Driving social change: the power of public opinion – understanding the network dynamics in German-Jewish periodical culture, 1750s–1930s

ABSTRACT

The history of the Jewish press can be studied both as a mirror and as a motor. The former looks back on the relationship between history and culture. It lends itself to the purpose of curation and retrieval and implies an agreed Jewish historiography. The latter method is forward looking. It suggests a more holistic approach, reaching beyond the identification of individual titles, and encourages a mapping of the overall Jewish press landscape in terms of cultural and economic capital, marginal initiatives, cross referencing, and the identification of trends. This article embarks on the latter approach. Presupposing that public discourses do not just reflect or represent social entities and alliances, but also construct or constitute them, I focus on the visionary character of Jewish periodicals and on their transformative function.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical German-Jewish periodical landscape
• network dynamics
• transformative function
• visions
• trends
• opinion leaders

Introduction: methods and material

Rather than consulting the voices of the press as a source for the reconstruction of the past, I interpret them as a vehicle for the discursive construction of social change, the broadest division being the period before 1879 (stability stage) and the period after 1879 (mobility stage). Accordingly, the aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, I shed light on the burgeoning of Jewish periodical culture as the child of the Berlin Haskalah, at the crossroads of Jewish tradition and philosophical enquiry during the mid-eighteenth century, illuminating its unfolding after adopting German as the Jewish lingua franca during the early years of Reform Judaism. I then follow its progress during the second third of the nineteenth century, when German-Jewish periodicals enjoyed a period of stability.¹ This approach relies on the definition of the German-Jewish press as periodicals published by Jewish editors for Jewish readers² but challenges the conventional reference to the German territory before World War II. Instead, it introduces Bourdieu’s Field Theory,³ which allows a transcultural view transcending the focus on the context of the nation state.

A “field” is understood here as a strongly interconnected discursive arena with its own social dynamics. It is further characterized by competition (e.g. cultural vs. economic capital), internal controversies (e.g. Orthodox vs. Reform) and external factors (e.g. the impact of incoming movers and shakers, whose traditions may propel established readerships into a new awareness of reading and criticism).

The year 1879 marks a break, and the beginning of events that motivate the second aim of this article. The decade of the 1880s saw a deterioration of the Jewish condition in Central and Eastern Europe.⁴ Jewish periodical culture began to respond to growing Jewish mobility and relocation as a result of various factors, of which European anti-Semitism is flagged here as the most relevant, by articulating a variety of ideologies that impacted the field of the German-Jewish press. Germany emerged as a country of transmigration per se. Migrating agents brought with them new types of presses from Imperial Russia, where a divergent Jewish periodical culture had developed. Indeed, Jewish emigration from Russia, mostly triggered by poverty, conscription, legal repression and pogroms,⁵ was part of a much broader exodus of Eastern Europeans to Western Europe and the Americas.⁶ Yet, two factors were crucial in terms of the German-Jewish press landscape: state censorship, including ruthless persecution of those producing subversive literature, and statistics in the service of anti-Semitism, reflected in the Tsarist policy of a Jewish numerus clausus in Russian higher education.

Driven by new visions and ideologies, mobile editors introduced new distinct modes of addressing target groups, intending to instruct and persuade them. As a result, many periodicals that subsequently established themselves as opinion leaders within the wider field of Jewish periodical culture struck a new tone of exhortation. The call for solidarity and protest underlying their appeals has been ascribed to the presence of groups whose relation to the field of state power is curtailed.⁷ Applied to the Jewish context, this visionary mode relies on a modern historical consciousness, which included the traditional mandate of education, but also captured a spirit of the future⁸ without compromising Jewish identity constructs.

Appeals can be traced back to the premodern politics of Jewish advocacy [shtadlanut]. They often assumed the knowledge of languages, as calls for intervention and support were not necessarily restricted to native realms. As discursive practice, appeals became more affirmative during the 1880s, when pleas began to address a wider European public. Yet, appeals were not necessarily followed up by any concerted action in support of those in greatest need, which in Russia caused a radicalization of Jewry and ultimately the emergence of two Jewish political movements with diametrically opposed programmes.⁹

To shed light on the rise of opinion leaders is part of the article’s second aim: to appraise the response Jewish periodicals gave to the unprecedented challenges of anti-Semitism faced by German Jewry during the 1880s and 1890s, together with the transcultural nature they assumed as a result of Jewish mobility and the internationalizing discourses of Socialism and Zionism across languages and borders.

The present article will follow these developments, which reached their peak in the 1930s. It will stop there without consideration of Freeden’s concise social history of German-Jewish periodical culture under Nazi rule,¹⁰ a critical review of which will have to be reserved for another study. It sets out to develop the historiographical narrative of the German-Jewish press in the light of its transformative effect, with German as the principle vehicle for the Jewish modernization project.

Periodization: the pivotal year of 1879

1879 saw a watershed in the history of the German-Jewish press. The following decade witnessed the popularization of the four distinct manifestations, or strains, of anti-Semitism, namely religious, economic, racial and political, each with its own themes depicting alleged Jewish malfeasance. Their anti-Jewish sentiments, alongside the decline in economic well-being, a rise in Jewish immigration, and the strength of the revolutionary left, created the grim conditions Jews across Europe began to endure in the 1880s.

Those developments were constrained neither geographically nor discursively within a precisely defined geographical space, which is why this article will argue in favour of a transcultural approach. It is useful to imagine the German-Jewish press landscape as a network of nodes and hubs¹¹ with their connecting lines, rather than within the context of national boundaries. A visualization of this network enables us to reconstruct the emergence of periodicals at the hubs of Jewish community life, to scrutinize local initiatives, and to juxtapose and correlate different networks of periodicals, together with their instigators, dissemination and readerships. This allows us to identify points of intensified contact and mobilization, to identify the directions of cultural flow, and to reveal how periodicals contributed to German becoming the Jewish lingua franca.

