INTRODUCTION

Understanding the “Last Generation of the German Rabbinate”

History, Memory, Generational Structure, and the Building of a Legacy

After the Nazis seized power on 30 January 1933, more than 250 German rabbis, rabbinical scholars, and students for the rabbinate fled to the United States. While this was not the first time the United States had been the destination for German-Jewish migrations including its rabbinical leadership, the flight of these refugees from Nazism not only represented a heavy influx of migrants—the beginning of a special knowledge transfer—it also marked the end of German-Jewish history at the onset of the Holocaust.¹ Therefore, the presentation of its history appears in a number of larger research contexts such as the Holocaust, memory studies, migration history, the history of knowledge and related transnational relationships, and cultural transfers that resonated in both German and American Jewish history. Such histories cannot be fully understood without acknowledging what happened before and after the hasty departure of these refugees and through a long-term analysis of their lives.

In the following pages, I provide a short introduction to help readers understand the multiple settings, layers of action, and divergent religious and communal concepts in Germany and the United States that determined the flight and reorganization of German refugee rabbis and their cultural transfers and achievements as the last of a special kind—the “last generation of the German rabbinate.”

A Special Historical Relationship: German and American Jewries

The historical connection to the nineteenth-century emigration of German Jewry to the United States made it attractive and promising for the German rabbinate as a place of refuge. After the influx of the first wave of German-Jewish immigrants, who arrived in the United States after 1830, American Jewry developed an inherently modern and pluralistic Jewish identity that exceeded even the progressivism of German Jewry at the time.² While these two Jewish communities developed in different societal frameworks, each maintained a close “cousinly” relationship and a vital exchange of knowledge and scholarship, especially with American Reform and Conservative Jews, whose existence was directly affected by nineteenth-century German-Jewish migration. This existing close relationship made the United States uniquely attractive to the German rabbinate as a place of refuge during Nazism and motivated American rabbis and rabbinical seminaries to launch a spectacular and highly effective rescue effort of their German colleagues.

History: A New Rabbinate, Wissenschaft des Judentums, and Judaism’s Encounter with Modern Society

Since the nineteenth century, German and American Jewries had been uniquely committed to the model of a modern rabbinate that emerged in the postemancipation era in German-speaking Europe and completely undermined the particularistic, traditional, premodern Jewish community and traditional rabbis’ leadership, scholarship, and jurisdiction therein. Rather, the states’ enforcement of Jewish emancipation went hand in hand with the rise of Haskala, the Jewish enlightenment, and triggered a process in which Jewish individuals and communities were actively preparing for a future as Jews within society.

In the newly founded Kingdom of Bavaria, emancipation legislation in 1813 for the first time required that a modern rabbi obtain a doctorate at a secular university to expedite his new role in society and the community. Here the modern “German” rabbi had emerged as an employee (Beamter) who not only needed the approval of the Jewish community but was also subject to a training and selection process involving state and secular knowledge. Consequently, the rabbinate experienced a radical change and a new level of professionalization in line with the changing times. The modern rabbi was to be the driving and defining force in the changing relationship between Jews and society and in the process of the social and religious integration of Jews in society at large. Therefore, the new rabbi was also to be a role model for his congregants and was expected to speak high German, not Yiddish.

The new rabbi was to rely on secular knowledge to represent the Jewish community in society, participate in public and religious discourses as an intellectual beacon of the community, gain the respect of the wider world, and provide a new type of guidance to his congregants. His role was not considered to be political; it was mainly the rabbi’s scholarly qualities grounded in Wissenschaft des Judentums (“academic study of Judaism”) that made Judaism subject to critical inquiry, and it was his training as a pastor (Seelsorger) and religious teacher in the community that changed his duties and shifted the tasks dramatically while Jews as citizens fell under the jurisdiction of the state. Unlike his historical precursor, who acted primarily as a legal expert and communal authority, the modern German rabbi served his community as mediator, spiritual leader, social worker, scholar, and representative in society.

The transformation of the rabbinate created a Reform movement in Judaism in Germany in the 1840s, which drove the process and tried to make Judaism fit for a new role in society. The Reform movement argued that Judaism itself was subject to history, which meant that change was needed to help keep Judaism attractive to a new generation of Jews and in line with contemporary requirements. This idea paved the way for a revision of Jewish practice and forms embracing Enlightenment thought, modern scholarly analysis, and intense intellectual exchange with the non-Jewish world.

Accordingly, a rabbi’s professional training shifted from instruction in traditional yeshivot to modern rabbinical colleges, which combined Wissenschaft des Judentums with modern secular study at a state university, and where—at least in Germany—a doctorate was essential for rabbinical ordination. These standards were maintained in the three modern rabbinical colleges that emerged in Germany in the nineteenth century: the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau (1854), the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1872) in Berlin, and the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar (1873) in Berlin. The standards were also upheld in many smaller but similar and often related institutions in central Europe that followed the model of the new German seminaries, such as the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna and the Jewish Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest.

