![[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora](/img/mockup/logo.en.png){kind=logo}
Few concepts have had as profound an impact on the Jewish experience of history as the word ‘Diaspora’. Ever since the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the sixth century BCE, experiences of escape, expulsion, and displacement, lost homes, plural geographical affinities, and networks of international relationships have characterized Jewish history, religion, tradition, and imagination. Alongside migration, which is the prerequisite for any diasporic community, Diaspora, from the Ancient Greek for ‘scattering’, lies at the heart of Jewish experience.
The Diaspora Portal focuses on historical themes through the lens of individual biographies and contemporary documents linked to Germanophone lifeworlds. The portal is not limited to Jews from Germany, however. More than questions of citizenship or nationality, the portal centers on a multifaceted cultural and linguistic community with shared German(-speaking) heritage as a point of departure. Any attempt to pin down lifeworlds in conceptual terms risks narrowing the diversity of social practice as it is actually lived. The label ‘Jewish’ comes with its own problems, given that a number of the figures discussed here did not identify or define themselves as such. In some cases, they only became ‘Jews’ as a result of their persecution under the imposed classification of Jude.
Within German-Jewish lifeworlds and historical experiences, the interpretation of that term, ‘German-Jewish’, is a core research question. Beginning in the era of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and then with the nascent legal emancipation during the long nineteenth century, Jews debated their identities as Germans and/or Jews with their contemporaries. The two-pronged term ‘German-Jewish’ arose from that debate. Today, the term is employed less as a normative value statement than as a cultural descriptor – and could be rendered more accurately as ‘Germanophone-Jewish’. For the sake of both readability and continuity with previous scholarship, we nevertheless retain ‘German-Jewish’ in most instances. Still, the hyphenate is clunky – and we are well aware that readers will stumble over it. Through that hyphen, we aim to carve out space for nuance, multiple affiliations, transnationalism, and biographical open-endedness.
The Diaspora Portal adopts a broad geographical vantage point and endeavors to remember the heterogenous group of German-speaking Jews whose roots stretch back not only to Germany, but also to Lithuania, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, and elsewhere. In these regions, the German language was often seen as a ‘language of upward mobility’ in the sense of embourgeoisement; the language itself frequently proved to be the most enduring marker of a migratory biography that remained visibly or audibly German-Jewish. In many cases, diasporic contexts only emerged by way of the longing for this linguistic homeland.
‘Diaspora’ is both a descriptive term and a scholarly one. As an analytical concept, it ideally captures the manifold, dynamic, and complex nature of German-speaking Jews’ migrations and the processes by which they made themselves at home. The word Diaspora may be employed in two related ways. On the one hand, it categorizes a set of individuals belonging to the same ethnic and/or religious group who have been compelled to leave their country of origin yet maintain a strong and lasting connection to its culture and heritage – sometimes for multiple generations.
On the other, Diaspora also contains an inherent spatial imaginary: it designates the experiential realms of such a set of individuals from the same ethnic and/or religious group who are living outside their original center, yet maintain an attachment to that Old Country, which they were forced to leave under duress, through traditions and memory. In both variants, Diaspora presupposes the migration and communal life of a group – held together by real or imagined ties.
According to Jewish tradition, Eretz Yisrael – the ‘Land of Israel’ – is this symbolic center, which has long been the reference point of religious practice and has assumed a new role since the founding of the State of Israel. Diaspora is a dynamic and ever-evolving practice, but also a social and symbolic space.
The original Jewish understanding of Diaspora, conveyed through the Hebrew terms galut or tfutzot (exile, dispersion) emerged after the expulsion from ancient Israel and was thus linked to a continual longing for a return to Zion.
On 14 May 1948, the founding of the State of Israel seemingly rendered a conceptually meaningful Jewish Diaspora obsolete. And yet, Jewish life continued to exist beyond the new state’s borders. Even today, the majority of Jews live in the United States, not Israel; hence, we must acknowledge the existence of at least two geographic centers. Notwithstanding, the establishment of a (renewed) territorial center with sovereign statehood in Israel raised the question of whether this marked the end of the Jewish Diaspora – long connoted negatively as galut (exile).
