Jüdische Migration und Diversität in Wien und Berlin 1667/71–1918. Von der Vertreibung der Wiener Juden und ihrer Wiederansiedlung in Berlin bis zum Zionismus by Ingo Haar (review)

Abstract

In Jüdische Migration und Diversität in Wien und Berlin 1667/71–1918, Ingo Haar analyzes the factors affecting Jewish migration patterns during peace and wartime. Most prominent among them were the application of social pressure to compel Berlin and Viennese Jews to assimilate and the efforts by Jews themselves to concede to the demands of the state while striving to retain their own religious community. Haar traces these factors over 250 years between Jewish emancipation (seventeenth century) and the rise of modern antisemitism (nineteenth century). He focuses on the history of the Jewish path between “cultural stigmatization and social functionalization” to understand the ambivalence of the period of Jewish emancipation that extended into modernity (12). In doing so, he builds upon the work of several earlier historians, e.g., J. Friedrich Battenberg (German Jewish emancipation in the early modern period), Tobias Brinkmann (German Jewish migrations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Werner Jochmann (modern German antisemitism), and Heinz Fassmann (Austrian Jewish migration). Haar compares the complex socio-cultural processes of how Jews in Berlin and Vienna became more inclusive or more exclusive from Christian society over time. He argues, correctly in my opinion, that the history of conflict between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews can only be understood by examining the underlying events of the pre-modern period and its effect on Jewish migration and diversity patterns. By doing so, he explicitly rejects the view of other historians who debate whether the twentieth century was characterized by its radical nationalism and was built on the practices of violence of the nineteenth century (16). By focusing on Jewish social and cultural history, he argues that historic violence against and expulsion(s) of Jews because of their religious beliefs were the rule and not the exception for centuries. The continued existence of Jewish communities in Berlin and Vienna became increasingly dependent upon the whims of the ruling sovereigns and the willingness of the Christian populations to accept Jewish citizens of those cities by the late sixteenth century (490). Jewish businessmen served literally “at the pleasure” of their Christian patron(s). In a particularly striking example of the lengths to which this concept was taken, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg appointed the “court Jew” (Hofjude) Lipman ben Juda (1530–1573) as court chamberlain responsible for managing credit transactions and the sovereign right of coinage (Münzregal). Upon the elector’s death, his successor