Wissenschaft des Judentums represented a new critical and scholarly approach to Jewish studies. Under the lens of Wissenschaft (science), Judaism was confronted and challenged by modern history, modern philosophy, the sciences, and religious philosophy. This give-and-take with the secular world drove Judaism’s historical transformation and stood front and center in a newly designed form of dual-track rabbinical education.

Since many of its founders felt that Wissenschaft was inseparably rooted in the intellectual context and culture of German-speaking central Europe and could not be separated from German language and thought,³ its study introduced generations of American rabbis to central European culture and prompted many to travel to Berlin and Breslau, where modern Jewish scholarship was centered until 1938.

The rise of National Socialism threatened this modern Jewish school of thought because Nazi ideology completely rejected the idea of the social inclusion of Jews; thus this modern Jewish leadership was a special target of Nazi atrocities. Yet the last German rabbis and scholars were quite aware of the difficulty of transferring the core of this academic culture into a new English-speaking environment, where it could survive and flourish as modern Jewish studies. The term Wissenschaft des Judentums is used throughout this book as it is the old-world model of a concept that has turned into modern Jewish studies in the English-speaking world since the Holocaust. Even though the two are closely related, the discipline of modern Jewish studies, unlike Wissenschaft des Judentums, has become an essential part of the curricula of many American universities and has developed into an academic discipline on equal footing with other fields. Wissenschaft was never incorporated into the German state university system as an independent academic field before the Shoah—even though some of its elements were part of larger fields, such as Oriental studies—because the state rejected the idea of equating it with Christian theology and of training Jewish rabbis at state universities

During the Nazi era, the German rabbinate was symbolic of the rabbis’ leadership and Judaism’s connection with society at large and was therefore attacked as part of the larger plan to reverse a process that had been occurring since the early nineteenth century. The Nazis worked to eliminate this unique Jewish leadership because they were instrumental in helping the Jewish communities in Germany confront exclusion and persecution, obtain or maintain a proud sense of Jewishness, and deal with the growing plight of German Jews. Ironically, many of the rabbinate used the Nazi attacks to spread a feeling of Jewish ethnic pride, resulting in an outcome quite unintended by the Nazis.

The Focus of This Study

This book presents a long-term analysis of the biographies and life cycles of a Jewish elite that accounted for approximately one-third of the German rabbinate at the time. It aims to determine how persecution, forced migration, and the flight of more than 250 individuals and their families from Germany alone affected their lives and careers. In particular, the younger members of this group made a considerable impression intellectually, socially, and theologically on American Judaism and American Jewish congregational and organizational life in the postwar world.

Little is known about how the rabbinical profession has dealt with the challenge of Nazism and the rising tide of systematic exclusion from society. The existing literature often ends at or just before Nazism or focuses on individuals or a specific community. Much of what we know today is found in postwar scholarly records of the rabbinate’s testimony of the end of an era. Surprisingly, even the literature on the Kristallnacht pogrom does not discuss the effects on rabbis or Jewish communities in depth—a large piece missing in the analysis of this fateful event.⁴ This study begins by exploring the effects of Nazism on the rabbinical profession and its schools, teachers, and students. It explains the rise of a new political rabbinate in a post–First World War generation that became the backbone of Jewish communities and whose new and vast secular activities dramatically affected the profession of the rabbi. It also examines the social and intellectual backgrounds of this new generation of rabbis. While some came from Germany and struggled with assimilation, many others came from a traditional setting in eastern Europe and hoped to become “German rabbis” in Berlin and Breslau.

The refugees’ forced flight from Germany is often considered the history of a group that was not quite involved in the Holocaust. This is because, unlike their east European cousins, a relatively large number of German Jews were able to flee Germany before 1941, when east European Jewry was overrun by German troops and confronted with an unprecedented genocide under German occupation in Poland. A closer look at German-Jewish life experiences—available in the online database German Refugee Rabbis in the United States after 1933 (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and analyzed in this book—reveals that German Jews were intensely involved in the events and effects of Nazism. They were the first to be struck by this movement and had more time than their east European cousins to deal with exclusion and persecution in a place and culture they called home.⁵

A close examination of the rabbis’ roles in German-Jewish communities after 1933 underscores that rabbinical leadership in the communities was targeted by Nazi persecution, and many of the rabbis endured the situation as long as they could. Their many different experiences, including the destruction of synagogues long before November 1938, are an essential part of this book.