Discussion

Part I: the German-Jewish press as a child of the Berlin Haskalah

The German-Jewish press landscape as a network topology: nodes of knowledge, cultural capital and the notion of gathering

Points of intensified contact appeared at the crossroads of Jewish tradition and philosophical enquiry during the mid-eighteenth century. They became paradigmatic nodes of knowledge and are classified here as super-nodes. Berlin stands out as the principal super-node. A modern Jewish press emerged there, when leading personalities of the Haskalah needed a forum for promoting their ideas.

The notion of “gathering” scholars to share their views and rehearse their interpretations determined the emergence of the first periodical, which appeared in Berlin sometime between 1750 and 1758 under the title Kohelet Mussar [קהלת מוסר – “Preacher of Morals”]. Launched in Hebrew by Moses Mendelssohn, its title and content refer to the idea of gathering moral lessons. It followed the example of contemporary non-Jewish periodicals and turned out to be the only Hebrew representative of a widespread and popular eighteenth-century European literary-journalistic genre known as the “moral weekly.”¹² More specifically, Kohelet Mussar reflected Mendelssohn’s aspiration to combine Jewish tradition and German Bildung, besides his enthusiasm for a renaissance of Hebrew.¹³

The concept of gathering is even more articulate in Ha-Meʾassef [הַמְאַסֵּף – “The Gatherer”]. Conceived as a monthly, Ha-Meʾassef was one of the central projects for the promotion of Jewish enlightenment. It was launched by its leading personalities, among them Isaak Abraham Euchel, Joel (Bril) Löwe and Aaron Wolfssohn, disciples of Mendelssohn, and published, with interruptions, from 1783 to 1797 in Konigsberg, Berlin and Breslau. What distinguished those three places? They hosted the biggest Jewish communities in Prussia, they constituted nodes of knowledge, and their university environment inspired learned societies to provide fodder and incentives for the upsurge of Haskalah periodicals.

Ha-Meʾassef was linked to various Jewish enlightenment societies. They were essential agents in rejuvenating Hebrew as a medium for the promotion of the Haskalah spirit in Ashkenaz.¹⁴ Among them were the “Gesellschaft Hebräischer Litteraturfreunde” [“Society of the Friends of Hebrew Literature”] in Konigsberg und Berlin, the “Gesellschaft der Beförderer des Edlen und Guten” [“The Society for the Promotion of the Noble and the Good”] in Berlin und Breslau, and, later on, the new “Gesellschaft Hebräischer Litteraturfreunde” in Berlin, Altona und Dessau, which supported the emergence of Ha-Meʾassef’s German-language successor entitled Der Neue Sammler (1808–1811).

Launched by Salomon Jacob Cohen, Der Neue Sammler appeared successively in Berlin (1808–1808), Altona (1809–1810) and, co-edited by Moses Philippson, in Dessau (1810–1811). These places indicate Cohen’s search for hubs where the project of Jewish Enlightenment in Hebrew still resonated,¹⁵ during a period when the rejuvenation of Hebrew generally had lost momentum. The periodical’s last issues appeared with German letters, perhaps not just a response to a growing number of Jews turning to the state language, but also suggesting a widened target group that included Christian circles, besides Jewish maskilim.

An extension to non-Jewish readerships had also been the decisive criterion for the Sulamith (Leipzig, Dessau, Kassel), launched in German in 1806 by David Fränkel and Joseph Wolf. They believed Christian support was integral to the processes of Jewish regeneration and emancipation.¹⁶ Targeting a widened public required a change in the mindset of Jewish readers and an opening up to bourgeois values and, although secularizing, these values were negotiated in the sacred space of the synagogue¹⁷ through the medium of homiletics, as will be discussed below.

Sulamith and Der Neue Sammler thus mark a turning point in the history of German-Jewish periodical culture. As publicist ventures they illuminate a transformation process across languages and borders: the beginning of Jewish journalism in German and the adoption of German as a vehicle for Jewish Enlightenment and modernization. More vigorous than its Hebrew predecessor, Der Neue Sammler implemented Ha-Meʾassef’s aspiration to gain subscribers,¹⁸ its dissemination reaching out from Dessau to Berlin, and via Frankfurt and Hamburg to Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Riga.

All these places rose to prominence, as they introduced the next stage in the history of German-Jewish periodical culture. Whereas the first stage had evolved by a process of “gathering,” enabled by the cultural capital available in the three super nodes Berlin, Konigsberg and Breslau, the second stage was brought about by the notion of “outreach” on the basis of economic capital that was available at settlements along the heirs of ancient trade routes. They facilitated the spread of Jewish periodicals and are classified here as subsidiary nodes.

The adoption of the state language: subsidiary nodes, economic capital and the notion of outreach

Subsidiary nodes arose at the intersection of trade routes, where Jewish communal structures had developed: Via Regia (Hohe Straße) connecting Erfurt and Frankfurt/Main, and the Old Bohemian Trail (Alter Böhmischer Steig) leading from Saxony to Bohemia, besides the historical Salt Roads, the routes leading from the salt mines in Halle, with hubs forming in Leipzig, Magdeburg, Breslau and Dessau.¹⁹ These towns became pillars of an interconnected system of Jewish periodicals within a greater German cultural realm,²⁰ in which German became the vernacular serving both Jewish communal structures and administrative transparency, besides promising access to universal and secular knowledge.

