Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Germany: Bildung as a vehicle of inclusion and separation

  The peril to which the new situation exposed Jews would turn out to be grave indeed, taking on the murderous forms that would stain European history in the next half-century. It is beyond the scope and capacity of this book to seek out all the reasons why it should have been in Germany that this danger was so disastrously realized, but among them were ones connected to the history that gave bourgeois life in Germany its particular character, and Jews a special relationship to it. At the center of that history was the contrast between the taken-for-granted nature of national existence in England and France by the mid eighteenth century and the evident German necessity that the national unity desired on many grounds had to be deliberately constructed. State power would ultimately prove to be the engine for achieving it, and territorial rulers had been seeking to expand their sway in the face of German disunity for two centuries. But the role of states in moving the fragmented German lands toward integration was deeply tied up with the part played by Bildung in the same process, and it was here that the special connection between Jews and German bourgeois life was forged.

  Early modern Jews and Germans had in common a sense of unity as a people or nation that drew each together across gaps of distance and political division. In both cases this pull toward unity was cultural in a broad sense, involving common elements of history, religion, and everyday life. To be sure, Germany was divided by faith as well as by politics, but the determining place of the Reformation in the country’s history gave religion a special place in its life too, crystallizing the divisions that made localism itself a defining element of national identity. It was characteristic of German history that the earliest attempts to reconcile the actual disunity of the region with the underlying sense of commonality felt by many who lived in it were the literary and cultural ones focused around the notions of Bildung, Aufklärung, and Kultur that Moses Mendelssohn linked together in his answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” and that played a central role in both official and private efforts to give a new and modern form to bürgerliche Gesellschaft.24

  The social vision that found expression through this cluster of terms was one of rational, responsible citizens emancipated from the shackles of the past, and it was to have room for Jews as well as Christians. Jews had to take their place in it on a different basis, however, because they were seen as more deeply tainted by their earlier history, a perception that was partly religious and partly secular, the latter aspect focusing on the numerous and visible poor Jews engaged in morally questionable or socially unproductive occupations such as peddling, hawking, begging, pawn-brokering, or petty theft. If Jews were to become upstanding members of civil society, they had first to undergo a process of improvement, a bürgerliche Verbesserung. The term was widely used after its introduction by the Prussian jurist Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in a treatise of 1781, advocating government programs to educate and uplift Jews, and thus to prepare them for productive citizenship. As David Sorkin points out, the policy was part of the general attempt by states and their officials to raise the moral level of German life as a whole, and it was exemplary of the notion that the state could and should improve both individuals and social relations by intervening directly to guide behavior and conduct. “Jewish emancipation belonged to the current of events that made Bildung into a principle for the reorganization of the German states through an extension of natural rights and individual freedom.” But whereas other Germans were thought to be worthy of the new universal citizenship simply by virtue of possessing the rationality that made Bildung possible, Jews had to earn their right to political inclusion by demonstrating their moral and cultural progress. One of the earliest emancipation edicts, promulgated in the liberal state Baden in 1809, granted Jews legal equality in principle but told them it could become fully realized “only when you … exert yourselves to match it in your political and moral formation.” The general result was that “for the state … the Jews’ admission to citizenship became synonymous with Bildung.”25

  The notion that Jews who still bore the marks of ghetto existence needed education and guidance in order to enter modern social and political life was common everywhere in the years around 1800, but in England and France responsibility for offering such aid was taken up by more advanced or better-off Jews themselves, who set up schools and offered financial assistance (not always so generous as some would have liked); in Germany it became a project of states. For the most part Jewish leaders greeted it with approval and worked together with state officials to implement it. The goal was not to put Jews at the forefront of modernization, and surely not to use them as agents of economic transformation, but to have them take their place inside bürgerliche Gesellschaft conceived of as a stable and hierarchically ordered structure of activities; the occupations into which poor Jews were expected to move included farming and skilled craftsmanship, seldom commerce or finance. Numbers of people took such paths in the early nineteenth century, making use of education offered in state schools to achieve a steady, moderate existence. But the story did not end there, for several reasons.