That the rabbis’ colleagues and friends abroad, especially in the United States, were well informed and concerned about the events in Europe is proof of the professional and private networks in the profession and its scholarly centers. While some studies discuss the supposed inactivity of American Jews before and during the Holocaust, a closer look at the rescue of the German rabbinate challenges this view and shows how this unique effort to save lives and knowledge preserved a valuable tradition. This research reveals an unprecedented, well-organized, and coordinated effort by America’s rabbis and religious bodies to use all legal administrative options to facilitate and enhance the rescue of their European colleagues and families and help them continue their careers in America. While some aspects of these endeavors are known in relation to the American Reform movement and the role of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the systematic evaluation of personal records in this study provides a larger and much more cohesive picture across the religious spectrum and also explains how American rabbinical colleges were affected and challenged.

Jewish people of this period have long been regarded as only German or American Jews, with no attention paid to transnational networks and identities that transcend national frameworks. But it is these networks—friendships, schools of thought, intellectual circles, schools, religious groups, teachers and students, rabbis, synagogues, congregants and their leaders—that make this history and experience observable, nuanced, and clear. Tracing these networks allows us to identify refugees’ efforts to reorganize, commemorate, confront, and take action in a completely changed Jewish post-Holocaust world. In an increasingly global world, a growing interest in the historical profession in migration studies and the “cultural turn” in the writing of history has underscored that this transnational perspective opens up new ways to understand the complex multidimensional networks of refugees. This book looks beyond what the rabbis experienced in one country—Germany or America—and provides a cohesive perspective on their multicultural background, cultural connections, communications, memories, and varied identities.⁶

How this trajectory affected the intellectual and communal leadership of German Jewry, the heart of German Judaism, is the focus of this book. It presents the history of German refugee rabbis in the United States, the country that not only accepted the largest number of German refugee rabbis and thus facilitated a spectacular rescue by American Jewish seminaries and research centers but also gave them the best opportunity to continue their careers within American Judaism. Due to the long-standing special relationship between German and American Judaism, the latter offered a unique opportunity to allow continuity for a distinctly modern German-Jewish leadership through the integration of the refugees into the world of American Judaism and its religious movements.

This unique cultural transfer is not described in most existing studies. But only a closer look at individual experiences allows us to understand how the integration into American Judaism progressed, how difficult it was, and what stimulated a vivid cultural transfer. The encounter with American Judaism came at a high price, and older rabbis and scholars in particular had difficulties adapting. In this book, a variety of documents underscore that these new beginnings were complex transformations that came with challenges in the rabbis’ professions, in the social and professional networks, and in a congregational structure that was completely new to them.

Books such as Steven Lowenstein’s remarkable Frankfurt on the Hudson do not explore the individuals who ventured into American Judaism but rather focus on a minority of older rabbis who continued their careers in German-Jewish communities in immigrant neighborhoods like Washington Heights within American ethnic religion,⁷ a phenomenon that lasted only a generation or two and focuses on the refugees in their ethnic and religious enclaves.⁸

The younger and vital majority of refugees, including students who graduated after their flight to the United States, were overlooked as a group that was driving this cultural transfer. To understand their complex story, this book traces the sometimes global path a large and diverse group of 200–250 individuals took after 1933 before settling in the United States.

Exploring the group as a whole is a methodological challenge in itself. The collection of prosopographical details on their individual experiences, hopes, thoughts, struggles, and interactions in the processes of flight, rescue, relocation, and coping with their past was necessary to write this book and evaluate their actions. It provided unknown details about the rabbis’ experience of Nazism, their flight, the role of their seminaries, and their first years in the United States. Most importantly, the collection provided the long-sought, long-term perspective on their careers and personal, political, and intellectual encounters.

This perspective emphasizes that they played a distinct role in American Jewry’s postwar renaissance by highlighting the necessity of harboring and nourishing the substance of Judaism in the modern world and encouraging American Jews to learn more about their Jewish identities.

It also reveals that Germany was always on their minds,⁹ for better or worse, and that for many, the cultural transfer did not end in the United States but in reconstructing Jewish life in Germany and in confronting their history.

Memory: Reasoning over the Holocaust, Going Back, and Late Renewal

The refugees took many years and much spatial distance to reestablish their lives and careers. Only after they had reconstructed the foundations of their lives and reached midlife did they have the time, opportunity, and desire to reflect on and historicize their experiences in an effort to make sense of their personal past and the German-Jewish experience as a whole. This process was difficult and painful because it involved a direct and often very emotional confrontation with a divided Germany and German population after the Second World War. Nevertheless, these encounters provided a unique opportunity to come to grips with the Nazi past,¹⁰ personal and material loss, and flight and displacement, and thereby to seek answers to unaddressed questions and understand why German society broke apart and failed to stand up for its Jewish minority in the 1920s and 1930s.¹¹ As Rabbi Leo Baeck predicted soon after the Shoah, the answers to these questions could only be found in a dialogue with the Germans,¹² and many of the refugee rabbis pioneered an exchange with postwar West Germany¹³ and Germans, an exchange that frequently touched sensitive areas on both sides and required care and expertise. The emerging dialogue between Germans and Jews on moral and social questions of the past, their attempt to build a future together, and the return of these religious leaders to Germany in the postwar years created a unique bond in German American and German Jewish relations, which was undoubtedly part of West Germany’s uniquely close postwar relationship with the United States. Their exchanges initiated a new understanding between both groups that was difficult and painful at the beginning but that opened up new and satisfying opportunities for cooperation and a brighter future on both sides.¹⁴