In terms of outreach, Leipzig occupies a key position. Twice a year, the city’s Trade Fair attracted Jewish merchants from afar. Frequently, it coincided with the Jewish festival seasons. Jewish merchants not only exchanged goods, but also enjoyed yom tov hospitality at the Leipzig Temple, where they became acquainted with a new type of sermon in German. The Leipzig Temple had been built in 1820 on the initiative of members of the Hamburg Temple – a prominent synagogue of Reform Judaism.²¹

The following years saw the dissemination of German along the networks of the Leipzig Trade Fair. Exemplary sermons, given by Zunz, J. Wolf, J. L. Auerbach, J. N. Mannheimer, Wohlwill, L. Philippson, M. Heß, Ad. Jellinek, and G. Philippson found their way to the nearby Jewish communities of Magdeburg (by L. Philippson), Dresden (by B. Beer, Frankel), Bernburg (Herrheimer), and to the more distant ones in Breslau (by Günsburg, Wolfson, and A. Geiger Joël), Konigsberg (Francolm, Saalschütz), Vienna (J. N. Mannheimer, A. Jellinek). From there, they reached Hungary, (by Schwab, Löw), Bohemia, Prague (Zunz, M. Sachs, Kämpf), Moravia, and North America.²²

The correlation between homiletics and the spread of German along routes of Jewish trade was pointed out by Meyer Kayserling in his periodical collection Bibliothek jüdischer Kanzelredner [Library of Jewish Pulpit Lectures] (1869–1872). The dissemination of homiletic literature printed in German, Kayserling argued, was a response to the growing demand for liturgical texts in high-German to replace the “derashot gibberish [das kauderwelsche Deraschot] of the Polish-German rabbis.”²³ In contrast to Yiddish, German thus experienced ennoblement as a “nigh holy tongue,” a vehicle for religious expression second only to Hebrew.²⁴

Kayserling’s remarks reflects contemporary attitudes towards Yiddish, which was considered a crude dialect of German. His Library launched in 1869, referred to the attempts to circulate homiletic-liturgical texts on a periodical basis. There were earlier undertakings made by the first spiritual leaders of the Hamburg Temple, Eduard Kley and Gotthold Salomon. In 1818, Kley came up with a temple prayer book including Hebrew originals and German translations, which launched a comprehensive liturgical reform. Its verses were accompanied by choral melodies that replicated the sound of Christian chorales.²⁵

Another publicist venture was their Sammlung der neuesten Predigten [Collection of Recent Sermons], issued as a biannual / quarterly between 1826 and 1827,²⁶ which initiated a printed series of sermons in German. The Collection was a response to the request articulated by teachers and community leaders in Hamburg. For the time being, the circulation of Jewish homiletic literature in German remained confined to the German lands.²⁷ The 1830s and 1840s saw its periodicity increase, together with its dissemination along Jewish trade routes, gaining momentum beyond the German lands and thus contributing to the adoption of German as the Jewish lingua franca.

Another example pinpointing the interplay between homiletics and the rise of German in Jewish periodicals, was the Israelitische Predigt and Schulmagazin [Jewish Sermon and School Magazine], launched as a monthly between 1834 and 1836 by Ludwig Philippson in Magdeburg. The Magazine set out to disseminate “valuable and substantial sermons”²⁸ for didactic purpose and thus emphasized the commitment of Jewish periodicals to the mandate of German Bildung. It presupposed a strong communal effort even far away, such as the eastern edge of the Prussian double province (Ost- und Westpreußen). Close to the influences in culture and language from partitioned Poland, a forging of Jewish periodical culture and German as the language of religious instruction was invigorated by Jewish communities in the East of the Province, who set up a network to promote the training of “suitable Jewish religious instructors equipped with a timely German education.”²⁹

A milestone in this respect was the foundation in Konigsberg of the Association for the Promotion of Studies among Jewish Talents [Israelitischer Studien-Beförderungs-Verein für Ost- und Westpreußen], established as a transregional network in 1868. By 1873, it was joined by 47 Jewish communities throughout the Province reaching out to Allenstein, Elbing, Löbau, Lyck, Memel, Stargard, Thorn and other towns where Jewish communities shared the perceived threat of German-language tuition, which was referred to as “an uncertified and unnaturalised tuition, under which we all suffer.”³⁰ Their joint response exemplifies how the focus on religious instruction in German stimulated the delimitation from external influences. It led to an unprecedented transregional network,³¹ whose annual report served as an important medium to strengthen community connectivity during the years 1870–1891.

Scrutinizing the process of Jewish periodicals adopting German thus reveals not only a bridge between the Jewish mandate of education and the German spirit of learned inquiry, but also a cultural flow in two directions: linear through subsidiary nodes and their economic capital, reaching out from the centre to the periphery, and circular within the transregional networks set up within the periphery, of which Eastern Prussia constitutes just one example. What distinguished linear from circular flows was how the outreach from centre to the periphery invigorated the adoption of German, whereas the circular networks of the periphery were set up to retain it.

Voices from afar: marginal initiatives and the diversification of the periodical landscape: the notion of connectivity

Marginal initiatives leading to transregional periodical networks gained momentum during the second third of the nineteenth century. Their instigators were usually from small provincial Jewish communities. Unlike those in the elitist super nodes and well-to-do subsidiary nodes, these communities had to struggle for visibility. Their periodicals enabled the launch and maintenance of networks. Internally, they facilitated interaction between scattered communities, in order to agree on concerted action for their improvement; externally, they displayed shared concerns. Two types of periodicals will have to suffice here to exemplify this trend: the reports of religious schools, released annually or biannually, and the periodicals of professional groups, usually disseminated weekly or monthly.

The reports of Jewish religious schools followed the example of their Christian counterparts. They started attracting attention in the second third of the nineteenth century, when Jewish religious schools were founded for two reasons: firstly, to counteract secularization of Jewish education in the so-called Free Schools (Freyschulen), founded by Jewish enlighteners and reformers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³² Secondly, it was hoped they would contribute significantly to a future history of Jewish scholarship.³³

Religious schools were established throughout the German lands, in Kiel, Frankfurt and Hannover, in Central Germany [Mitteldeutschland], eastern Pomerania and the Neumark area where immigration from the East had swelled the ranks of Jewish communities, particularly in provincial metropoles, such as Thorn, Colberg, Posen, Stargard and Bromberg.

