Good for the Jews, Bad for Judaism

The Jewish community of Berlin has usually been considered consistently central for German Jewry in modern times. After all, there were some 175,000 Jews in Gross-Berlin in 1925, close to one third of the Jews in all of Weimar Germany. And although the Jewish population of Berlin declined thereafter, the capital continued to be by far the largest and most important Jewish community in Germany. It has therefore been tempting to project backwards and assume that also in the period before World War One and back to the eighteenth-century Berlin was similarly central, not only in its population of Jews but also in significance for Judaism. In presenting an argument against that assumption, I would like here to begin by noting an abundance of evidence for the contention that Jewish creativity, and especially religious vibrancy, during the nineteenth century, with few exceptions, was to be located in places other than Berlin. And beyond that contention, I will argue that from the beginnings of Jewish modernity in the late eighteenth century until into the twentieth, and to some extent until the Nazi period, Berlin may have been good for the Jews’ material interests but was not nearly as good for Judaism

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