This book explores how the German refugee rabbinate in the United States took on a special mediating role as ethnic brokers of a transatlantic exchange of history and memory that managed to support an incomplete but highly symbolic “return” to Germany. This return was particularly important and visible among liberal Jews, especially those who had joined the American Reform movement and pioneered the encounter.¹⁵

The Jewish identity of the Reform movement was rooted in a special way in German culture, and the destruction of German Jewry and its institutions had shaken its intellectual and theological roots during and after the Nazi period. In fact, Nazi persecution shifted the center of modern Judaism from Europe to the United States after 1938; when the modern German rabbinical seminaries were closed in Germany, many of the German rabbis emigrated, and those who stayed with their communities perished in the Shoah. Therefore, the founding of the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg at the University of Potsdam in 1999, which reinstituted the study of modern Judaism on the European continent just outside of Berlin on the initiative of former refugee rabbis in the American Reform movement, may be regarded as the pinnacle of a mutual rapprochement and celebrated as a belated “victory over history.” This helped clear the way for the successive founding of the Zacharias Frankel College of the Conservative movement in 2013 and also a new modern Orthodox Rabbinerseminar in 2009 in Berlin—all of which consciously connected to the tradition of the schools in Berlin and Breslau.¹⁶

Not only did the lasting connection of the former refugees and their American Jewish religious institutions to the European continent seventy years after the Shoah mark the return of modern Jewish learning to its historical homeland; it also celebrated the integration of Wissenschaft des Judentums into a university program of Jewish theology—a construction that was the first of its kind in Germany. Abraham Geiger had unsuccessfully demanded an inclusive setup for the training of the modern rabbinate in the nineteenth century to give modern Jewish rabbinical training equal standing with the study of Christian theology at German state universities.

Related, but Different: Synagogue and Community in Germany and the United States

To understand the challenges the refugees met, readers must fully grasp the structural differences between German and American Judaism and those of their synagogues and communities, which essentially defined the rabbis’ tasks as well as their religious affiliations. While its relationship with American Judaism was close, American society provided a uniquely liberal environment for religious movements, including Judaism, which had long embraced American pluralism. In Germany, religions and their mutual relationships were still impacted by the effects of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the separation of religion and society was incomplete, and a modern civil society struggled with hierarchical structures and the absence of pluralism. This was reflected in the religious movements, in both their structure and role in society.

Wissenschaft had created a new pluralism in modern Judaism with competing schools of thought in early nineteenth-century central Europe. In addition to Reform Judaism and positive historical trends within the larger orbit of German liberal Judaism, there was an Orthodox Judaism that was open to taking on an active role in society. This created a particular type of German Orthodoxy because it was both modern and Orthodox and emphasized the unique model of Torah im Derech Eretz (Torah with the way of the land). Because of their outward modernity and identification with German culture, German Orthodox Jews were not always accepted in a traditional Orthodox Jewish environment and struggled to continue their careers elsewhere. Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked that many of the students of the Berlin Rabbinerseminar preserved the memory of their alma mater after the Shoah and established brilliant careers, particularly in the state of Israel.

In Germany, parts of Orthodoxy and (radical) Reform also struggled with the communal organization of the Gemeinde, a Jewish communal superstructure that had emerged from the traditional European Jewish kehillah and united all Jews in a locality under one roof. The Gemeinde incorporated the synagogues of all the various religious movements and Jewish institutions, like hospitals and schools, which were maintained and administered by the group, usually under a liberal majority. This required religious compromise to guarantee cohesion, but it did not always satisfy radical Reform or Orthodox perspectives and sometimes triggered secession from the Gemeinde and the formation of separatist congregations.

The Gemeinde also affected the mainstream aspects of the German Reform movement. Although this progressive movement had emerged in the German lands early in the nineteenth century, it was apparent by the middle of that century that the development of the German Reform movement would face challenges within the Gemeinde. Both the need to enforce Jewish cohesion among Orthodox and Liberal Jews therein and the conservative social and political development of German society added to this and did not allow the Reform movement to develop along similarly radical lines as in the United States. Therefore, in Germany, the Reform movement developed into the prevailing so-called liberal Judaism and leaned far more toward Conservative Judaism than its American cousin, which turned into a uniquely progressive Reform movement in the United States.

