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The Rural Community and the Urbanization of German Jewry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Steven M. Lowenstein
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Extract

The process of urbanization is treated by most historians as intimately related to other changes in the economic, cultural, and social life of societies and individuals. In some societies the growth of cities is one of the first steps in the processes of industrialization, secularization, cultural change, economic growth, and other changes often labelled “modernization.” A study of urbanization and other societal changes in German Jewry, however, suggests a different sequence.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 218 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1980

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References

1. Approximately 17,000 of Prussia's 123,000 Jews lived in towns of 20,000 or more inhabitants in 1817. In Hesse-Darmstadt (1828) the figure was 2,176 out of 21,236; in Baden (1825) it was 2,349 of 17,577 The number of Jews in towns of at least 10,000 inhabitants was 19,000, 2,176, and 2,703, respectively. See Table 3, below.

2. The argument of this article, namely, that the chief economic, educational, and social changes in German Jewry preceded the main thrust of urbanization of the community, does not contradict the presentation made in my previous article “The Pace of Modernisation of German Jewry in the Nineteenth Century,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 21 (1976): 41–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar That article argued that the pace of change of the German Jewish community was slower than one is led to believe by most historians. Rather than placing the crucial developments in the period from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic period as is usually done, I argued that the rank and file of the German Jews changed overwhelmingly only in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The sequence that I propose is as follows: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries small groups of German Jews made the transition to integration into German society, but only in the period between 1850 and 1870 were the majority of German Jews acculturated to their surroundings. Similarly, in the period from 1815 to 1870 a minority of rural Jews moved to the cities, but the overwhelming majority did not migrate to the metropolitan centers until the last quarter of the nineteenth century or the first quarter of the twentieth. In general one can say that demographic changes including urbanization, low birthrates, and increasing intermarriage affected the bulk of German Jewry later than did cultural and economic changes.

3. Blau, Bruno, “Die Entwickelung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Deutschland von 1800 bis 1945” (MS in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York), pp. 33–34.Google Scholar The figures are for the year 1817.

4. See Tipton, Frank B. Jr., Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, Conn., 1976), especially pp. 19–21, 48–53, 63–66, 132–33.Google Scholar

5. In Bavaria (excluding the Palatinate) 4,453 of 42,438 Jews and 233,000 of about 3,200,000 of the general population lived in towns of over 10,000 inhabitants. For figures for Prussia, Hesse-Darmstadt, and other areas see n. 1 and Table 3.

6. See, for example, Richarz, Monika, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1976), 1: 115–16, 217–18, 293–96Google Scholar, and the complete unpublished memoirs of Jacob Adam in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

7. See, for example, the case of Talheim, Württemberg, described in Sauer, Paul, Die jüdischen Gemeinden in Württemberg und Hohenzollern (Stuttgart, 1966)Google Scholar, the anonymous Illereichen-Altenstadt: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Marktgemeinde (Weissenhorn, 1965)Google Scholar, and Rapp, Wilhelm, Geschichte des Dorfes Fellheitn an der Hier, Landkreis Memmingen (Fellheim, 1960).Google Scholar As late as 1838 the 1,300 Jews in the market town of Ichenhausen, Bavaria, lived in only 55 houses. By comparison in 1900 when there were only 601 Jews in the town, they lived in 125 houses (Ganzmüller, Eugen, Ichenhausen: Vom Dorf zum Markt zur Stadt (Ichenhausen, 1970), p. 174.Google Scholar

8. For example, the mother of Eduard Silbermann in the village of Kolmsdorf, Bavaria, read Shakespeare, Balzac, and Scott, as well as urban newspapers (Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 170)Google Scholar. By 1859–60 6.8% of all Gymnasium students in Prussia were Jews, although Jews were only 1.3% of the Prussian population (Richarz, , Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe [Tübingen, 1974], p. 143Google Scholar, quoting Ruppin, A., Der Anteil der Juden am Unterrichtswesen in Preussen, p. 21).Google Scholar

9. Schwarz, Stefan, Die Juden in Bayern im Wandel der Zeiten (Munich and Vienna, 1963), pp. 287–92, 343–44, paragraphs 11–14 of the law of 1813 on the Jews.Google Scholar

10. Michaelis, Alfred, Die Rechtsverhältnisse der Juden in Preussen seit dem Beginne des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1910), pp. 160, 162–63.Google Scholar The law of 1847 still forbade unnaturalized Posen Jews to move to other provinces without a permit.

