Germany

Jews were few in Germanic lands (Ashkenaz) in the early second millennium, even despite the presence of so illustrious a figure as the great Jewish bible and Talmud commentator, Rashi (1040-1105). Their numbers increased significantly only following the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492-7, when Ashkenaz became the population center of international Jewish life.  

In the Middle Ages, Jews in these territories lived in relatively small numbers in small towns and cities, dependent on their Christian neighbors for their survival. Jewish residence was not restricted to ghettos, and Jews freely mixed with their neighbors in the marketplace and town square. And while there were occasions of severe persecution and even murder, such as during the first crusade in the Rhineland, “Jews would not have survived there, let alone created what they left us, if that had been the main story” (Ivan Marcus in Cultures of the Jews, p. 450). Indeed, several exceptional Hebrew manuscripts in the JTS collection firmly support this estimation.

In modernity, Germany was the birthplace of the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) and Reform Judaism. Jews became prominent in many fields, including the arts, banking, and more. It was German Jewish scholars who founded the modern “scientific study of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums), setting the stage of modern Jewish scholarship.

Of course, Germany was also the land of virulent, modern, race-based antisemitism, leading to the Holocaust. But it has also become a land of Jewish survival and regrowth. Jews in formerly Nazi lands showed remarkable resilience, creating new mechanisms of memory while laboring to create a new future.