The relative absence of politics in the lives of rabbis in Europe helped maintain a kind of peace within the multifaceted Gemeinde, where different identities were forced to compromise to find common ground as one community. Here the rabbi, qualified by his Jewish and secular scholarship, served as pastor and spiritual and intellectual leader to the community. Granted, he was also a representative of the Gemeinde in non-Jewish society, but he did not have quite the same standing as a Christian minister in society and rarely maintained close social or professional contacts with Christian colleagues. Instead, he represented a minority that had suffered from a new form of antisemitism since gaining full emancipation in 1871. Based on that situation, the rabbi was indeed a mediator between a minority group and society and a role model and leader in this process.

Since the Gemeinde was large and well established and was staffed and funded by the state’s collection of taxes (as were other religious groups), the rabbinate was far less burdened than its American counterpart by organizational and business tasks and did not have to worry about raising funds for the community. As a consequence, the rabbi maintained his independence as a leader of the community and enjoyed a reputation of dignity and honor. He also represented a distinct form of masculinity. This was illustrated by Leo Baeck’s demand that German rabbis were to maintain posture and dignity especially when humiliated, as was the case during the pogrom of 9 November 1938. Their leadership style resonated in their sermons, which demonstrated their intellectual capacities and potential for religious abstraction, sometimes to a degree that alienated their congregants from religious feeling and community. After 1933, their daily experience was affected by social exclusion and the crumbling of community while they witnessed the rise of innovative trends in Judaism, such as Zionism and a romanticized view of eastern European Jewish cultures—two trends that would shape a new generation of rabbis who came of age in the 1920s and profoundly change the profession.

In the United States, the nineteenth-century offspring of the German Reform movement, which had been transplanted to the United States by that century’s German-Jewish migration, quite literally found its land of promise. Here the initial goals of the German Reform movement materialized into a uniquely progressive and socially involved dynamic modern Judaism that corresponded with American modernity and individualism and exceeded the expectations of its European founders.

The extreme progressivism of the American Reform movement was supported by the independent congregation in the United States. The adoption of that structure in the establishment of Jewish community and religion was backed by many German immigrant rabbis arriving in the first wave from Europe in the nineteenth century because they saw the “free community” or congregation as a way to preserve a hence-unknown liberty of conscience for the individual Jew. This liberty was nonexistent in Europe, where any reforms to the Gemeinde were severely hampered by social integration, religious compromise, and pressures from both the old Jewish establishment and the national governments/states, which rarely permitted secession to those who did not conform to religious compromise.

America was an appealing option for many German Orthodox Jews. Separatist Orthodox communities in Germany gravitated to American religious setting; the congregations enjoyed the pluralism and were able to exist as independent communities and replicate the kahal (local governing body) outside any of the existing religious movements.

American freedoms deeply affected the American Jewish congregation and its rabbinate, and this impacted the refugees’ experiences, professional transformations, and standing in the synagogue. Under the influence of American individualism, the congregation, as a much smaller entity than the Gemeinde, was supported by families or individuals who deeply identified with what both the congregation and the rabbi, as their representative, stood for in the public sphere. In the highly democratic American religious arena, laypeople possessed a previously unknown self-awareness that challenged a rabbi’s leadership and authority far more than was the case in Europe.

The American rabbi was the public face of the congregation and part of the larger local community; he was accepted among the other religious leaders and had a responsibility to present his congregation in this context. Because the congregation lacked the manifold services and institutions of a Jewish Gemeinde, secular Jewish organizations took on an important role in the organization of Jewish life. These organizations included the B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Federations, and many others. In fact, these secular organizations constituted the linchpin of American Jewish life, as they also embraced those Jews who were not members of a congregation. American rabbis therefore had to maintain a relationship with these organizations and demonstrate serious participation in society. Besides the fact that the American Reform movement propagated a strong societal engagement by its religious leaders, this context resulted in far more political and societal roles of American rabbis than was the case in central Europe.

Definitions: The “German” Rabbinate, the Role of the Seminaries, and Generation-Building

In the course of conducting research for this book, it became obvious that the history of the forced migration of German rabbis to the United States could not be separated from the history of the colleges and seminaries. They were not only the centers for modern rabbinical training in central Europe; they were also the cradle and later the hubs of the negotiations for the rescue of graduates, students, and faculty. Therefore, this book discusses the migration of faculty from the rabbinical colleges, for they were sometimes ordained rabbis who had chosen a scholarly career over a community rabbinate. Their stories highlight how the seminaries were changing under Nazism as they faced increasing financial and political pressures, how they helped support Jewish scholars who had lost their positions at state universities and offered them career prospects, and how swiftly faculty positions were vacated and passed on to new colleagues due to increasing emigration. The situation offered some young scholars who were rare specialists in their fields a chance to advance in their careers to a professional level that would otherwise have been more difficult to reach. One scholar was the Talmudist Alexander Guttmann, who was appointed to a full professorship at the Hochschule at age twenty-eight, barely older than his students.