The ancient Greek concept of Diaspora (διασπορά), roughly meaning ‘dispersion,’ is itself a product of Jewish diasporic communities. It first appears in the Septuagint – the earliest Greek translation of the Torah, which was created by Jewish scholars, mostly in Alexandria. At the time, more than 2,200 years ago, the majority of Jews were already living outside Eretz Yisrael, and the term did not yet hold the same negative associations that would later cling to it. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the subsequent expulsions of many Jews under the Roman occupation, the term Diaspora became widespread. It was given a negative (religious) interpretation, foremost associated with expulsion, displacement, enslavement, and coercion, with powerlessness and territorial homelessness.
In the twentieth century, even before the founding of Israel, the Jewish meaning of the term Diaspora underwent a further transformation. The historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), born in what is now Belarus, together with other Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe, developed the notion of a ‘Diaspora nationalism’ that consciously embraced a national project in the Diaspora, adding political agency to the concept and demonstrating that Jewish identity can exist without a sovereign state as its center. In this context, Diaspora was no longer viewed merely as the result of dispersion, but also as a space of cultural and social agency.
The term Diaspora has passed through a range of meanings in academic research, including the fields of Jewish history and historiography. Since the 1980s, it has seen a revival across disciplines, not only as a descriptive term but also as an analytical category, after previously being understood primarily in a religious and usually negative sense, as a condition of forced exile. Our approach, too, seeks to move beyond galut and exile, focusing instead on the concrete social practices and dynamic processes of group formation among historical actors.
The historian Steven M. Lowenstein (1945–2020), himself a New York-born child of Jewish refugees from Germany, coined the phrase ‘German-Jewish Diaspora’[1] for the communities that formed from 1933 onward. We have adopted his articulation from the epilogue to the fourth volume of German-Jewish History in Modern Times (1997) as a systematic tool for continuing that history in a dual sense.
In doing so, we will first seek to broaden the exile-based understanding of Diaspora by examining how Jewish exiles developed a sort of diasporic relationship to their German or German-speaking communities of origin. Second, we will ponder the extent to which German/ophone-Jewish culture remained salient for these individuals. Thus, we are also preoccupied with the collective maintenance of a German-Jewish identity outside the German-speaking world. Other Jewish groups, too, have developed a similar kind of dual Diaspora, notably the Sephardi Jews, whose community formation and continuing orientation toward the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 from Spain and in 1496 from Portugal are still reflected today in a shared language (Ladino) and in religious customs.
Scholarly discussions of diasporic minorities have proposed various definitions for what constitutes a diasporic identity. Some of the common threads across these definitions, albeit with differing emphases, include the following.
A temporally well-defined starting point, typically associated with the expulsion or forced displacement of large numbers of people or entire communities, constitutes the origin of a Diaspora. At the same time, the settlement of this group outside the region of origin establishes a geographical point of reference. These aspects are accompanied by efforts to preserve, or even create, community-building practices in the country of exile – such as through landsmanshaft-style organizations – alongside a continued, often tense relationship with the new living environment and a continued emotional attachment to the ‘lost homeland’. This attachment is often accompanied by a vague longing for a past inflected by the Old Country, linked to hopes of transcending the pain of expulsion – even if only in the imagination.
This first overview of the German-Jewish Diaspora draws on existing research and new archival findings to investigate the historical circumstances that led to German-Jewish migration, and the ways in which Germanophone Jews sought to preserve their cultures of origin and affiliation(s) in various countries of refuge – and to safeguard them as part of a German-Jewish cultural heritage. Given the hybrid and often fragmented nature of the resulting affiliations, we are particularly interested in the extent to which this group developed shared identities in each ‘New Country’ – identities shaped not only by distance, homesickness, and loss, but also by proximity, arrival, and a sense of belonging.