11. Cahnman, Werner J., “Village and Small-town Jews in Germany: A Typological Study,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 19 (1974): 127–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 452–61.Google Scholar

12. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 1844, pp. 354, 371, and passim, gives a list of the participants in the first (Reform) rabbinical conference at Brunswick. Later issues give lists of the participants of the conferences which took place in the following two years. Similar lists are available of the rabbis who protested against the first rabbinical conference. Of 38 participants in the Reform conferences 13 (from 9 different communities) came from towns with over 20,000 inhabitants. This compares to 11 of the 37 German protesters against the conference. Seventeen of the Reform participants and only 10 of the Orthodox protesters represented towns of 5,000 to 20,000 inhabitants, while 12 of the Reformers and 19 of the protesters represented towns and villages of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. (See my article “The 1840s and the Beginnings of Religious Reform in Germany,” to appear in Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1981],Google Scholar which deals in greater detail with the relative strengths of city and small-town elements in the developing Reform movement.)

13. Published in Meiningen, edited in Stadtlengstfeld.

14. See, for instance, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 1846, p. 656, and 1844, no. 20; Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 271–72Google Scholar; and Jahrbuch des Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeindebundes (1895), pp. 116–17 (lists of communities with organs), and (1903), pp. 183–84. Among the small and medium-sized towns which had formerly had pro-Reform rabbis (some of whom participated in the rabbinical conferences of the 1840s) and hired Orthodox rabbis by the late nineteenth century were Weilburg, Trier, Eschwege, Burgkunstadt, Aschaffenburg, Schweinfurt, and Marburg.

15. See, e.g., Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 271–72, 290–91.Google Scholar

16. Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 148, 298.Google Scholar The memoirs of Hirsch Oppenheimer of Gronau, who moved to Hanover in 1865, make clear that he was one of Gronau's leading citizens.

17. Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 244–45.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., 1: 335–41, 2 (1979): 251–60; Tietz, Georg, Geschichte einer Familie und ihrer Warenhäuser (Stuttgart, 1966), especially pp. 24–62.Google Scholar

19. Tipton, pp. 89–97.

20. YIVO Archives, New York, N.Y., Papers of the Jewish community of Ostrowo (Ostrow Wielkopolski), folders 45, 48, and 49. See Table 1.

21. Jeggle, Utz, Judendörfer in Württemberg (Tübingen, 1969), pp. 188–89 n. 519.Google Scholar See Table 2, which is taken from Toury, Jacob, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1847–1871: Zwischen Revolution, Reaktion und Emanzipation (Düsseldorf, 1977), pp. 96–97, table 40.Google Scholar

22. See, for instance, Tipton, p. 103, and Jacobson, Jacob, Die Judenbürgerbücher der Stadt Berlin 1809–1851 (Berlin, 1962), especially pp. 32–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The percentage of Jews from the eastern provinces of Prussia in Berlin was probably a good deal higher than the percentage of non-Jews from those provinces.

23. Blau, p. 69.

24. Ibid.

25. This paper sometimes uses 10,000 inhabitants as the dividing line between cities and small towns and sometimes 20,000. The reason for this is that statistics are sometimes available for one figure and sometimes for the other. Usually the statistics for the period after 1871 are broken down only for “over 20,000” and “under 20,000.”

26. Blau, p. 97.

27. Richarz, , Jüdisches Leben, 1: 31Google Scholar; Blau, pp. 284, 286.

28. Blau, pp. 71, 157, 230 (Blau's arithmetic error on p. 157 has been corrected); Ophir, Baruch Zvi, Pinkas Hakehillot—Germania, Bavaria (Jerusalem, 1972), p. 8.Google Scholar

29. Krohn, Helga, Die Juden in Hamburg 1800–1850 (Frankfurt a.M., 1967), pp. 49–52, 87Google Scholar; Jeggle, pp. 188–89; YIVO Archives, New York, Ostrowo records, folders 45, 48, and 49.

30. Blau, pp. 72, 284.

31. Blau, p. 286.

32. Lamberti, Marjorie, “The Prussian Government and the Jews: Official Behaviour and Policy Making in the Wilhelminian Era,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 17 (1972): 7, 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Was ist, will und leistet der Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund? (Berlin, 1905).Google Scholar Another sign of the decline of the rural communities was the transfer of the seat of the district rabbinate from villages to cities. In Württemberg such transfers took place, for example, from Mühringen in 1905, from Jebenhausen (to Göppingen) in 1867, and from Buttenhausen in 1887 (Sauer, pp. 58, 84, 130).

33. Schulte, Klaus, Dokumentation zur Geschichte der Juden am linken Niederrhein seit dem 17. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1972), pp. 234–37.Google Scholar

34. Jeggle, pp. 220–21, 226–27.