The periodicals of the teaching professions proved to be important initiatives.³⁴ A teachers’ and cantors’ press emerged in the Prussian province, where Jewish communities were usually unable to employ more than one person. Therefore, they assigned their teachers the position of the community secretary, prayer leader (cantor) and shochet. Promoting the interest of the teacher meant promoting the school as a community’s central institution. This was timely, as Jewish teachers were disadvantaged compared to their Christian colleagues, in terms of salary, job security and pension entitlement. Periodicals thus aimed to promote these interests and to campaign for the launch of professional associations committed to raising funds and alerting public interest in their disadvantaged status.

Over the decades, these periodicals acquired the function of collective organizers. This is demonstrated by Abraham Blaustein’s weekly Der jüdische Kantor (The Jewish cantor), launched in Bromberg in 1879. Although Der jüdische Kantor ceased to exist in 1898, it paved the way from a one-man-enterprise initiated to surmount isolation in the province, to the Standesverein der jüdischen Kantoren in Deutschland [Association of Jewish Cantors in Germany], established in 1905 as a national organization representing the interest of an entire professional group. The next stage saw the organization’s centralization, which points to another trend: the progression into mainstream presses of a publicist venture through its geographical relocation to the centre.

These four stages – marginal initiative, connectivity, institutionalization, centralization – indicate to what extent the diversification of the Jewish periodical landscape depended on geographical location, local concerns, visibility, and the status of professional groups.

Towards internationalization: statistics as a response to Jewish mobility and secularization

Other types of periodicals followed a similar flow from the periphery to the centre, such as those launched in the service of philanthropic and statistical ventures. In contrast to the periodicals associated with teaching (and other) professions, however, their launch was inspired not by isolation but by external factors. They included Jewish migration from Imperial Russia, fleeing poverty, conscription, pogroms and growing Judeophobia³⁵ following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Within the process of East West migration, Germany emerged as a country of transmigration per se. Accordingly, the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw a burgeoning of welfare organizations at the points of transhipment, and port cities, such as Danzig and Hamburg, where local Jewish communities ensured that migrants en route to America with neither means nor access to Jewish communal institutions were looked after.

There was a subsequent upsurge of periodicals calling and accounting for philanthropic action. They were supplemented by balance sheets of income and expenditure, to reassure stake holders and donors, besides reports on demographic trends and professional reorientation as a result of mobility, and they relied on both observational studies and statistical research. Eventually, these supplements grew into independent periodicals, dedicated exclusively to statistical material. Mostly launched at points of transmigration, their editorial offices were soon relocated and centralized in the capital Berlin.

The 1880s saw a multiplication of statistics. A statistical yearbook was launched in 1885 by the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (DIGB) – a predecessor of today’s Central Council for Jews in Germany. With Jewish migration exploding in the 1880s, surveys of Jewish population and demography began to include data collected beyond national borders. Their international dimension increased after 1900, when Zionist groups adopted statistical methods claiming they help to understand the overall Jewish condition as a motivation to change it, while reporting emigration figures and encouraging resettlement in Palestine.³⁶ This internationalization process is known as “Jewish Statistics” or “Jewish Social Science,” and eventually led to the national institutionalization of Jewish statistics in Germany within the framework of two organizations: the Verein für Statistik der Juden (Association for Statistics among the Jews) founded in 1902 by Alfred Nossig (1864–1943),³⁷ with its organ Jüdische Statistik launched in 1903, and the Bureau for Jewish Statistics, established in 1904 by Arthur Ruppin and Jacob Segall. Their publishing venture, the Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Journal for Jewish Demography and Statistics), launched in January 1905, marks a change in the study of Jewish identity constructs. This study, initiated in 1819 by the Association for Jewish Culture and Scholarship and known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, relied on historical and literary sources and their associated research methods anchored in history and philology. Ruppin and Segall now introduced statistical and anthropological methods, based on the practices of German economists.³⁸

External forces as trend setters: new directions of cultural flow: the notion of mobilization

Ideological goals began to dominate the German-Jewish press from the late nineteenth century. Modern ideologies had opened the door to a Jewish renaissance. They brought about an upsurge of Jewish political parties, each of them striving to realize their own vision of the future. Orthodoxy disagreed with the Liberals. Zionists struggled with Socialists. The mouthpieces they established to articulate and disseminate their respective ideologies subscribed to the postulate of the shofar, reaching out to connect Jewish communities and rally them behind a particular idea. Such outreach could extend beyond national boundaries and the confines of Judaism, as it did e.g. in the socialist call to workers of the world to unite, known as proletarian internationalism.

Within this context, the three super-nodes, Konigsberg, Berlin and Breslau, gained renewed prominence as hubs of contact and mobilization, pioneered by a new type of periodical. It had been outsourced to Konigsberg from neighbouring Vilna, at the time part of Imperial Russia, where the emergence of independent journalistic practice was subject to strict conditions of Imperial censorship. Most relevant within the present context is Vilna’s role as an exchange point for the transport of clandestine literature that had been produced in Vienna, Konigsberg and Berlin, for distribution in Russia.

