The appeal for recognition as both same and different, common to so many societies, brings us back to an overlooked point in the history of civil society — one featuring a 19th century German Jewish organization as protagonist.
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A Jewish-based self-defense organization forms in Berlin at a time when assimilation is the recipe for antisemitism and renewed support for antisemitic political aspirations gains votes in the German Parliament in 1893. The Central Association of German Citizens’ of Jewish Faith (hereafter CV) arises in the attempt to cause a sea-change in the perception of the role of Jews in the newly-formed German state and hold the public to their constitutional claim to equality. It’s all too easy to take every step they make leading up to the Nazis’ Final Solution, and feel compelled to assess where they went wrong, how they failed, perhaps even seek justification for the foundation of Israel, as is all too tempting. All too often inspiration which might be garnered from their rise to their defense is thus lost in the greater story of their demise. Yet there is far more to the story of the CV than the downward spiral of Jewish life in Germany pre-World War II. It need not be so that this success-failure paradigm dominate the story. Their very rise to existence is a testament to the entrenchment of liberal values at the time, the widespread belief in the democratic experiment, and hope and faith in the goodwill of mankind--a timeless virtue. In that vein, the claims and pursuits of the Central Association of German Citizens’ of Jewish Faith, are not all that different from the ones of groups in the struggle for human rights who came before it and who’ve come after it. Putting the spotlight on the CV’s public debut is where resonance of their claims for other groups of similar pursuits throughout time, becomes most apparent.
This essay is a foray into the story of their motivation to take claim to that piece in the first place, as essential in itself. Their rise into existence is to speak not only through the prism of ultimate success or failure, but for the betterment of our understanding of societal struggles and claims-making, and for the enrichment of our understanding of the individual players at work in mind-altering, relations-changing, policy-shifting developments, through the microscope of their place and circumstances in their day and age. And yet it shall also become clear that, that for which they fought resonates today.
For our enquiry, the relevance of a theoretical framework for highlighting an aspect of the story of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith which has not been told, takes central stage. That aspect is the enormous import of their claim for recognition in the act of their formation and in the initial stages of their pursuit in establishing a voice for themselves. This is a theory construed by Charles Taylor, on the so-called politics of recognition--a theory that has been tested and found resonance in many cases in the present, but thus far minimally applied to groups further back in time.
Taylor’s theory asserts the centrality of a group’s plea for acknowledgment from the mainstream or dominant group, of its difference whilst being equal citizens, in their raison d''être. That is to say, the chief aims of a group as expressly laid out in their works may say nothing of the kind, that it is recognition which they seek, but recognition is often indeed key to reaching those aims and implicit in every call for action from the dominant group which is taken.
A consequence of Taylor’s approach then, is to shift the parameters from which to measure the organization’s success, to a smaller scale, whereby the organization’s surfacing to public scrutiny can be seen as an achievement in itself, indeed an exercise in democracy at its infant stages and against enormous pressure by Christians and Jews alike, to remain in the shadows. This essay will outline the full extent to which Taylor’s theory of the politics of recognition finds resonance in the case of the formation of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith and its beginnings, and in doing so, feature a facet of their story which yields potential insight for the assessment of others groups’ pursuits in testing democratic promises, and in so doing also render their story parallel to that of many other groups seeking the very same thing.
Scene Setting--Jews’ One Foot in the Door and Two Hands Out
Some two decades after Jews were granted full citizenship through emancipation in 1869, a large number of them took to the cities, taking advantage of their new freedom of movement and settlement. The majority moved from the countryside to the city during this time, especially in the Prussian state, which saw an increase of over 25 percent of its Jewish population between 1871 and 1910.
[1] What’s more, already accustomed to internal migration in search of the best conditions for rights on choice of profession and settlement before Emancipation, the lot of Jews, now having procured a secure status across the country, put an extra premium on socio-economic advancement.
[2] Between 1815 and 1871, the proportion of German Jews making up the middle and upper classes grew from 35% to 60%, while those of the lowest class shrunk from 50% to between 5% and 15%, varying by region.
[3] The inroads they made in academia were also of great import, as it had also been an avenue largely excluded to Jews. Though often at the price of baptism, the number of Jewish scholars with posts at universities grew significantly, from 9.4 percent all of German university teachers in academic year 1874-1875, to 12 percent in 1889-1890.
[4].
A most unsettling event to shake up the Liberal consciousness was the election of 16 antisemites in the 1893 Reichstag election, or 3.4 percent of the total vote.
[5] That was an increase from 47,000 votes or 5 seats in 1890, to 263,000 or 16 seats in 1893.
[6] Though it was far from clear that any of them had any particular concrete agenda of rolling back Jewish rights, it proved nevertheless jolting for many in the Jewish community.
[7] It was a reminder, in the words of Judaism historian Michael Meyer, that “Jewish fellow citizens[...] might enter general society, but not without knocking”.
[8]
Of course, the Jewish community was not without representation on its behalf to fire back on those developments. Yet the only organization at the time which aimed to defend Jews against antisemitism, the Abwehr-Verein, maintained that it was through assimilation, including intermarriage and conversion, that Jews would have the best means of asserting Jewish attachment to the German nation and best hope for overcoming anti-Semitism.
[9] They also considered predominantly Jewish-based organizations to be
separatist and even counterproductive to the cause of dampening anti-Semitism.