  First, even education intended to offer a means for only limited social mobility provided tools that had wider potential; schools taught literacy, writing, and basic arithmetic, all skills that could be put to broader uses. Second, Jews had never been part of the guild world that sought to dedicate such resources to the preservation of traditional methods of production and shared local ways of living. Instead their social relations often involved them with kin or co-religionists beyond their own places of residence, giving them access to knowledge about distant materials, methods, markets, and sources of finance. Such knowledge in the hands of trained craftsmen with a certain ambition could provide a base from which to undertake innovations in production and seek increased income. Although there seem to be no data to suggest that Jews followed this path more regularly than others, examples of those who did are far from rare. Among the instances cited in a recent book is the Elsas family of Württemberg; still dependent on peddling in the early nineteenth century, their position was radically altered by two brothers who learned weaving in a school devoted to Judenverbesserung. Beginning from traditional handloom production, they grew wealthy in the 1860s by becoming the first in their town to introduce sophisticated mechanical weaving of many-colored fabrics. This turn seems to have been inspired by a visit to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 in London, an event that allowed a number of German Jews to link up with relatives or associates resident in England. Later the Elsas brothers set up a modern textile factory in the city of Canstatt. Such people contributed to the remarkable rise in Jewish status during the nineteenth century, as noted earlier; some of them shifted from artisanship or industry to commerce or finance, which continued to outpace manufacturing as Jewish occupations. Meanwhile, governments’ hopes that Jews would take up farming and the kinds of craft-work traditionally subject to guild organization were never fulfilled: Jewish participation in such occupations remained well below those of the population as a whole. By sometime in the second half of the century the form of Jewish entry into bürgerliche Gesellschaft had “little by little become separated from the vision of the states” that originally promoted it, becoming “an independent Jewish project with an economic and social content that grew ever-more independent of its original ideological assumptions and political considerations.”26

  We take this observation from Simone Lässig, who argues in a stimulating and challenging study that what chiefly lay behind the attainment of bourgeois status by so high a proportion of German Jews during the nineteenth century was Bildung, at once the practical kind provided by states in their Verbesserung projects, and the wider mode of cultivation the term commonly designated. The line between the two meanings was especially permeable for a group that had long cultivated both practical and cultural ties to distant kin and associates. Lässig does not make culture the sole cause of Jewish advancement, but s
he gives strong reasons for revising the entrenched notion that practical success generally preceded acquiring it. Rather than a consequence of an economically propelled entry into bourgeois existence, Bilding for German Jews “has to count as a fundamental and permanent concomitant of this process,” providing the first step up for many. Jews were not unique in using culture as a basis for social ascent, but in no other section of society did so many people at lower levels of the social scale take this path.27

  At the same time, this importance of Bildung gave Jews a special relationship to modernizing Germany and to its Bürgertum. Education and cultivation were central features of middle-class life in every country, but nowhere else did they play the role in national integration they did in Germany. Their importance rested on the close relationship between state-sponsored modernization projects and the body of officials and administrators at the core of the Bildungsbürgertum, together with the widespread sense that the cultivation fostered and espoused by this group was an important means for the integration of the country and the moral improvement of its citizens. Jews thus appeared as a special case of the larger German link between modernity and cultivation, marked by a particular need to demonstrate their ability to effect the tie. How much the remarkable attraction that drew German Jews to Bildung owed to the pressure this put on them to display their intellectual and moral progress, and how much to the role of learning and discussion in traditional Jewish culture, is an issue we need not try to decide here. Whatever the reason, German Jews assumed a presence in higher education and in German cultural life more generally far in excess of their numbers in the population. Already in the first half of the nineteenth century the increase in Jewish students at universities far outpaced that of the overall population, their numbers growing two-and-a-half times compared to merely 20 percent overall, and the proportion of Jews in Gymnasien and universities was far above that of other Germans from the 1860s. The phenomenon has been especially remarked in Austria, and from the 1890s among women:

  In 1910, 46 percent of the female students at Viennese Lyzeum and 30 percent of those enrolled in Gymnasien in Vienna came from Jewish families. At the University of Vienna, which first began accepting women in 1900, the proportion of Jewish women quickly rose to 68.3 percent, a figure which does not include those with no denominational affiliation who came predominantly from the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie. In 1919, with the opening of the University’s School of Law to women, Jews made up 50 percent of the female students.