In that respect, Konigsberg assumed new strategic relevance during the late 1870s. Being close to the Russian border, it became a point of transhipment, a reservoir of subversive forces, and a fountain of revolutionary writings that had been outsourced from Russia by editors who feared Tsarist persecution. Yet, this border was more permeable than the concept suggests, and radical thought could still be “smuggled into Russia through the backdoor,”³⁹ as the editor of the journal Asefat hakhamim [אספת חכמים – “Gathering of scholars”] put it. Published in Hebrew, it envisaged a reformed society, with equal rights for Russian Jews, to be achieved by revolution, while its name concealed its subversive agenda.⁴⁰

Asefat hakhamim appeared in eight issues between October 1877 and October 1878. Produced in Konigsberg by Michael Levi Rodkinson und Mark Winchevsky, it was to substitute Aron Liberman’s short-lived Vienna journal Ha emet [Truth], which was to become the prototype of a socialist periodical. As a graduate of the Vilna, state-sponsored rabbinical school, Liberman insisted on Hebrew as the language of socialist propaganda, as he took it to be the best literary vehicle for training revolutionaries among Talmudic students.

The revival of Hebrew for Socialist propaganda did not take place in German-Jewish periodical culture, where its use as a medium of Jewish Enlightenment and a Jewish secular tongue was already declining by the end of the eighteenth century. In Russia, by contrast, Hebrew had both these functions, while at the same time maintaining its relevance as the language of religious life.⁴¹ Hence, the outsourcing of radical Haskalah journalism illustrates the contrasting role of Hebrew at different times in Russian, Austrian and German Jewish periodical cultures. It also marks the rise of press networks that transcended national borders. Similar networks developed as a function of Jewish mobility over the following decades. The migration of people and ideologies pioneered new types of periodicals. They can be summarized under the broad heading “opinion presses.”

Part II: periodicals as a function of Jewish mobility

Propaganda, agitation and the rise of opinion presses: notions of centralization

The rise of Jewish opinion presses led to an internationalization of the German-Jewish press landscape. Their facilitators were Jewish students from Russia,⁴² who had been attracted to German institutions of higher education following the Tsarist edict of July 1887. The edict introduced a numerus clausus and prescribed the number of Jewish students in secondary schools (10%) and tertiary education (5%). As a result, well-to-do Jewish families sent their offspring to universities in western Europe, particularly to Germany.

Meanwhile, Imperial Germany enabled the new Jewish politics to draw from a pool of intensely active Russian student colonies in virtually every city with an institution of higher education.⁴³ The universities of Berlin, Leipzig, Munich and Breslau saw a discernible shift in the allegiances of Jewish students from Russia to more radical movements, where major ideological rivalry arose between Socialist revolutionaries and Jewish nationalists during the 1890s.⁴⁴ Throughout German university cities, their key figures were gradually constructing a network of cells that also came to include German students.

One of them was Heinrich Loewe, who is counted as one of the fathers of German Zionism. He is known for spreading the word of the Zionist cause through his numerous publicist ventures and organizations. In 1891, he set up the Association for the Care of the Hebrew Language, Chowewe Sefat Ewer, and a year later, Jung-Israel [Young-Israel], a Zionist student association in Germany that also included German-speaking Jewish students from Courland and Galicia.⁴⁵ In 1895, he founded the Association of Jewish Students (VjSt), and in 1898 – the Berlin Zionist Association (BZV).

Launched in 1892, Jung-Israel set out to foster national belonging among both Russian and German acculturated Jewish students and encouraged them to discover their tradition by studying literary and historical sources. The association’s mouthpiece Zion (1895–1899) was one of the principal contributors to the theoretical platform of political Zionism.⁴⁶ It was among the first to articulate a longing for the end of the Jewish diaspora and a return to Eretz Israel. Besides contributing to the discursive construction of Zionism, it suggested new alliances and presented examples of belonging and demarcation.

Another periodical made its appearance under Loewe’s editorship. Launched in 1902 by the Bund Jüdischer Corporationen (Association of Jewish Corporations) B.J.C. under the title Der jüdische Student [Jewish Student], it pursued a similar mission: the revival of Jewish consciousness and the promotion of connections among Jewish students at German universities. The B.J.C. had emerged in 1901 from the Russisch-jüdischer wissenschaftlicher Verein [Russian-Jewish Academic Association], of which Loewe had been the only German member.⁴⁷ It had been established by Jewish students from Russia in 1889⁴⁸ to foster networking among their corporations in Berlin, Munich, Breslau and Leipzig. The attraction of those cities for Russian Jewish students rested on the reputation of their universities, their thriving Jewish communities, efficient economic infrastructures, and excellent printing facilities, which enabled the effective dissemination of propaganda for mass agitation.

Propaganda and agitation deserve special attention, as they introduced a new dimension into German-Jewish periodical culture. With the rise of modern ideologies, they were claimed by various groups, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Within this process both terms acquired negative connotations and therefore need clarification.

Their origins were to be found among revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement, who conceived propaganda⁴⁹ and agitation⁵⁰ during the 1890s as instruments to convey political education and ideological persuasion. At this time, propaganda referred to political education within small tutorial groups called kruzhkovshchina [learning group movement], whereas agitation applied to one person sharing their ideological conviction with masses of people. In short, propaganda carried a variety of ideas to small groups of people;⁵¹ agitation conveyed a single idea to a large group. While tuition was the principle of propaganda, agitation rested on persuasion and found expression in pamphlets and brochures, issued irregularly.

Both propaganda and agitation qualify as collective organizers, as they gathered people into a powerful organization or party. Once this formatting process had been accomplished, the publications would become more regular; the leadership of a party would manage and issue its own central organ as a key component of organized, planned and integrated top-down communication.

The term “central organ” points to the notion of centralization. Yet, in contrast to the periodicals in the service of statistics and philanthropical enterprises discussed above, the notion of centralization in party organs referred to the concentration of power in a handful party leaders, called central committee, who adopted a central organ to inform their adherents about current party politics.

Geographical centralization could still stimulate and turn a marginal publicist venture into a mainstream press. This happened to Der Zionist,⁵² launched in January 1901 by a Zionist group formed around Breslau university hospital.⁵³ At their first conference, the Zionist Federation of Germany in Berlin claimed as its organ the Jüdische Rundschau [Jewish Review], which quickly absorbed Der Zionist. While it ceased to exist in Breslau after a short lifespan, it had given a wake-up-call to Berlin Zionists, and has, in hindsight, been considered “a modest predecessor of the Jüdische Rundschau” (Figure 1).⁵⁴

Figure 1. Der Zionist is considered the first Zionist periodical in Germany.