[10] Some members even preferred to conceal their Jewish identity when coming to their defense.
[11]
Then in 1893, the last of the non-baptized Jews to serve in the Reichstag or Prussian parliament went into retirement.
[12]
It is against this backdrop that a rare pamphlet in defense of Jews surfaces in Berlin in that same year.
A Cautious Plea for Acknowledgment of and Respect for a New Jewish Identity - Taylor’s Politics of Recognition at Work
It is New Year’s Day 1893 and an anonymously published pamphlet reads: “Protected Jews or Citizens?”
(Schutzjuden oder Staatsbürger?) on the cover. The title in itself suggests several things. It names at once the status which Jews previously endured, whereby agreements were made with local authorities to protect Jews from harm in exchange for rather restricted liberties. This Schutzjuden pact reflected the fact that Jews were second-class citizens, if citizens at all, living or subsisting at the good will or whim of Prussian (to name but one state) authorities before 1869. It also speaks to the fact that in theory, Jews are now full-fledged citizens by virtue of the Reichsverfassung (imperial constitution) which granted them full citizenship status. But because of the author’s question mark, the reader is immediately asked to reflect which concept reflects the reality of today, as, it is indeed in many ways in question. The author bothers to say that he is “a Jewish citizen,” and in smaller print beneath the title, he adds “it’s medicine, that I’m offering you, not poison”.
[13] The author goes on to explain why he neglects to print his name by adding, it is not out of fear, and that only if he is so lucky as to find like-minded people who would wish to know who he is, would he have no qualms revealing it, but in the case that his words should go “unheard,” then it very well doesn’t matter who said them, he claims.
[14]
The cover page alone, thus, already speaks volumes about the status which Jews enjoy at this moment in time, and here we begin to find evidence of the phenomenon at play which Taylor outlines in his theory of the politics of recognition. That the author feels compelled to say that no fear is involved in his anonymity suggests something which underlines his entire essay, and that is that he is speaking to an upstanding, reasonable and sympathetic audience of Germans out there, who simply must be more than amenable to hearing his arguments out, and certainly aren’t the type of people who would want to harm a man merely for words that he printed about his loyalty to the German state as an avowed Jew. Yet his anonymity betrays some element of fear that negative repercussions of some kind might be felt, and thus he cannot be sure that he is in fact speaking to the reasonable upstanding, sympathetic Germans that he however
wishes them to be. One can already see the markings of a plea for recognition as a member of a minority deserving of respect. The author clearly defines himself as such, even distancing himself from
other Jews of that minority group who cling to old ideas, but who are not to be held as representative of all Jews in their handlings. Yet as Taylor points out, it is only through interaction with the other that
fulfillment of that identity can be reached.
[15] The author
needs to be recognized for the identity he claims, by the German gentiles who have sway over his treatment as a Schutzjude or Staatsbürger, in order to realize it.
The author, later revealed as Raphael Löwenfeld, a professor of Slavic studies and among the first translators of Tolstoi to German, voices a sentiment which proves also to be on the mind of many Jews, that if they are to capitalize on the rights which had been granted them and not retreat into the precarious status in which they had lived before, then they would have to insist that they be received as the fellow German citizens that they were, and yet at the same time not have to surrender their attachment to Judaism. Löwenfeld calls upon Jews to speak up in their own defense, launching a discussion about the direction which counterattacks to antisemitism should take.
The range of responses Löwenfeld receives demonstrates a solid block of like-minded people, who, as it turns out, find themselves in a similar position and are inspired by Löwenfeld’s call for the coming together of Jews to fight for themselves as the most natural human response to the oppression of what Taylor calls that misrecognition.
Three months after the appearance of Löwenfeld’s pamphlet, a group of like-minded men, all educated professionals of the Jewish intelligentsia, present themselves and organize a body which would put out precisely that message and those principles in a most potent manner. It is a call to counter the antisemitic slander, to defend Jews where prejudice rears its head. Running with Löwenfeld’s and others’ conviction that Jews themselves take up the matter of defending themselves, Berlin lawyers Maximillian Horwitz and Eugen Fuchs and medical doctor and lecturer Martin Mendelsohn, break with the credo of the Abwehr-Verein, by going it on their own--that is to say, without the strict supervision or co-founding role of a gentile notable.
The Kurds in 20th century Turkey, the Muslims of present Sudan, the Hmong of Vietnam, Tibetans in China, and homosexuals seeking marriage rights in Western society--all who have suffered their own misrecognition, have made similar claims and endured parallel struggles for that same basic right, to be both ethnically, religiously, or otherwise different, and part of the greater community or nation. Though they diverge in peculiarities of practice, it can be stated thus that the CV’s fight--though not their fate--is not as singularly unique as it is made out to be. The room in civil society of 19th century Germany which allowed for the CV’s claims of recognition to be made in the first place points to the paramount importance of the endurance of that space in light of what happened to Germany’s Jews. It is also a telling reminder of the inviolability of that space for civic development in the democratizing societies of today.
Jennifer Schneider from the U.S., a Huygens Scholar and MA candidate in History of Global Connections: Migration, Networks, Institutions at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Main research interest is the comparative development of anti-discrimination/civil rights policy and multiculturalism in Europe, especially Germany and the Netherlands.
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