in 1895, himself exhibited many symptoms of the pathology that he later diagnosed in others.
Perhaps the best-known case of this sickness was the Viennese writer Otto Weininger (1880–1903), who converted to Protestantism in 1902. His Sex and Character (1903) was an incoherent mishmash of misogynism, anti-Semitism, and penetrating psychological observations. A guilt-ridden homosexual, Weininger took the logical ultimate step of the militant, Jewish anti-Semite: at the age of twenty-three, he committed suicide.
Whereas Weininger despised both women and Jews, Lessing sought to regenerate both and developed into a feminist and a Zionist. Arthur Trebitsch (1880–1927), also from Vienna, was a follower of Weininger. He converted to Christianity and became a violent anti-Semitic propagandist. Both Weininger and Trebitsch were discussed by Hitler and furnished useful material for Nazi anti-Jewish theorizing.
Self-hating Jews undoubtedly existed but Lessing’s book gave the concept a popular currency that outpaced reality. Most Jews afflicted by some form of anti-Semitism were not so much haters of themselves as haters of other Jews. Often they attributed to others characteristics that they feared brought down upon all Jews, including themselves, undeserved disrepute. Among the most complex and controversial cases of this kind were the two most hated German writers of the age.
The savage and inspired Viennese satirist Karl Kraus renounced Judaism and resigned from the Jewish community in 1899, was received into the Catholic Church in 1911, but then left it in 1923. His attitude to Jews and Judaism was always tortured and often contradictory. He attacked the “Jewish press” and mocked Yiddish-inflected German. Yet, like Kafka, he expressed admiration for Yiddish “jargon-theater,” such as the Budapester Orpheum, a comedic troupe that performed in hotels in Jewish districts of Vienna. Die Fackel, the magazine that he edited from 1905 until his death in 1936 (in later years he wrote it single-handedly) was full of crude anti-Semitic jokes, sneers, and imagery. Kraus was influenced by the racist doctrines of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and helped draft an anti-Semitic article by Chamberlain that he published in Die Fackel.44 He poked fun at Jewish-sounding names and at those Jews who changed their names the better to conceal their origin; yet he deplored Jewish resistance to assimilation. He assailed Jewish solidarity, as at the time of the Dreyfus Affair; yet he bewailed the “unspeakable horror” of the assassination of Walther Rathenau. He was an early opponent of Nazism and was himself vilified as a “syphilytic Jew.”45
Kraus’s expressions of anti-Semitism have often been interpreted as self-hatred, though he himself rejected the concept. “His criticisms of Jews,” Ritchie Robertson writes, “have an incoherent, flailing quality which suggests that they originate, not from observation and judgement, but from a personal source too intimate and deep-seated for Kraus ever to examine it.”46 Kraus’s biographer, Edward Timms, interprets his outlook not as self-hatred but rather as “the desire to liberate the self from compromising affiliations.”47 As a searing critic of bourgeois society, Kraus earned the deep admiration of Jewish intellectuals such as Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin.
He was an opponent of Zionism, which, he said, would merely create a new ghetto. The Zionist writer Max Brod wrote, “I am disgusted and repelled by such types of my race as Karl Kraus, because I regard them as the embodiment of everything that has abased my people for thousands of years.”48 Yet the German Zionist Gershom Scholem detected in Kraus’s work echoes of Hebrew prose and poetry (though Kraus knew no Hebrew) and considered that “this Jew” had discovered “undreamed-of Jewish provinces” in the German language.49 If the judgment seems far-fetched, it is one that, coming from this source, must be considered seriously.
Similar questions are raised by the career and writings of the other great German-language satirist of the age. The antimilitarist, antireligious, anti-almost-everything Kurt Tucholsky was the most feared German writer of the period. He attacked nationalism, philistinism, respectability, and much else, including the Jews. He too had abandoned Judaism in 1911, although, as he put it, “I know one can never do that.”50 In 1918 he underwent a Lutheran baptism. In the Weimar period he was viciously attacked by right-wing antiSemites as a typical case of poisonous Jewish subversion of German culture and society.