Such processes of group formation also bring into focus the relationship to the majority society and to other minorities (including other Jewish groups). These relationships were often riven by tensions, which in turn encouraged the institutionalization of dedicated spaces, organizations, and representative bodies. Alongside this group-specific multiplicity of cultural affiliation, the analytical category of Diaspora also makes it possible to trace transnational networks. The relationships among German-speaking Jews, who viewed themselves as part of a larger (imagined) intercontinental community, open up doors for an additional, particularly rich field of analysis. This approach offers two different avenues to a transnational turn in German-Jewish history, as it also considers those who remained in the Old Country.
We reflect afresh on the concept of Diaspora in each region where significant numbers of German-speaking Jews settled. A sense of self dominated by reminiscences and ties to the Old Country did not always emerge. This project also addresses processes of detachment and decoupling. It also examines questions of return migration – including migration to one of the two postwar German states. After the Second World War, no more than five percent of the roughly 450,000 German-speaking Jews ever returned to their respective Old Country. Nevertheless, numerous examples attest to how intensely those who had emigrated wrestled with the possibility of returning to their countries of origin, often for years. In some cases, they went through with it, temporarily or on an exploratory basis.[2]
Besides examining the political, societal, and social challenges that newcomers encountered in each destination, this project also explores the opportunities available to Germanophone Jews and the extent of their participation in the mainstream societies around them. At the same time, we examine the emergence of a widely dispersed German-Jewish Diaspora and its transterritorial connections.
By adopting a transnational perspective that takes German-Jewish history outside the German-speaking region as a premise, we bring new facets of Jewish experience into view, and can disrupt the methodological fixation on the nation-state. Understanding the German-Jewish Diaspora, with all its particularities, as inherently part of the global migration movements that shaped the twentieth century – and continue to shape our present – also reveals points of connection with Diaspora Studies and (Global) Migration Studies.
The topic of Diaspora remains equally relevant today. Since the 7 October 2023 attack by the Hamas terrorist organization and the ensuing war in Gaza, many Jews in the Diaspora – including descendants of German-speaking refugees – have been rethinking their Jewish identities with regard to both Israel and their families’ Old Country. This project highlights the central role of migration and Diaspora in Jewish history and affirms their continuing relevance for current developments. Growing antisemitism – which in the past was a major push factor for migration – is now driving an increase in migration, alongside political developments such as the rightward shift in Israeli politics and the war in Ukraine. In 2024, the number of people globally who were forced to leave their homes as a result to war, conflict, and persecution reached an all-time high. Migration – often involuntary – is thus pervasive in our own present moment, and new diasporic communities, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are emerging in its wake.
The term ‘German-Jewish’ calls to mind the idea of a cultural symbiosis in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – an idea that was rattled by Nazis’ taking power in 1933 and then obliterated by the Shoah. The political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) addressed this problem in her biography Rahel Varnhagen (1938/1957). Arendt described the notion of a ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’ as an illusion, and showed how Jewish efforts at assimilation in the nineteenth century ultimately failed in the face of persistent antisemitism. For Arendt, only the shared language offered some form of cultural continuity. Many of the individuals described on this portal did not view themselves primarily as ‘Germans,’ but rather as part of a Central European, culturally diverse public sphere. The term ‘Germanophone’ points to this intellectual breadth – between Prague, Vienna, Breslau (Wrocław), and beyond.
In the context of the diasporic lived realities documented by the Diaspora Portal, this is not so much a matter of the subjects’ identification with a nationality or a sovereign state. After all, many future émigrés no longer identified with such affiliations after the First World War, when the borders of Central Europe were redrawn, or else distanced themselves from these newly demarcated states following the Nazi rise to power and the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria. For many, the German language was less a marker of national identity than a kind of cultural homeland. In the Diaspora, language, education, religion, and cultural practice became key elements of identity, although personal experiences and perspectives varied widely. For the first generation, at least, ‘German’ was often a fixture of everyday life – in the family, at school, and in religious and cultural contexts. In many cases, the language was passed down for generations.
As seen from a bird’s-eye view, the German-speaking Jewish Diaspora was characterized by a diversity of biographical backgrounds, experiences of migration, and self-described identifications. Cities of origin such as Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi), Lemberg (now Lviv), Vienna, Prague, or Breslau (now Wrocław) reveal that ‘German’ often signified a cultural rather than a national belonging – a notion more accurately conveyed by the term ‘Germanophone’. Life trajectories that moved between these places illustrate the intra-European entanglements within this diverse community – for example, numerous binational marriages, often among German speakers, but with sometimes pairing cultures known in German as ostjüdisch (Eastern Jewish, i.e., historically Yiddish-speaking) and westjüdisch (i.e., Germanophone).
