About the Exhibit

By Amy Stempler

Introduction

"[It is our task] to build up a continuously developing inventory of Judaism, to see what we are, what we have, and what we are able to do."

In a 1901 essay, renowned philosopher and theologian Martin Buber first introduced the term 'Jewish renaissance,' and defined it as the "resurrection of the Jewish people from the partial life to full life." Reflecting the strong influence of Ahad Ha-Am, he advocated a Jewish cultural renaissance contrary to Theodor Herzl's strictly political Zionist movement, which was then in its nascent stage. Buber stressed that this revival was only possible by introducing Jewish tradition in a contemporary fashion.

At the time of Buber's commanding statement, the resurrection of Jewish culture in Germany seemed rather remote. Yet, within a few years, the organizational structure for a methodical cultural renaissance had been built. At the 5th Zionist Congress, Buber demanded the establishment of a publishing house. Shortly thereafter, he founded the Judischer Verlag in Berlin, which was the first German language Jewish publishing house. It promoted both Jewish art and literature, and by 1930 there were 103 Jewish periodicals being published in Germany in both German and Hebrew. In the field of scholarship there was a shift towards focusing on the practical use of researching the past in order to establish a modern and mostly secular Jewish culture. At the time of Martin Buber's vision, only a small, mostly Zionist minority of Germany's Jews became actively involved in this newly budding cultural development. It took a war to change the situation.

During and after World War I (1914-1918), Berlin's Jewish intellectual life flourished as an influx of about 70,000 East European Jews flocked to Germany. This was only a prologue to a stronger community during the Weimar period (1918-1933) when Berlin went from a center of Hebrew culture to the center for Hebrew culture, reaching its peak from 1920 to 1924. The German capital had become a major center for mostly Russian Hebrew writers who had left their homes in Eastern Europe to escape political oppression and violent anti-Semitism. The Hebrew and Yiddish speaking intellectuals brought with them their own language and culture. For a number of years, Berlin was the headquarters of "Russia Abroad."

After the war, other German cities also became hubs for this Jewish cultural revival. Frankfurt was the home of Franz Rosenzweig and his famous adult institute for Jewish learning, the Freies "Jüdisches" Lehrhaus. In addition, nearby Bad Homburg had its own Hebrew Colony of writers, poets and artists. For these small elite groups in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Bad Homburg, Jewish culture expressed in Jewish languages was the culmination of a Jewish renaissance. In fact, the use of distinctly Jewish languages was the primary reason that made Oriental and East European Jews look authentic to German Jews. During and after World War I, German Jews had countless opportunities to encounter Hebrew and Yiddish cultures in their own land.

Nearly a hundred years after the German Jews began their ascent from the ghetto, the piercing question of what encompassed the nature of their Jewishness had become ever more acute. Religion alone proved to be tenuous ground for self-definition among a highly secularized Jewish population, one that came to reject most traditional practices of Judaism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a Jewish rationalist "enlightenment" took place, called the Haskalah. Its adherents, known as the Maskilim, used their studies in order to facilitate the acculturation of the Jew into Western society. Those involved in the secular reason-based studies in Germany were members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a movement devoted to the scientific study of Judaism. Unlike those who had studied the principal Jewish sources before them, those involved in the Wissenschaft no longer interpreted the Torah as divine law presiding over their daily lives, but as an historical document that ought to be studied scientifically. However, this purely rational approach proved to be an inadequate way to characterize their Jewish existence. From this dissatisfaction and unrelenting search for meaning, a Jewish cultural renaissance was born.

Conclusion

"For the first time after leaving Russia, I felt myself in the midst of my people, in a warm and living Hebrew Atmosphere. In all the counties I have been so far, I felt estranged, as if there was a barrier, because there was no Hebrew spoken there. Only here in Berlin did this barrier fall."

This exhibit tells an important, but unfamiliar story in modern Jewish history. It was commonly thought that the Jews of Germany were undoubtedly the most assimilated of all Jews in the Diaspora--losing most forms of Jewish identity since emancipation. This perception enhanced the belief that by the time Hitler launched his evil upon the Jews, there was no real collective Jewish expression to destroy.

In reality, there was a rebirth of Jewish culture in Germany beginning at the turn of the 20th century and ending as the Nazi regime took power. A new understanding of this era, is reflected by recent scholarship such as, The Renaissance of Jewish Cultural in Weimar Germany, by Michael Brenner and Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West, by David A. Brenner. These works illustrate the existence of cooperation and open dialogue between the German and East European Jews, who were historically at odds with each other. This revival of Jewish culture could not have taken place without the combination of inspiration from East European Jews who left their homelands to escape persecution and the freedom of expression and vibrant contemporary culture found in Germany.

This is also a story of remarkable achievement by women. For the first time, a substantial number of young Jewish women entered the field of Wissenschaft and became Jewish scholars. Expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler defined a generation, greatly influencing the world of German literature. Women were also involved in the effort to translate works into German. They helped to make classics accessible to German audiences and generated a new Jewish consciousness, reflected in the translations of Micha Josef Berdyczewski's works on Jewish myths and legends by his wife Rachel. Many translations were specifically aimed at women. The most important being a modern German version of the seventeenth-century Yiddish memoirs of a Westphalian Jewish woman. Pappenheim, president of the Jewish Women's League in Germany, also found time to teach at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus and was Sigmund Freud's "Anna O." However, no one could surpass the devotion and contributions of Edith Rosenzweig, who became Franz Rosenzweig's voice and pen after he was inflicted with devastating paralysis.

The Jews thrived within the general culture of Weimar, which was then consumed with mysticism, Romanticism, and the importance of collective memory. The collaboration between German and East European Jewish men and women helped to create a distinctive Jewish sphere, which reflected the richness of Jewish tradition and the developments of modern Western culture.