Tucholsky’s attitude toward things Jewish has been fiercely debated. In the character of Herr Wendriner, who appears in a number of his stories and sketches, he created a model of the despicable, philistine, German-Jewish bourgeois compromiser. In a prophetic piece that he wrote in 1930, he predicted the reaction of Wendriners to a Nazi takeover. A group of them have gathered in a cinema with SA men (brownshirts) outside and are chatting in whispers. Jews must wear the yellow star. But after all, things are not so bad. At least now they know where they stand. One of them points out a man whom they take to be an Ostjude. Anti-Semitism directed against that sort, they agree, is certainly justified. “What a repulsive type! I’m surprised he’s still here and that they haven’t thrown him out yet!”51
Scholem saw the Wendriner sketches as “a sinister document of the German-Jewish reality” and Tucholsky as “one of the most gifted, most convinced and most offensive Jewish anti-Semites.”52 To such criticism there was an obvious response that had been voiced years earlier by Theodor Lessing in his own “self-hating” phase. Taxed with having written an anti-Semitic diatribe, he wrote to Martin Buber: “I am alarmed by the weaknesses of our kind. What should be done with this race of ghetto-heroes who feel incapable of standing naked in front of a mirror?”53
Tucholsky, however, did more than take embarrassing social snapshots. He evinced bottomless contempt for the submissiveness, as he saw it, of Jews, a “slave-people,” toward their persecutors: “Now I understand,” he wrote in his diary in early 1935, “how this race has been able to survive for so long: they guzzled their own shit.”54
Apparently repressing memory of the scurrilous attacks to which he had been subjected, he claimed, in his last letter, written from Hindås in Sweden to Arnold Zweig on December 15, 1935, that he had never personally experienced anti-Semitism. He assailed the Jews’ cowardice, lack of dignity, and “absolute inability to grasp what heroism even is.” It was also untrue, he continued, that the Jews were fighting back. “They don’t fight at all.” Contrary to the pabulum they were often fed, the Jews should not comfort themselves that they were “attacked but undefeated.” “Jewry is defeated—no less defeated than it deserves.”55
The letter has been called a “political testament.”56 Marcel Reich, a bookish young Polish-German Jew (later the foremost literary critic in postwar Germany), read a shortened version of it in a Nazi paper in Berlin a few months later: “We could not believe that these implacable and occasionally hate-filled remarks, now and then turning into open abuse, could have been written by Tucholsky. … This letter had been written by a man in whose life the pain of Jewishness, and an uncanny self-hatred, had played a major, possibly the decisive part.”57 Tucholsky committed suicide two days later. The news was received by Nazi propagandists with a chorus of splenetic abuse: hebräischer Schmutzfink, jüdischer Paralytiker, and so forth.58
In spite of all this, the historian Walter Grab has argued that, unlike Weininger and Rathenau, Tucholsky was free from any sense of shame or stain arising from his Jewish birth. True, Grab argues, he criticized Jews, but he lambasted Germans much more fiercely. As for his admittedly sharp words against German Jews in the final weeks of his life, Grab sees these as arising from contempt for the weak-kneed response of the German-Jewish establishment to the rise of Nazism. According to Grab, Tucholsky’s words spoke “sorrow and pain, despair and resignation but no Jewish self-hatred.”59
The satirist speaks with many forked tongues and the first error of the reader is to take him literally. Kraus and Tucholsky cannot be pigeonholed in simple categories. Their ferocious, guns-blazing-inall-directions assaults on contemporary icons and their breaches of all manner of taboos and mannerly conventions of civilized discourse were what rendered them so powerful as social critics—and so attractive particularly to Jewish intellectuals among their readers. At least they were both unswerving in their abhorrence of Nazism— which was by no means true of all Jews.
Otto Rudolf Heinsheimer, aged twenty-five, a Jewish student in Berlin, heard a speech by Hitler on the radio in May 1933. He found it “shocking, crushing—yet at the same time uplifting. … Is there really no possibility for a Jew to take part in this thing here?”60 Heinsheimer soon realized that there was not: a few weeks later he left for Palestine.
The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had converted to Lutheranism in 1921, but, like other converts, was categorized by the Nazis as a “non-Aryan.” In the spring of 1933 he said: “I love Germany. It is my country. I am a Nationalist, and in spite of the way I am treated I want this movement to succeed. … There are things worse than Hitlerism.”61 Pevsner sided with Goebbels against the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who wanted to employ Jewish musicians. All this availed him nothing: his application for admission to the Reichskulturkammer (the state-controlled “cultural chamber” set up by the Nazis) was rejected and he was compelled to leave Germany.
