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This chapter shows that although relationships with other Jews took up the majority of Jewish social life, Jews found themselves more integrated than at any time in German history. Many of their relationships with non-Jews would fall into what Georg Simmel called “differentiated friendships” that connect individuals according to common intellectual interests, common experiences, and common careers or situations in life. These friendships maintained a degree of reserve, avoiding certain areas of interest and feeling. Still, some of these links led to great affection, and some even ended in marriage.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The history of Jewish daily life does much more than provide static snapshots of the past. It opens up new vistas and shows that German-Jewish history is not merely a simple, linear story that takes us from the limitations and insecurities of the 17th century to the successful achievement of emancipation in the 19th, back down to the dark days of the Nazi era. The history of daily life also provides a three-dimensional perspective that illuminates gender relations, the interactions among generations, and those between Jews and non-Jews.

This chapter shows that Jewish social life in the 19th century slowly became more sophisticated and less exclusive. Numerous German Jews acquired manners appropriate to polite gentile society and began attending cultural events such as concerts and the theater. Though most Jews continued to socialize mainly with coreligionists, mixed Christian-Jewish formal and informal circles became more common. Jews of the higher classes were admitted to general bourgeois associations, and Jews participated in slowly growing numbers in local government and national politics. Violence against Jews became less common. In the liberal era of the 1850s and 1860s, barriers to Jewish mixing with non-Jews were probably lower than ever before in German history, though separate social circles were still quite noticeable.

This chapter shows how the experiences of Jewish children, teens, and young adults in the German education system had a critical impact on how they formed their identities as Jews and as Germans. Jewish and other German children imbibed the German classics, German nationalism, and strong doses of discipline at school. In public, Jews accepted Christianity in the schools, either officially or unofficially, permitting and even encouraging the decline of Jewish schools. In private, the home and family, not the Jewish religion lessons they were required to take, influenced the depth of their religious and ethnic identities.

This chapter shows how Jews were deliberately terrorized starting in 1933. As of summer 1938 more extreme persecutions peaked in the pogrom of November 9-10 and the arrest and internment of about 30,000 men in concentration camps. This made the defenselessness and isolation of the Jews clear-cut. Even at that time they received little help from non-Jews. Emigration seemed the only remaining option. But this option became virtually impossible once the war started and was finally prohibited entirely in October 1941. At the same time, forced labor and the withdrawal of almost all food stripped Jews of the material basis for survival and all psychological strength.

Nineteenth-century German Jews — their way of life transformed by modernity — debated whether circumcision was an appropriate practice for adherents of the new Jewish “enlightenment” and Reform Judaism. Samuel Holdheim was the principal spokesman for a progressive perspective, but he was strongly opposed by nearly all other rabbis, Reform and Orthodox alike. German Jewish physicians argued either for complete elimination of the practice or for medical supervision and adequate sanitary technique. A few voices were raised against circumcision in France and Italy as well, though these countries were not centers for the debate. Early German Jewish immigrants to the United States often abandoned circumcision along with much else, but some preserved the practice as one of their few ties to religious tradition.

This chapter shows that Jews shared in the economic upswing of the 19th century, generally experiencing success even during what has been known as the Great Depression of 1873-96. Halfhearted attempts at altering the Jewish career profile had no effect: more than half chose commercial fields and remained self-employed. Their history gave them some experience in business, their families provided them with encouragement, financial support, and useful commercial networks, and contemporary antisemitism compelled them to fend for themselves.

This chapter shows that by the 19th century, most Jews practiced an individualistic religiosity, influenced by their family, location, community, or nation and even by their own life cycles. Belonging to a Jewish family and to Jewish organizational life remained a linchpin of Judaism as Jews fashioned a comfort zone somewhere between tradition and Bildung, between conformity to hallowed customs and openness to new forms of Jewish life.

This chapter discusses the degree of integration of Jews with the non-Jewish environment and the bonds within the Jewish community. Although ostracized from German cultural life, Jews held fast to German culture and learned more and more about Jewish authors and Jewish history. A strengthened Jewish communal life and a return to Jewish holidays at home were also accompanied by an intellectual return to Judaism.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the book. It begins with a discussion of the purpose of the book, which is to examine the qualitative aspects of the life of Jews in Germany. The book begins in the 17th century, the early modern period among Jewish communities in the German states, principalities, and duchies, and concludes in 1945, a caesura in German-Jewish life. Sources range from memoirs, letters, and diaries to rabbinic response (replies by rabbinic scholars applying Jewish law to queries concerning the exigencies of daily life), communal and organizational histories, and Jewish newspapers.

