German Jews |
Achievements of the German Jews
General
Walter von Mössner, a Jew, commanded the 3rd Prussian Cavalry
Brigade between 1896 and 1898. Decorated for distinguished service during the
Austro-Prussian war of 1866-1872, he became the “aide de camp” of the
Emperor William II and was cited as the “most brilliant cavalry man” in
Prussian history. His career was indeed unusual because Jews in pre-Nazi Germany
were not normally allowed promotion to an officer rank despite their military
ability and/or courage. When the first world war began in 1914, one hundred
thousand Jews volunteered to fight for Germany. This was far out of proportion
to the number of non-Jews who entered the military. 12,000 Jews died in combat,
78% fought at the front, 30,000 were decorated and 2,000 attained the rank of an
officer in the field. Despite this, even during the first world war, in 1916 the
German minister of war carried out a “Jew census” to discover whether or not
Jews were “shirkers”. When the contrary proved the case, the German
government refused to release the figures. That was 17 years before the Nazi
takeover of January 31, 1933, the day Hitler (Yemach shmau v’gaualau) was
appointed Chancellor of Germany. At that time there were
580,000 Jews in Germany. In
the 1930’s the German population
was about 65 million, of whom the Jews
constituted less than one percent. There were then 11 million Jews in Europe.
After the Europeans had slaughtered 6 million Jews, there remained in all the
world only 200,000 German Jews scattered about the earth in Israel, the U.S.,
Canada, South America, Australia, etc. In short, the German Jews are the tiniest
of minorities, even among Jews. Today, there are only 60,000 Jews in all of Germany in a population of 82 million. One half of these Jews migrated to that land during the past twenty years. They are almost all Russian refugees. Therefore there are only thirty thousand Jews in Germany who were born there and whose ancestors were also Germans.
It
is indeed astounding what this small group achieved during the one hundred and
twenty years from 1812 to 1932 when, at least in theory, they were citizens of
the German Empire and later the German Republic.
Among
these achievers are some who reached world renown such as Albert Einstein who
was born in Ulm, Württemberg in
1879. Two grandsons of the great philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who translated
the Torah into German, were the major composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1887) and
his cousin, Philip Veit, no doubt the greatest painter and portrait artist then
living (1793-1877).
That
generation also included the most important German poet and essayist other than
Goethe. He was the Jew Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Unknown in non-German
speaking countries, his poem “Die Lorelei” is sung in all German schools,
homes and at all gatherings, although the Germans like to pretend that the poet
who wrote “Lorelei” is
“unknown”.
In
later years, Jacob Eberst became a major composer. He was born in Köln, which
we call Cologne, in 1819. He changed his name to Jacques Offenbach and moved to
France to escape the anti-Jewish behavior of his German compatriots even as
early as the third decade of the nineteenth century.
Karl
Marx (1818-1883), the grandson of rabbis on both sides of his family, was the
contemporary of Offenbach. Marx was born in Trier. Trier held one of the
oldest Jewish communities in Germany. In fact, the area between Trier and
Colonia Aggripina, as the Romans called Cologne, was settled by Jews in the
fourth century, nearly six hundred years before the vast majority of Germans
came into northern Europe from Siberia around 1000 C.E.
Jews and some Romans were the first Germans.
In
1878 Erich Mühsam was born in Berlin. He was a great poet and essayist. He was
murdered in a Nazi camp in 1934. Did you know that the German Jews were subject
to murder six years before the
outbreak of the second world war in 1939?
A
somewhat older contemporary of Mühsam was Franz Boas (1858-1942). He came to
the United States in 1887 and here became the father of American anthropology.
His students were Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He investigated and wrote
numerous books about native Americans and in fact the ethnology of the American
native culture was entirely his work.
Walter
Rathenau (1867-1922), foreign
minister of the German republic, was
murdered by a Nazi assassin in 1922, eleven years before the Nazis came to
power. He was at that time the foremost electrical engineer in Germany and had
been minister for reconstruction in an earlier post–war German government. The
Nazis and their followers blamed him for the depression of the 1920’s in
Germany, a depression which came to this country in the 1930’s after his
murder. His contemporary was Charles Steinmetz, the founder of General Electric.
Steinmetz (1865-1923) came to this country in 1889. To him we owe the use of
alternating current (AC), the magnetic arc lamp
and hundreds of other patents in the field of electricity.
Then
there were the doctors. Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) was a principal founder of the
sciences of immunology and hematology, having studied with the great Robert
Koch. His younger colleague, August Wasserman (1866-1925)
discovered the cure for syphilis and must be ranked with Ehrlich as a
principal contributor to bacteriology and immunology.
We
could go on and on. By carefully searching numerous encyclopedias and old
newspapers, biographies and histories I found 406 major contributors to all
fields of human endeavors among the German Jews born between 1785 and 1885. This
means that those born in 1885 were 48 years old at the advent of Hitler in 1933.
Therefore, those born later than 1885 were seldom able to attain any prominence
in Germany because the Nazi spirit had already removed Jews from the
opportunities necessary to accomplish anything in Germany long before the actual
Nazi takeover became political reality.
If
we examine the achievements of the most outstanding German Jews from their
release from the ghetto by Napoleon in 1812 to the end of the German Jewish
experience in 1933 we find that Jews made their most important contributions to
medicine in that era. Seventy-six of the 406 top achievers included in my
research were doctors of medicine. Fifty-seven made contributions to various
physical sciences such as chemistry and physics. Forty-six distinguished
themselves in the law and in politics, thirty-four became famous in literature
and philology, there were twenty-two major musicians and twenty-one leading
mathematicians among the German Jewish achievers and the others were known in a
variety of the arts and sciences.
Many of the German Jews who were able to attain any position in nineteenth
century Germany were converted to Christianity “pro forma”, although
everyone continued to view them as Jews just the same. It was however necessary
to be a formal “Christian” in 19th century Germany if a Jew
wanted to hold a position such as professor, government official or army officer
(except in wartime).
There
were really very few German Jews associated with secular humanism as it is known
today. Reform Judaism had indeed been organized in Germany in 1810 and the first
Reform Temple established in Hamburg in 1818. That form of Jewish worship
resembled our conservative movement more than our reform movement. The Hamburg
Temple held services in a manner very much like Temple Beth El here in Buffalo
today.
Contrary
to American belief, there was a large orthodox Jewish community in Germany until
1938, when all synagogues were burnt down. Twenty-eight major rabbinical
scholars were part of our German Jewish achievers, among these the great Samson
Rafael Hirsch, Max Lilienthal, Abraham Geiger and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. These
great rabbis contributed immensely to Judaism and its survival even amidst
ultimate destruction and death in the gas ovens.
We,
the American Jewish community, owe the German Jews a great deal. They were the
forerunners of our enlightened life in America. They included the giants of
intellectual history, namely Marx, Freud and Einstein, who shaped the twentieth
century for all mankind for better or for worse. They also included thousands of
lesser known or unknown Jews who did their best under the worst of circumstances
and who deserve our everlasting recognition. We dedicate ourselves to their
memory when, from beyond Auschwitz and Buchenwald, we send our children to
Jewish schools, attend to our religious obligations, contribute to Jewish
charity and support Israel with all our hearts, with all our minds and with all
our strength, bimhayro v’yomenu. Shalom
u’vracha. If you want to read more about the German Jewish
achievers go to the Buffalo State College or U.B. libraries and look at a
journal called Mankind Quarterly. My
colleague, Vern Bullough and I published our findings on this topic in Vol. 27,
No. 3 of that journal.
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