The attraction of some “non-Aryans” to Nazism could take erotic form. Werner Warmbrunn, a teenager in Frankfurt, recalls that
my anti-Semitism after 1933 was to a large extent “identification with the aggressor.” I accepted/shared some of the Nazi view of the Jews as being commercial, un-soldier-like, clever, cowardly, physically unattractive etc. (I never bought the view that Jews were evil, or vermin to be exterminated.) I took great pleasure in the fact that I did not look Jewish, that I could (and did) “pass,” that my passport issued in 1933 listed “dunkel blond” (dark blond) as the color of my hair. Blond, blue-eyed and athletic has been my idea of beauty … I would have given a lot to become an officer in the German army.
His closest friend was a member of the Hitler Youth who took him riding at an SA riding academy. This friend became his “first love” about whom Werner had “erotic daydreams.”62 Another acquaintance, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, a young Jewish theologian, monarchist, ultranationalist, and homosexual, took Warmbrunn under his wing, accompanying him on bicycling trips and on a visit to his friend Martin Buber.
Exaggerated nationalism was a common Jewish characteristic throughout Europe. What gave the German-Jewish superpatriots their special character was not so much their hyperventilated devotion to the country of their birth but rather the fact that some of them maintained their faith even when the German state turned decisively against them. The Verband nationaldeutscher Juden, founded in 1921, was one of a number of marginal organizations that attempted to reconcile Jewishness with German ultranationalism. Its leader, Max Naumann, a Berlin lawyer and former army officer, considered German Jews to be one of the “tribes” that formed part of the German Volk. He attacked Tucholsky as a recruiting sergeant for anti-Semites. At its height, the Verband boasted no more than 3,500 members, drawn mainly from the professional classes, particularly in Berlin. Strenuously patriotic, it refused to admit Ostjuden and opposed Zionism. Naumann bewailed the “flood [of Ostjuden] that threatens to devour us.”63 The Ostjuden were “pitiful creatures … of a not quite human level.”64 He blamed their conspicuously Jewish lifestyle for evoking anti-Semitism and called for their expulsion from the country. Naumann rejected the God of Israel, calling instead for faith in a “German God.” In 1932 he hailed the “popular movement,” of which the Nazi Party formed a part, as promising a “rebirth of Deutschtum.”65 After 1933 his movement sought unsuccessfully to ingratiate itself with the Nazis by means of Verständigungsarbeit (work for understanding). All this availed the Verband nothing after the Nazi advent to power. Although it sought to position itself as a “loyal opposition” to the new regime, its stress on assimilation led it to be regarded as dangerous by Nazi ideologues bent on racial separation. As a result, in 1935 it was one of the first German-Jewish associations to be banned.
Another such ultrapatriotic organization was the Deutscher Vortrupp (German Vanguard), a youth movement established by Schoeps, then aged twenty-four, in February 1933. It was antidemocratic, anti-Marxist, antiliberal, and anti-Zionist but, unlike other such bodies, had a positive attitude toward Jewish religion. Schoeps considered anti-Semitism peripheral to the Nazi program, with much of which he was in sympathy. In November 1935, several months after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Schoeps wrote that he still felt closer to Hitler than to Mussolini, Laval, or Baldwin. “I would rather be hungry here than elsewhere,” he wrote. He deplored the Jammergeschrei (wailing) of his fellow Jews.66 The slogan of the organization was Bereit für Deutschland (“Ready for Germany”). Men like Naumann and Schoeps were mortified when, in March 1935, Jews were excluded from the German armed forces. Notwithstanding a restaurant meeting with Ernst Roehm, head of the SA, Schoeps, like Naumann, was rebuffed at every turn in his efforts to persuade the Nazis that Jews could be good Germans.
Were Jews such as Naumann and Schoeps, like Milton, “of the devil’s party, without knowing it”? Perhaps—with the critical difference that Satan in Paradise Lost was a figment of the imagination, whereas Adolf Hitler was flesh and blood.
Jewish ultranationalism was not unique to Germany. It could be found throughout the continent. In France, for example, the Union Patriotique des Israélites Français stressed that French Jews must have only one loyalty—to France. The union’s leader, Edmond Bloch, was almost a mirror image of Neumann: a lawyer and ancien combattant who had earned the Croix de Guerre in the First World War, he was close to rightist circles and an outspoken opponent of Communism, the Popular Front, and Zionism. The more it registered an increase in anti-Semitism, the more his group insisted that French Jews must demonstrate unconditional patriotism. The union mustered only about five hundred members (though it claimed many more) but its ideas were representative of a larger body of French-Jewish opinion.