  Since academic employment and state service long remained closed to Jews, and even more to women, scholars have been uncertain what use they made of this advanced education, especially in the earlier period; some think it was the prestige attached to degrees that led Jews to seek them, others suggest that some of the knowledge, and many of the social contacts they acquired could be useful in business.28

  In less formal contexts too, Jews were notably active in the institutions through which German Bürger simultaneously sought cultivation and the development of life on a national scale. The role eighteenth-century reformers assigned to creating a national literary language as a means to move the country away from its traditional fragmentation helped inspire the projects nineteenth-century nationalists conceived to celebrate great literary figures, notably Goethe and Schiller, as instruments of national integration, and here too Jews took a special part. The founding of the Nationalverein in 1859 corresponded with the centennial of Schiller’s birth, and many people active in the first were also much involved in festivities to mark the second. Leopold Sonneman, the Jewish editor of a prominent organ of south German democratic liberalism, the Neue Frankfurter Zeitung, viewed the Schiller celebrations as an “effort by the people to feel itself as a single nation,” and in Dresden practically the whole of the Jewish community took part. The Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the most-widely circulated Jewish paper (run by Ludwig Philippson), wrote that “Jewish youth turns for aid to Schiller, it learns to read, think, and feel through him.”29 Idealistic as such a pronouncement may seem, it suggests something of the importance that literary cultivation bore for Jews seeking to feel their way into German society and culture. David Sorkin notes that from late in the eighteenth century Jews had followed the example of their German neighbors in organizing much of their social and cultural life through voluntary associations, a number of which reoriented themselves from religious to more secular principles after 1800. In their way these societies too, like their Christian counterparts, aimed at bürgerliche Verbesserung, and their members sometimes pointed to their participation in them as evidence of civic and moral worth.30 At the same time German Jews sought to become model bourgeois in their family life, displaying features of decorum, self-control, and respectability prized by their neighbors. Given that Jews were the most highly urbanized segment of German society it is not surprising that toward the end of the century they were early exemplars of such modern practices as smaller families, later marriages, and provision of education for women.31

  Recent historians, however, have called attention to certain problematic features of these various Jewish ways of joining bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Jewish Vereine had many features in common with others, but they never did away with the gap between Jews and other Germans. Instead, as Sorkin shows, they created a kind of parallel civic culture, closely resembling the majority but exclusively Jewish in its membership. The barrier between the two seemed to grow more permeable between around 1815 and 1870, as certain at-large organizations animated by Enlightened principles, notably a number of urban Masonic lodges, opened themselves to Jewish members. But in the latter part of the century the line grew more rigid again, as rising public anti-Semitism led these organizations to return to exclusionary policies toward Jews. The result was an increasing divide between German and German-Jewish civic culture, bringing the paradox that the organizations through which Jews hoped to effect their integration into the larger society actually solidified their separation from it.

  The consequence was that German Jewry could not understand its own situation. Unable to live either the autonomous existence of its ancestors or to integrate fully into the majority bourgeois society, German Jewry had created a new sort of identity combining elements of both under the auspices of a secular cultural ideal. Its embourgeoisement under the conditions of incomplete emancipation and partial integration had not led to assimilation, but to the creation of a new sort of Jewish identity and a new form of community, yet it was a community invisible to itself, one which its participants could neither recognize nor acknowledge.

  Well into the twentieth century the social relations of German Jews, even those who took the additional step of becoming formally Christians, remained largely involved in a specifically Jewish world many of them took to be simply German. Thus the harmony Jews felt between themselves and the German culture they absorbed kept many from recognizing the peculiarity of their situation, which left their otherness unreduced in the eyes of those around them, and the dissonance between the two perceptions grew sharper as time went on.32

  This half-integrated, half-excluded condition of German Jews, and the special place of Bildung in it, had more than a little to do with the rise of public anti-Semitism in the 1870s and 1880s. As in France, Jews in Germany came to be seen as symbols of a modernity that felt foreign and threatening to many of their neighbors, all the more because the near-brutal rapidity of the country’s political and economic transformations subjected many to painful dislocations, and in both countries anti-Semitic forces made good use of the new forms of communication and political organization. However much industrial transformation came to appear as the dominant element of modernization during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Bildung continued as a powerful symbol of modernity, partly because of the large place that educated officials and state employees retained in the country’s life (as Jürgen Kocka and others have pointed out, it was only at this time that the industrial and commercial Wirtschaftsbürgertum
began to overshadow Bildungsbürger), and partly because migrants to the exploding cities could attribute their difficulties to the cultural and moral contrasts between the world they had left and the one they now entered. That Jews had by then attained great prominence in urban professions, and notably in that powerful medium and symbol of city life, the newspaper press, put their developed connection to Bildung in greater relief, sharpening the sense of separation many ordinary Germans felt from them. In these conditions, as Simone Lässig suggests, Bürgerlichkeit, the Germanically inflected manner of being bourgeois, came to appear both to Jews and – although in a different way – “in the eyes of the ‘others’ as a Jewish norm of life.” To those to whom Bürgerlichkeit remained in some way foreign, Thomas Nipperdey observes, Jews appeared as its “model students, and model students are not beloved.”33