Centralization of organization in the sense of concentrating power in a small group of party leaders, on the other hand, was rooted in agitation. While the policy of education inherent in propaganda allowed a variety of perspectives, agitation provided the breeding ground for opinion presses.⁵⁵

As a result, linear top-down imperatives dominated in opinion presses and gave rise to a journalistic genre that could be directive and persuasive with an inherent parental tone and modes of instruction ranging from praise and advice to recommendation, warning and even threat. These could acquire a cautionary note suggesting marginalization of non-conformists, but were nevertheless unable to halt the trend for groups to split off from the mainstream and form parties of their own. Hence, pressure to conform, with subsequent splinter groups and newly formed parties, turns out to be a characteristic feature of the opinion press landscape. This trend became very active in the liberal atmosphere of Weimar Germany, with a maximum divergence of opinion presses reached during the early 1930s.

In summary, propaganda and agitation were perceived as a fast-track to social change. They shared the aim of winning adherents to generate a mass movement in order to create social change: a future society, either here and now, as in the agenda of socialist internationalism, or not here and not now, as pursued in the Zionist project. What distinguished propaganda from agitation, was the way they communicated their aims. Propaganda implied a didactic element, whereby intellectuals shared their knowledge by discussing a topic of political or economic relevance and made it digestible to a naïve readership, thereby shedding light on a variety of perspectives. Agitation, in contrast, relied on persuasion, rather than explanation. It communicated the view of a single person or party, with modes of communication frequently conforming to the view of a party, and loyal to its leadership. Outside the Jewish realms, as e.g. in Russian Social Democracy, Bolshevism in particular, editorial policies of party organs increasingly reflected ideological, rather than intellectual training, summarized in Lenin’s notorious call “Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen!”⁵⁶

The sacrifice of intellectual in favour of ideological training among editors constituted a major difference between Jewish opinion presses and rising numbers of their non-Jewish counterparts. As the offshoots of a textual tradition that rested on teaching and dissemination – the two central components for the transmission of Jewish culture from one generation to the next – Jewish opinion presses were abiding by what was at the heart of their Diaspora existence: education and publishing, while their non-Jewish counterparts favoured short-term instructive imperatives to faster action, with dwindling editorial space for explanations.

Agents, debate culture and the notion of unity

The discernible shift in allegiance among Jewish students from Russia to more radical movements thus appears as a logical consequence of government censorship and the Tsarist policy of numerus clausus. Both were perceived as an existential attack on Jewish cultural continuity in the Diaspora, with a radical choice between ending the restrictions and becoming an equal member of society or ending the Diaspora.

The more restrictions were imposed on publishing and education, the stronger would be the Jewish response. The late 1870s had seen the outsourcing of radical Haskalah journalism from Russia to the more liberal environment of Vienna and Konigsberg for reasons of censorship; the late 1880s saw the outsourcing of an entire generation of Jewish intellectuals to European universities as a result of their curtailed access to higher education.

Their arrival fell in a period of growing European anti-Semitism, when previous anti-Jewish prejudice, based on religious differences and perceived Jewish economic practices, were replaced by a philosophic-historical worldview, presented as a key solution to social problems in general.⁵⁷

Mechanisms of exclusion appeared too in German institutes of higher education in the 1880s, where anti-Semitic attitudes became significant within the popular fraternity system. Jewish students were forbidden to wear “colours” (couleur) of fraternities or were refused membership. In response, they established their own fraternities. The first Jewish student association, was Viadrina, founded at the University of Breslau in 1886. During the decade to come, further associations were formed in Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg and Freiburg. In 1896, they merged into the “Kartell-Convent der Verbindungen deutscher Studenten Jüdischen Glaubens” [Cartel-Convent: Fraternities of German Students of Jewish Faith], the K.-C., an umbrella organization, soon to be joined by student associations in Bonn, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Konigsberg and Leipzig.⁵⁸

The K.-C. associations were close to the Central-Verein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens [Central Association of German Citizens of Mosaic Faith] the C.V. They shared the C.V.’s commitment to the German State and the promotion of equal rights among Jewish students.⁵⁹ Hence, they differed from the more radical approach of the national Jewish student associations, such as the aforementioned Russian-Jewish Academic Association and the B.J.C., in which Jewish students from Russia had joined ranks with their German co-religionists. The different credos of these associations reflected much of the ideological spectrum of German Jewry, ranging from a German-Jewish symbiosis to support for Socialist Internationalism and to Jewish Nationalism, with Jewish undergraduates and young graduate academics becoming the keenest promoters of their respective ideologies.

The mouthpieces of the various student associations were established centrally in the capital Berlin, or relocated to it from Breslau, Leipzig and Strasburg. They became the sponsors of Jewish opinion presses, with a concentration and consolidation of editorial power in the hands of agents who were young, male, urban and academic.

However, shared goals did not imply agreed pathways to action. Fierce debates and unresolved conflicts could still lead to marginalization of non-conformists and splinter groups who would depart to form their own organization. To counteract these trends, an increasing drive for unity became prevalent among the pioneers of opinion presses in the early 1910s. E.g. the notion of unity was the driving force behind the merger between the B.J.C. and the Kartell Zionistischer Verbindungen [Cartel of Zionist Corporations]. Based on the insight that it would be a waste of energy to have two separate student organizations committed to one and the same goal, namely a Jewish renaissance, both organizations merged into the Kartell jüdischer Verbindungen [Cartel of Jewish Corporations]. Established on 19 July 1914, it comprised associations from universities in Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Konigsberg und Munich who envisaged the Cartel becoming a powerful organization, uniting under its umbrella the entire Jewish academic youth of the nation.