This chapter shows that Jews lived in a variety of settings. In most locations, Jews lived among the Christian population. In some cities, notably in the Frankfurt and Prague ghettos, they lived in crowded conditions, with several families sharing a single unit. But in the majority of settlements, especially in the smaller towns and villages where most Jews lived, housing conditions could be more spacious. In such smaller communities Jews would allocate space to fill religious needs as well, ranging from synagogues and room to study to ritual baths and ovens. Wealthier Jews sought to improve their residences by living outside the accepted domains of Jewish residence, a move often opposed by the local authorities as a slight to Christian citizens and officials living in these more prestigious neighborhoods. For other Jews, residential restrictions often required that they move elsewhere to establish a family and a household.

This chapter shows that many Jews before 1850 lived in difficult housing conditions. Many were crowded into multiple dwellings caused by legal limitations on Jewish homeownership. In the middle of the 19th century, Jewish housing conditions improved markedly, but it is not certain that on average they were better than those of non-Jews. By 1871, something substantial had changed in the residential conditions of German Jewry. The extreme overcrowding, cramped housing conditions, and confinement to certain towns, neighborhoods, and provinces were decreasing rapidly. The huge Jewish communities in Posen and in certain south German villages were beginning to fade, but were by no means gone. Most German Jews still lived in the countryside or small towns.

In the Third Reich, suicide became a routine phenomenon among German Jews. This chapter concentrates on Nazi Germany, but also goes beyond the confines of the Third Reich: to exile, to Auschwitz, and to later times. It focuses on German-Jewish suicides during the Third Reich and analyses the links between Nazi racial policy and German-Jewish suicides. There is a rich literature on the suicides of prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Paul Celan, Primo Levi, and Bruno Bettelheim, who killed themselves decades after the final solution. This chapter primarily concerns the social and political context of German-Jewish suicides and their individual motives, using hitherto neglected archival sources, including suicide notes of German Jews. It also asks how far, if at all, Jewish suicide was a form of resistance towards Nazism, or how far, on the other hand, it was an act of despair and hopelessness.

This chapter shows how the Jewish population pursued a very limited range of often marginal occupations within the relatively underdeveloped preindustrial economy of Germany in the 18th century. Subject to many legal restrictions, they rarely had a fixed place of business and often lived on the edge of subsistence. Although there were always some wealthy Jews, the vast majority were in difficult economic straits. Political emancipation and the Industrial Revolution helped large numbers of Jews find new economic opportunities and improve their positions substantially. Although not all Jews benefited from the rapid changes, many were able to enter the German middle class.

This chapter shows how by 1870 Jewish religious practice and attitudes changed from being uniformly religiously traditional to running the gamut from preservation of the essence of the tradition at one end to the almost total abandonment of Jewish religious traditions on the other. Although most German Jews had already traveled a road away from tradition by 1870, almost all of them had grandparents who had been traditional Jews. It is difficult to guess what percentage of German Jews in 1870 still observed the rules of kashrut and the Sabbath.

This chapter shows that the family became an object of fascination and idealization in the “bourgeois century.” Like other 19th-century members of the bourgeoisie, Jews made family a central value and symbol. Far more than an ideology or a vehicle for acculturation, the family provided social sustenance as well as financial support, business resources, and connections. But family in and of itself did not lead to bourgeois respectability. Only a family that exhibited the traits of what Germans called Bildung — education and cultivation — would do. Bildung appealed to Jews because one did not have to be born into it. It could be acquired at the university, in cultured circles, and in a family of good breeding. Moreover, Bildung could be joined to Jewish ethnic and religious identities.

This chapter shows that the Jewish move to the cities paralleled Jewish social mobility. With urban life came the luxuries and anxieties of the modern age: better business opportunities, better schooling, better housing, and greater consumer possibilities, accompanied by a much faster pace, smaller family size, greater emphasis on proper deportment, and criticism that Jews were too urban and too concentrated in specific professions. Moreover, Jewish loyalties stretched from local to national and from narrower Jewish communal interests to chauvinistic expressions of German superiority.

The two major economic crises of the Weimar Republic — the inflation at the beginning and the Depression at the end — accelerated the stagnation and economic decline that had already begun before World War I. As early as 1933, a social worker predicted that German Jews would experience such grave restrictions in their “economic sphere” that their standard of living would be reduced to the point of ending their “middle-class existence”. This chapter shows how this prediction came true, with the onslaught of discrimination, boycotts, and ultimately “Aryanization” — a euphemism for the Nazi expropriation of Jews.