Such views, at least so far as they concerned Jewish immigrants, were not restricted to the right. The prominent French-Jewish journalist Emmanuel Berl was a left-winger, ardent pacifist, and “Munichois.” In an article in November 1938, two weeks after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, he insisted that France could not admit all the Jewish refugees who might want to come there. There were in Poland no fewer than three million Jews, “dans l’ensemble peu désirables” (“taken as a whole not very desirable”), who would pour in if the frontier were open to them.67 Berl assailed the “crazy generosity” of granting speedy naturalization to refugees. “I find it incomprehensible that immigrants who three years ago weren’t even thinking that they could become French, some of whom have not even learned the language, enjoy the same political rights as a French peasant.” The German-Jewish immigrants, he declared, were of “low quality” and “a burden [un fardeau] for France.”68
In an attack on warmongering international financiers in March 1939, Berl ventured this historical reflection: “I see very few millionaires among the victims of the wars of the twentieth century. No Austrian Rothschild died in 1866. No French Rothschild died in 1870. No English Rothschild, to my knowledge, died in 1914”— though he quickly added, “The same goes, I think, for the Morgans and the Vanderbilts.”69 Unforgiving of Jewish plutocrats, Berl displayed greater charity toward literary anti-Semites. He could forgive even Céline, announcing that he was prepared to “wipe a sponge over Bagatelles pour un massacre so as to retain only the inventor of a new language.”70
Berl’s attitude has been interpreted as masochistic and as a product of self-hatred.71 But he never sought to hide his own Jewishness. His utterances can more plausibly be seen as a product of self-regard and self-protection by way of separating himself from and vilifying other Jews.
In France, as elsewhere, literary anti-Semitism spilled over from gentile into Jewish writing. The French writer Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 and moved with her parents to France in 1919. Her wealthy father was a banker. Her family resembled that of Zachary Mirkin, a central character in Sholem Asch’s trilogy Three Cities, set in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow before and during the Russian Revolution. Whereas Asch, for all his hostility to socialism, showed deep sympathy for amkho (the common [Jewish] people), Némirovsky felt an almost convulsive repulsion from them, from her Jewish origins, and from her family, especially her mother.
In her quasi-autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude (1935), Némirovsky painted a merciless portrait of her parents, viewed through spectacles of adolescent rage: a mother interested only in her love affairs and a father only in making money. Everything in the daughter revolts against her parents and all they stand for. “I have spent my life fighting against an odious bloodline, but it is within me. It flows inside me.”72 The anger is directed here at her mother, but critics have discerned discomfort too with her Jewish origin. This was clearly expressed in her first novel, David Golder (1929). The title character, an unscrupulous Jewish businessman, having pushed a business associate over the edge into suicide, is depicted unsparingly as a profit-obsessed misanthrope. The novel, a succès fou, was adapted for stage and screen. Némirovsky was compared to Balzac and Proust. During the 1930s her subsequent novels enjoyed continuing acclaim.
At the same time, however, and even more so after their rediscovery in recent years, they were attacked for their unflattering, stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters. Némirovsky has been accused of “crude anti-Semitism,” of creating “portraits of Jews depicted in the most cruel and pejorative terms, whom she observes with a kind of horrified fascination, even though she recognizes that she shares with them a common destiny.”73 In her defense, Frederic Raphael has contended persuasively that “the mercilessness directed at ‘her own people’ concealed a much wider scorn. The underlying topic was the interplay of emotion and callousness, the alternations of vanity and despair, in all the players of the world’s game.”74 The controversy echoes the similar debates about Kraus and Tucholsky, with the difference that the extra latitude that may be accorded to the satirist cannot readily be claimed for Némirovsky, a middlebrow, conventional storyteller. Némirovsky herself conceded, in an interview with a Jewish newspaper in 1935, that “if there had been Hitler [at the time], I would have greatly toned down David Golder.”75
In November 1938, Némirovsky and her husband, also a Russian-born Jew, no doubt alarmed by the growing anti-immigrant clamor in France, applied for French citizenship, to which they were entitled by virtue of long years of residence. They never received a response. In February 1939 they and their daughters underwent baptism. Némirovsky’s motive seems to have been at least partly spiritual, though the simultaneous conversion of her husband and children suggests the presence of a prudential motive too.
Whatever view may be taken of Némirovsky’s personal conduct or her literary strategies, it is plain that she did not consider Jewishness as something to be affirmed or celebrated. For her, as for many others in the 1930s—it was rather something to be concealed, glossed over, or jettisoned, a source of anxiety rather than of inspiration, a burden rather than a badge of pride.