The book also examines the rescue of students, many of whom could finish their studies only after immigrating to the United States. Their rescue was facilitated by mentors such as Ismar Elbogen, Leo Baeck, and Jacob Hoffmann, who supported their placement at American colleges and yeshivot with countless letters of recommendation and empathetic support. Like the faculty of the rabbinical schools in Germany, these students were an essential part of the organic fabric of centers for rabbinic education.

Community rabbis also found that their careers were expedited by the crisis. Advanced students graduated quickly to fill the urgent need for chaplains, teachers, and rabbis; recent graduates moved into full rabbinical positions without working as a teacher or assistant rabbi because emigration vacated many posts and their services as pastors, social workers, and spiritual leaders were in great demand. This provided them with unusual opportunities and in fact enhanced a development that had been underway since the end of the First World War. It created a new type of rabbi: young, dynamic leaders in modern Judaism who were engaged not only in Wissenschaft and scholarship but also in Zionism, politics, and a completely new way of constructing a Jewish community.¹⁷

The seminaries played a key role in selecting candidates for emigration and paving the way for those who were willing to emigrate. After all, a large majority of refugee rabbis and scholars depended on receiving nonquota visas that were available only to clergy or scholars. Thus their hopes of escaping Nazism rested on offers and invitations from the respective modern American rabbinical seminaries and the associated movements in American Judaism, which trained and hired American scholars and the rabbinate.¹⁸ Long-existing contacts and a good working relationship facilitated the exchange between German seminaries and their American counterparts, primarily the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati (1875), the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York (1922), the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City (1886), Dropsie College (1907–1986), and Yeshiva College (1928) in New York City.

The definition of the “German rabbinate” at the center of this study must be understood in its widest possible framework. It embraced scholars of Wissenschaft, many of whom were not officiating but ordained rabbis—students, and rabbis serving a Gemeinde or Jewish institution. Of course, this included German citizens who were trained in Germany at one of the flagship seminaries mentioned above. Nevertheless, citizenship cannot be the only defining criterion for “the German rabbi.” Whereas the label “German rabbi” was more or less a cultural self-description, citizenship was a matter not of choice but of political borders, many of which were highly contested, discussed, and reversed after the First World War.

After 1919, borders were redrawn, thereby excluding multiethnic areas that had formerly belonged to the lost empires of Prussia and Austria-Hungary. These were areas in which a large number of officiating rabbis had been born as Prussians or Austrians. They were deeply rooted in German culture, especially in the bourgeois middle class, but their places of birth suddenly turned into newly emerging nation-states, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, or Russia, which classified them as foreigners if they had not acquired German citizenship in the meantime.¹⁹

After 1919, this restructuring may have been the reason why, in the 1920s and 1930s, over half of the students in the German rabbinical seminaries did not possess German citizenship but were officially “east Europeans” who were attracted by modern “German” Judaism and modern German scholarship. Many of them, irrespective of citizenship, had grown up in a German cultural context reaching as far east as Bukovina. To complete their education, some of them may have been attracted to the schools in Berlin and Breslau by a curiosity to explore Western, specifically German, cultures of knowledge and academia, which at the time were famous for their dedication to scholarship and critical method.²⁰

In this book, the definition of the “German rabbinate” is expanded to include these cultural backgrounds, diverse citizenships, educational backgrounds, and the training of those rabbis who could, in the widest sense, be considered part of the group: in short, everyone who—irrespective of their citizenship—obtained their rabbinical training at one of the German rabbinical seminaries, who officiated in Germany (even if they were not German citizens or trained at a modern German rabbinical seminary but resided in Germany and served a German synagogue), and who were Orthodox students and rabbis with German citizenship but did not attend a modern German seminary.

Since legacy, memory, and generational self-identification as the “last generation of the German rabbinate” also include those who are referred to in the literature as “the second generation” (those who emigrated as children with or without their parents and received their education in the United States at one of the modern rabbinical seminaries),²¹ their data and experiences were also included in the group of “German refugee rabbis.” Although they constitute a specific subgroup and were not German trained, they have the core features of the ethos of the “German rabbinate,” such as their commitment to earning a doctorate as a prerequisite for the rabbinate, their dedication to scholarship and teaching, and a strong cultural affiliation to their tradition. Their biographical data highlights how devoted they continued to be to the German-Jewish community and German culture. A significant number found partners within the refugee community and continued to speak German, which was essential for their access to German culture, their Jewish scholarship, and a meaningful exchange with postwar Germans. They participated in the generation-building process and throughout their lives identified with a specific memory of the German Nazi past, which continued to play an essential role in their private and professional lives. They remained quite conscious of their experience with and connection to a lost Jewish culture and tradition, even though their American identity was never in question.²²