With the merger, the Cartel’s programme changed, and with it the mission of its organ Der jüdische Student. The new programme foresaw a stronger focus on unity and concerted action while promoting among its men [sic] the commitment to a Jewish national renaissance that would appreciate and incorporate the great achievements of the Jewish past.⁶⁰ Shortly after the Cartel’s unification rally, the First World War broke out. Jewish students from Russia left Germany. Unlike Der jüdische Student, its Russian-language pendant Evreiskii student, was discontinued.

This change of focus from a culture of debate to the notion of unity is evidence of a new development that became visible only after the First World War. It gained momentum in the 1930s, when Der jüdische Student changed its title into Der jüdische Wille [The Jewish Will]. The new title resurrected an earlier publishing initiative of 1918–1920, which in the aftermath of the War had only gained a lukewarm response. Yet, after fifteen years of regeneration, in 1933 it articulated a new self-understanding that relied on three things: the inclusion of groups other than academic, the rigorous promotion of activities outside the commercial and academic systems, and the training of young men in preparation for their settlement in Palestine.⁶¹ The common denominator for this new group was athletics (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Evreiskii student advocated the idea of a Jewish homestead in Palestine. Launched in Berlin in February 1913, it was a Russian pendant of Der jüdische Student and a mouthpiece of the Kartell Zionistischer Studenten aus Russland in Deutschland.

Athletics as a common denominator: rejuvenation, masculinization and the amalgamation of periodicals

While many presses were on hold or resorted to war editions during the years 1914–1918, the periodical landscape recovered in 1918 and continued to unfold. Driven by the Balfour Declaration, the Russian Revolution and the liberal climate of Weimar Germany, the early 1920s saw a burgeoning of Jewish periodical culture with unprecedented variety. Rather than shedding light on this variety, the present study will follow up the trends evident in the periodical landscape before 1914. Of those trends, the concentration on a new target group, for which athletics provided a common denominator, was the most spectacular. It led to periodicals that amalgamated opinions, sport, students and youth culture. A representative for such amalgamation is Jüdische Turn- und Sportzeitung (JTSZ).⁶² It was launched in 1900 as Jüdische Turnzeitung, for the purpose of connecting local sporting associations, and advocated physical fitness for everyone. Following its relaunch in 1918, however, it downsized its target group and encouraged physical exercise, along with intensified ideological training, among a male readership that was radically committed to a future in Palestine. Drawing on the Zionist concept of agricultural labour as a pathway to national redemption, editors argued that the Palestine project required young, embattled people, toughened both ideologically and physically. In a process that saw physical rebirth as a cornerstone of national rebirth, it was no longer the number of members in a sporting federation that mattered, but the resilience of their health and ideological convictions.

The Great War had interrupted the attempt of student associations to widen their target group, but its revival in the 1920s elicited a stronger response. This successful departure depended on a higher visibility, achieved through the identification with a rising network of Maccabi periodicals promoting a powerful and internationalizing movement. The impressive rise of the Maccabi press in Germany is documented in Table 1.

Table 1. The lifespan of the Maccabi press, including its predecessors.

Year	Title
May 1900 to December 1912	Jüdische Turnzeitung
January 1913 to August 1914	Jüdische Monatshefte für Turnen und Sport
August 1914 to November 1916	On hold
December 1916 to Sept. 1918	Five numbers appear as War editions
December 1918 to February 1919	Jüdische Turn und Sportzeitung Organ des deutschen Kreises der Jüdischen Turnerschaft
March 1919 to May 1919	Jüdische Jugend
June 1919 to April 1921	Jüdische Turn und Sportzeitung
December 1921 to April 1922	Nachrichtenblatt des Deutschen Kreises des Makkabi-Weltverbandes (Jüdische Turnerschaft)
May 1922 to October 1922	Nachrichtenblatt des Makkabi-Weltverbandes
November 1922 to February 1923	Bar Kochba-Blätter, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Kreises
March 1923 to April 1924	Makkabi-Blätter Zeitschrift der jüdischen Turn- u. Sportvereine in Deutschland
March 1923 to October 1924	Makkabi-Blätter
November 1924 to January/February 1925	Jüdische Turn- und Sportzeitung “Hammakkabi” [sic] Organ d. Deutschen Kreises im Makkabi-Weltverband (Deutsche Ausgabe)
April 1926 to February 1927	Hammakkabi [sic]
April to October 1927	Jüdische Turn- und Sportzeitung. Der Makkabi. Organ des Deutschen Kreises im Makkabi-Weltverband
January 1928 to October 1938	Der Makkabi. Organ des Deutschen Kreises im Makkabi Welt-Verband

Successively, these periodicals promoted the rise of the Maccabi movement and its unfolding throughout the 1920s towards a world organization and a masculine ideal, in which the boundaries between athletics, Zionism and the study of Hebrew became increasingly blurred. By the early 1930s, the target group had changed. It was no longer young, male and academic, but young, male and athletic.

Rejuvenation became an even more prominent feature in Jewish scouting periodicals, burgeoning during the mid-1920s. Their ideological spectrum reached from Jewish national aspirations over left-wing Zionism to a German national attitude represented by various associations, such as Blau-Weiß, Bund Jüdischer Pfadfinder [Association of Jewish Scouts], Kadimah and Schwarzes Fähnlein [Little Back Banner] to name but a few. While their agenda differed, they all shared and flagged in their periodicals a commitment to the notion of unity.⁶³

Conclusion

To provide a historiographical narrative of nearly two hundred years of German-Jewish periodical culture in a single article is a challenging task. In this study, it has been approached by concentrating on the principal mission of Jewish periodicals as drivers of social improvement (before 1879), and drivers of social change (after 1879). Within these two main parts, various stages can be identified, corresponding to different notions that typified the emergence of periodicals at a particular time.

