The Future Of The German Jewish Past

Germany’s acceptance of its direct responsibility for the Holocaust has strengthened its relationship with Israel and has led to a deep commitment to combat antisemitism and rebuild Jewish life in Germany. As we draw close to a time when there will be no more firsthand experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, there is great concern about what will happen when German responsibility turns into history. Will the present taboo against open antisemitism be lifted as collective memory fades? There are alarming signs of the rise of the far right, which includes blatantly antisemitic elements, already visible in public discourse. The evidence is unmistakable—overt antisemitism is dramatically increasing once more. The Future of the German-Jewish Past deals with the formidable challenges created by these developments. It is conceptualized to offer a variety of perspectives and views on the question of the future of the German-Jewish past. The volume addresses topics such as antisemitism, Holocaust memory, historiography, and political issues relating to the future relationship between Jews, Israel, and Germany. While the central focus of this volume is Germany, the implications go beyond the German-Jewish experience and relate to some of the broader challenges facing modern societies today.

From its modest beginnings in 1818 Berlin, Wissenschaft des Judentums has burgeoned into a scholarly discipline pursued by a vast cadre of scholars. Now constituting a global community, these scholars continue to draw their inspiration from the determined pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth and twentieth Germany. Beyond setting the highest standards of philological and historiographical research, German Wissenschaft des Judentums had a seminal role in creating modern Jewish discourse in which cultural memory supplemented traditional Jewish learning. The secular character of modern Jewish Studies, initially pursued largely in German and subsequently in other vernacular languages (e.g. French, Dutch, Italian, modern Hebrew, Russian), greatly facilitated an exchange with non-Jewish scholars, and thereby encouraging mutual understanding and respect. The present volume is based on papers delivered at a conference, sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, by scholars from North American, Europe, and Israel. The papers and attendant deliberations explored ramified historical and methodological issues. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a tribute to the two hundred year legacy of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its singular contribution to not only modern Jewish self-understand but also to the unfolding of humanistic cultural discourse.

An unexpected immigration wave of Jews from the former Soviet Union mostly in the 1990s has stabilized and enlarged Jewish life in Germany. Jewish kindergartens and schools were opened, and Jewish museums, theaters, and festivals are attracting a wide audience. No doubt: Jews will continue to live in Germany. At the same time, Jewish life has undergone an impressing transformation in the second half of the 20th century– from rejection to acceptance, but not without disillusionments and heated debates. And while the ‘new Jews of Germany,’ 90 percent of them of Eastern European background, are already considered an important factor of the contemporary Jewish diaspora, they still grapple with the shadow of the Holocaust, with internal cultural clashes and with difficulties in shaping a new collective identity. What does it mean to live a Jewish life in present-day Germany? How are Jewish thoughts, feelings, and practices reflected in contemporary arts, literature, and movies? What will remain of the former German Jewish cultural heritage? Who are the new Jewish elites, and how successful is the fight against anti-Semitism? This volume offers some answers.

This four-volume collective project by a team of leading scholars offers a vivid portrait of Jewish history in German-speaking countries over nearly four centuries. This series is sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955 in Jerusalem, London, and New York for the purpose of advancing scholarship on the Jews in German-speaking lands.

Christine M. Korsgaard presents an account of the foundation of practical reason and moral obligation. Moral philosophy aspires to understand the fact that human actions, unlike the actions of the other animals, can be morally good or bad, right or wrong. Few moral philosophers, however, have exploited the idea that actions might be morally good or bad in virtue of being good or bad of their kind - good or bad as actions. Just as we need to know that it is the function of the heart to pump blood to know that a good heart is one that pumps blood successfully, so we need to know what the function of an action is in order to know what counts as a good or bad action. Drawing on the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, Korsgaard proposes that the function of an action is to constitute the agency and therefore the identity of the person who does it. As rational beings, we are aware of, and therefore in control of, the principles that govern our actions. A good action is one that constitutes its agent as the autonomous and efficacious cause of her own movements. These properties correspond, respectively, to Kant's two imperatives of practical reason. Conformity to the categorical imperative renders us autonomous, and conformity to the hypothetical imperative renders us efficacious. And in determining what effects we will have in the world, we are at the same time determining our own identities. Korsgaard develops a theory of action and of interaction, and of the form interaction must take if we are to have the integrity that, she argues, is essential for agency. On the basis of that theory, she argues that only morally good action can serve the function of action, which is self-constitution.

Die Reihe Europäisch-Jüdische Studien repräsentiert die international vernetzte Kompetenz des »Moses Mendelssohn Zentrums für europäisch-jüdische Studien« (MMZ). Der interdisziplinäre Charakter der Reihe, die in Kooperation mit dem Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg herausgegeben wird, zielt insbesondere auf geschichts-, geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Ansätze sowie auf intellektuelle, politische, literarische und religiöse Grundfragen, die jüdisches Leben und Denken in der Vergangenheit beeinflusst haben und noch heute inspirieren. Mit ihren Publikationen weiß sich das MMZ der über 250jährigen Tradition der von Moses Mendelssohn begründeten Jüdischen Aufklärung und der Wissenschaft des Judentums verpflichtet. In den BEITRÄGEN werden exzellente Monographien und Sammelbände zum gesamten Themenspektrum Jüdischer Studien veröffentlicht. Die Reihe ist peer-reviewed.

Although Jews in early modern Germany produced little in the way of formal historiography, Jews nevertheless engaged the past for many reasons and in various and surprising ways. They narrated the past in order to enforce order, empower authority, and record the traditions of their communities. In this way, Jews created community structure and projected that structure into the future. But Jews also used the past as a means to contest the marginalization threatened by broader developments in the Christian society in which they lived. As the Reformation threw into relief serious questions about authority and tradition and as Jews continued to suffer from anti-Jewish mentality and politics, narration of the past allowed Jews to re-inscribe themselves in history and contemporary society. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including chronicles, liturgical works, books of customs, memorybooks, biblical commentaries, rabbinic responsa and community ledgers, this study offers a timely reassessment of Jewish community and identity during a frequently turbulent era. It engages, but then redirects, important discussions by historians regarding the nature of time and the construction and role of history and memory in pre-modern Europe and pre-modern Jewish civilization. This book will be of significant value, not only to scholars of Jewish history, but anyone with an interest in the social and cultural aspects of religious history.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

This volume is a comprehensive rethinking of the German-Jewish experience. Goldschmidt challenges the elegiac view of Gershom Scholem, showing us the German-Jewish legacy in literature, philosophy and critical thought in a new light.