This identification was the result of a generation-building process that started with their hurried flight from Germany and launched their displacement. Generations are more than mere age cohorts that share several similar experiences or one particularly dramatic experience that shapes the lives of those who associate with a specific generation. For the generation-building process, collective communication of shared experiences and one’s role therein are essential. A number of events and social and political contexts in the postwar world have provided frameworks in which these rabbis could reflect on, discuss, and cope with their shared biographical experiences, roles, and events, including their own rescue and survival. Plenty of frameworks existed for communication crucial to the generation-building process, and they usually allowed the refugees to share their firsthand knowledge as victims of Nazism in a way that was unique and meaningful for their later lives and that permitted them to speak with special authority.²³

In their careers, the rabbis frequently benefited from their shared expertise with Nazism during this period. This expertise was in high demand, both in the United States and postwar Germany for reasons that are explored in detail in the second half of this book. Segregation and the emerging American civil rights movement created one such framework, providing a wide, popular, and certainly important projective surface to connect the past with the present. Others included the growing demand for interfaith dialogue, the discussion of ethnic diversity in the United States after the Second World War, and the effort to contribute to a timely and meaningful sense of Jewish identity and Judaism to which the individual community member felt connected. For some rabbis, Jewish theology as such provided a framework by which they can understand and seek answers for the Holocaust and amalgamate it into their autobiographical experiences or to engage in Holocaust education and commemoration; others undertook difficult trips back to Germany and initiated a dialogue with the postwar German population as they thought it necessary to search for answers where the destruction had begun.

All of the refugees, rabbis, scholars, and students of the former Berlin and Breslau seminaries used burials, commemorations, anniversaries, and their new rabbinical organizations to build or reflect on their image as a special generation, one with a shared past and unique legacy. After all, these spaces and events connected them to a specific time and place. One such occasion was the burial of Ismar Elbogen, the former rector of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for the Academic Study of Judaism), who died in New York in 1943. His funeral was attended by an overwhelming number of his former students and colleagues who gathered to honor him five thousand miles away from Berlin, where these relationships had been formed. The event marked the end of an era: the Hochschule had become history. At the time, it enhanced the communication of the past, one’s role therein, and the future. In like fashion, memorial volumes about the seminaries, a community, or an institution such as the Hochschule—some of which were even labeled to be the work of “the last generation”—signal where and how communitization, or the formation of a special community, occurred hand in hand with Americanization. This is also true for many of the autobiographical writings and memoirs, as they present an additional medium by which communitization took place.²⁴ In this process, the (destroyed) seminaries turned into “generation objects” that represented the social formation of their professors, students, and graduates and connected them into a collective.

The refugees’ American institutional counterparts served a similar function in the respective movements of American Judaism because they corresponded to the former German seminaries with regard to their history and tradition and provided a haven where the refugees felt stable and could transition into American Judaism. They became centers for the Americanization of the refugees as well as for the reconstruction of their lives and careers and provided a platform where they could continue their scholarship. Wissenschaft des Judentums stood at the center of their identities and may perhaps also be regarded as a generation object because it provided them with a strong intellectual realm to express themselves and combat obscurity in exile. The centrality of Wissenschaft in this process explains the return of modern Jewish learning to German universities; the founding of the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies) in Heidelberg and more recently the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg in Potsdam held special significance for this generation when they launched these projects.

The former refugees’ return to Germany as visiting professors, leading faculty, or community rabbis and their fundraising or institutional support signaled that this last generation was a bridge between the past and the future. Even though the refugees were the last of the graduates and students of the destroyed seminaries, elements of the German-Jewish tradition, liberal Judaism, Wissenschaft, and the spirit of modern Judaism were not extinct but were reinstitutionalized by them in the United States and, later in their lives, in Germany. For those forced to leave Germany in the 1930s, this marked a personal victory over Nazism. When they looked back at their biographies, they could feel satisfaction and find some sort of closure. The historicization of one’s biography, which typically begins at midlife, corresponds with the database findings, which state that the cohort known as the “last generation of the German rabbinate” was born after 1895/1900. It must be noted that only the younger refugees had the time to build careers and reflect on their histories, and the way they built their careers and lives in the United States with respect to their past is significant and has played an important role in society.²⁵