The first part examines the upsurge of a specific German-Jewish periodical culture as a child of the Berlin Haskalah, initially governed by the notion of gathering. The next stages relied on the notions of outreach and connectivity. The former invigorated German language-culture, the latter envisaged its retention across the country, to benefit the next generation.

The second part distils the period of mobilization, starting in the 1880s, with notions of centralization and unity dominating. Both themes characterized the rise of opinion presses as new voices in the Jewish periodical landscape, with agents who tended to be young, male and academic. These trends had already been evident in the periodicals of Jewish student associations during the early 1910s. Interrupted during the War, they were revived, and unfolded in the pluralistic atmosphere of Weimar Germany, with a trend towards masculinization, rejuvenation and physical fitness. Their study reveals the periodicals of student associations as a motor and intellectual sponsor of opinion presses, whose pioneering spirit achieved its highest visibility with the amalgamation of periodicals in the service of the Zionist project. The focus on opinion presses reveals that they retained the primacy of education in Jewish periodical culture, and that they anticipated and articulated visions and controversies, in testament to the transformative power of public opinion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number NA 244/9-2, 677084).

Notes on contributors

Susanne Marten-Finnis

Susanne Marten-Finnis is a Professor of Applied Linguistics (Emerita) at the Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR) at the University of Portsmouth. She also holds an appointment at the University of Bremen (Fachbereich Kulturwissenschaften, Deutsche Presseforschung), where she collaborates with Professor Michael Nagel in a DFG- funded project to study the history of German-Jewish periodical culture during the period 1670–1943. In her publications, Susanne explores the nexus between Jewish literary activities and European thought. Her focus is on the multilingual Jewish press in the European countries of former Jewish residency and migration. Her other research strand is the cultural production of Russia Abroad during the first third of the twentieth century.

Notes

1 The very first periodicals emerging as from the 1670s onwards in the form of luachim will be neglected for the purpose of this study.

2 Edelheim-Muehsam, “The Jewish Press in Germany,” 163–76.

3 According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a field is a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined, in their existence and in the determination they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, or in other words, a social arena within which struggles or manoeuvres take place over specific resources or stakes and access to them, see: Wacquant, “Towards a Reflexive Sociology,” 39.

4 Klier, “German Antisemitism and Russian Judeophobia,” 524–40.

5 Klier and Lambroza, Pogroms, 1992, 3–12.

6 Zahra, The Great Departure, 18.

7 Requate and Schulze Wessel, Europäische Öffentlichkeit, 14. See also: Lederhendler, “Did Russian Jewry Exist Prior to 1917?,” 15–24.

8 Nagel, “Zur mentalitätsgeschichtlichen Bedeutung,” 261.

9 Guesnet, “Strukturwandel,” 46.

10 Freeden, Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich.

11 For the concept of networks and nodal points, introduced into historical research, see: Jaspert, “Mendicants, Jews and Muslims,” 107–47.

12 Gilon, Mendelssohn’s Kohelet Mussar.

13 Nagel, “Zur Journalistik,” 28.

14 Shavit, “A Duty Too Heavy,” 111–28.

15 Wittler, Salomon Jacob Cohen.

16 Sorkin, Transformation, 82.

17 Lässig, Jüdische Wege, 290.

18 Lohmann, “Chevrat Ohavej Laschon Ivrit,” 857–63.

19 Wikipedia, “Salzstraße.”

20 Volovici, German as a Jewish Problem, 10–11.

21 Auerbach, Die wichtigsten Angelegenheiten Israels, VII.

22 Ibid.

23 Kayserling, “Einleitung,” V.

24 Braese, Eine europäische Sprache, 15–20.

25 Herzig, “Das Königreich Westphalen,” 246.

26 Kley and Salomon, Sammlung der neuesten Predigten.

27 Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge.

28 Philippson, “Einführung,” 16.

29 Israelitischer Studien-Beförderungs-Verein, Vierter Jahresbericht, 6.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 3.

32 Sabellek, “Die Entwicklung,” 215–32.

33 Bericht (Dritter) der Talmud-Unterrichts-Anstalt, 53.

34 Brämer, “ … für den besonderen Beruf,” 291–302.

35 Klier, “German Antisemitism,” 524–40.

36 Statistik der Auswanderung, 162–4.

37 Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 1–29.

38 Vallois, “Jewish Social Science,” 1–26.

39 Winchevsky, Gezamlet Shriftn, 193.

40 Ibid.

41 Shavit, “A Duty Too Heavy,” 111–28.

42 Wertheimer, “Between Tsar and Kaiser,” 329–349.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Schlöffel, Heinrich Loewe, 131.

46 Schenker, Der Jüdische Verlag, 13.

47 Zimmermann, Jewish Nationalism and Zionism, 129–53.

48 Ibid., 135.

49 Plekhanov, O zadachakh sotsialistov.

50 Kremer, Ob agitatsii.

51 Plekhanov, O zadachakh sotsialistov, 58.

52 Dr. H.P., “Vor 40 Jahren,” 2–3.

53 Jüdische Zeitung 44, no. 17 (April 30, 1937), 2–3.

54 Walk, “Der Zionist,” 11–12.

55 Dovifat, Zeitungswissenschaft.

56 Lenin, “Partinnaia organizatsiia.”

57 Rürup, “Emanzipation und Antisemitismus,” 95.

58 Leo Baeck Institute Repository, “Kartell-Convent.”

59 Ash, “Self-Defence,” 122–38.

60 Anonymus, “Die Verschmelzung,” 91.

61 Anonymus, “Bericht des Präsidiums,” 3–4.

62 JTSZ no. 2 [1919], 1.

63 See e.g. Anonymus, “Bundestag des Kadimah,” 48.