Method: Managing and Analyzing Data of the Group and Sources

This book examines, distinguishes, and analyzes the personal lives and professional development of these different groups of German refugee rabbis from a transatlantic perspective and also as a whole—instead of focusing merely on one period of their lives, be it persecution, emigration, or postwar integration into American Judaism—by using an extensive collection of data gathered from a web-based database called German Refugee Rabbis in the United States after 1933 (MIRA).²⁶ The database structures these refugee life cycles into several segments, exploring the specifics of their migration, careers, and personal lives to evaluate and compare the individual biographies, analyze the commonalities and differences of their life cycles, and use this information to explore the generational structure and the generation-building process within this larger group of refugee rabbis. This collection of quantitative data gives us a comprehensive overview of this relatively large and diverse group of refugees and their paths of travel and professions before, during, and after emigration, and it plots their migration paths on an interactive map. Thus it becomes obvious that this is not just a transatlantic but a global migration, which took the refugees not only westward to Great Britain and the United States but also eastward to Palestine and even to Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Australia before they settled in the United States. The database research emphasizes how Great Britain was a special European haven for Jewish refugees and how it contributed to the wide dispersion of the rabbis by forced internment in other Commonwealth nations such as Australia or Canada. This systematic quantitative evaluation and collection of data provides a balanced judgment about a group whose social significance varies and for whom there are not always records or biographical data to track their paths. Part of the collected data has been made accessible in an online database hosted by the University of Munich to stimulate further research on this refugee group and the German rabbinate. I hope that in the future, the database will be expanded to include additional regions and upgraded qualitatively with regard to its digital potential, resources, and analytical instruments.²⁷

To evaluate the group of refugee rabbis as a whole, it is essential not to overlook the less visible individuals, those who left the profession after they emigrated and those who were older and died soon after their resettlement in the United States. Without considering them, the well-documented biographies of individuals with outstanding careers may falsely be considered typical for the group as a whole.

It is striking that this group made a major effort to document their experiences in autobiographical writings, memoirs, survivor interviews, websites, memorial volumes, and even films. These records are an important resource, allowing us to not only reconstruct their past but also to see how they tried to preserve history and memory. With this documentation, these people directly linked the past with the present and created a special legacy as “the last generation of the German rabbinate” many years after their forced migration and the Holocaust.²⁸ The second part of this book focuses on the analysis of these records, exploring the postwar lives and careers of the refugee rabbis, the construction of “a last generation of the German rabbinate,” and the rabbis’ return to Germany in the postwar era.

In addition to the systematic collection of prosopographical data in the database mentioned above and the autobiographical publications, this book relies on a vast array of original records from a number of German and American archives, particularly those of the three major rabbinical seminaries in the United States, which were key to the rescue process: the American Jewish Archives on the campus of HUC in Cincinnati, the Archives of the JTS, the Archives of Yeshiva University, and the American Agudah Israel in New York, from which I used papers pertaining to individuals, the college administration, their presidents’ correspondence, and their publications. In addition, I have greatly benefited from the holdings of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, which permitted me to use the papers of individuals and the collection of the New York–based Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration. This collection was compiled under the guidance of Herbert Strauss, a former student of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, who was a professor of history at City College before returning to Berlin to become the director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism in 1982. Based on his research experience and work on German refugees, Strauss launched a research project with a group of scholars at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in Munich in the 1970s and managed to reconstruct the biographies of a vast number of “intellectual émigrés” in the early 1980s. This group published its results in the multivolume Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigres, one of the first groundbreaking works on the history of refugees from Nazism. The questionnaires and interviews this research project collected proved to be an extremely valuable source of information and guided my research far beyond what the published materials had provided. These records informed me in detail about the flight and resettlement until the late 1970s of a large number of rabbis. Because the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration partnered with the IfZ on this project, the materials could be examined in the archives of the IfZ. Over the years, I returned many times to this rich resource for research in German contemporary history and was fortunate that the institute’s newly founded Center for Holocaust Studies was able to sponsor my work during my tenure as a senior research fellow there during the summer of 2019.

I have reviewed the papers of the Cultural Department of the Political Archive in the German Foreign Office in Berlin and the records of German missions in the United States after 1949. Consular officers and diplomats were involved in organizing the visits of major Jewish leaders to West Germany after 1949 and co-organized the visitor programs of specific German cities from the 1960s onward. Several smaller collections were examined, such as the Joseph Asher Papers at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and a remarkable number of digitized materials and Holocaust testimonies, which are publicly available through research libraries or the internet.

Finally, I want to stress the importance of the digital database MIRA, which is currently undergoing an intense update into a sophisticated research portal and a massive expansion with more features, updates, visualizations, and analytical tools after the project received additional funding in the Priority Program “Jewish Cultural Heritage” by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It aims to provide a modern, user-friendly, and sustainable resource that will hopefully stimulate more work in this field of research. With quick links to archival materials, library resources, and finding aids, the database facilitates access to materials that highlight the history of this transnational group of refugees. I also hope that it will help in the analysis of the persecution, flight, and memory of these German-Jewish refugees, who have received little attention from historians until recently but whose stories have been passed on to the twenty-first century, thanks to my colleagues Gerhard Schön and Christian Riepl at the Center for Digital Humanities of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.