German-speaking Jews in Mandatory Palestine and later Israel shared a distinct experience. Many of them, especially those born and raised in Germany, found refuge in Palestine from 1933 onward, bringing their language and culture with them – as did all immigrant groups – and contributing to the local public sphere. The German language often remained a central element of their identity, although this went along with a particular shame given its status as the ‘language of the perpetrators.’ Those German-speaking immigrants, nicknamed ‘Yekkes,’ had in common their experiences of skepticism from other Jewish groups – who often asked them whether they had moved there “out of Zionist conviction or out of Germany.”
When we use the phrase ‘Germanophone-Jewish’ or ‘German-speaking Jewish,’ then, we aim to highlight the existence of linguistic-cultural affiliations beyond the taxonomies of sovereign states. Language functioned as a cultural homeland, and the hyphenate term Germanophone-Jewish reflects the specific diasporic experience at the heart of this portal. That experience may also be shared by descendants who neither speak the language nor personally identify as Jewish.
The Diaspora Portal is devoted to the lifeworlds of German-speaking Jews who, especially from 1933 onwards, built new lives in a range of countries, both transit stops and longer-term destinations – from Argentina to Australia. The most important centers of the German-Jewish Diaspora, such as the United States and Palestine/Israel, have already been the subject of extensive research as individual locations, often showing their development over extended periods. More recently, lesser-known destinations such as Kenya, Shanghai, the Caribbean, and the Philippines have also been explored in insightful case studies. However, there has been no comparative study to date of these highly diverse transit and destination countries. With this Diaspora Portal, we aim to shed light on the full geographical scope of German-Jewish dispersion and to present a panorama of its transnational entanglements. In addition to the ‘conventional’ destinations, in which a German-speaking Jewish community successfully took root, we also take into account ‘transit countries’ – including waystations such as Shanghai – and the temporary diasporic structures that developed in such environments. Even in these waystations, distinct forms of community emerged which continue to exist in collective memory as a ‘remembered Diaspora,’ even though the exiles themselves have long resided elsewhere.
The chief destinations for German-speaking Jews outside Europe during the period of the Nazi regime were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mandatory Palestine. Of the roughly one hundred countries in which these refugees found permanent or temporary sanctuary, Argentina also held core significance. Around 75 percent of German-speaking Jews settled in these four diasporic centers alone. After the outbreak of the Second World War, opportunities to emigrate grew increasingly scarce, and destinations such as Cuba, Shanghai, Turkey, and Iran became life-saving havens.[3]
What about Israel?
In addition to the three major centers – the US, the UK, and Argentina – we also consider Palestine/Israel. Between 1933 and 1945, no territory received as many immigrants from the German-speaking world, relative to the total population, as did Palestine under the British Mandate. This differed fundamentally from all other countries of immigration in that migration to Eretz Yisrael, according to Jewish tradition, was interpreted as an act of returning. Thus, the concept of Diaspora cannot be readily applied to Israel without qualification. Nevertheless, the great hardships on the ground and the loss of a previous life in Europe – which even most Zionists would not have willingly given up for a life in Eretz Israel – left many Germanophone Jews with feelings of alienation and difference. Tellingly, it was within a society dominated by Zionism – which exerted particularly strong pressure on newcomers to assimilate – that a pronounced sense of regional solidarity emerged, often anchored in a sense of a shared German-Jewish origin.
With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the imagined homeland – which before had only manifested in Heinrich Heine’s (1797–1856) image of the Torah as a portable ‘fatherland’ – became a real-existing sovereign state for Jews. As a result, the concept of Diaspora underwent a Zionization process that remains a subject of lively debate among Jews. Proponents of the Zionist worldview spoke of an end to the Diaspora condition – and in some cases, questioned the very legitimacy of Jewish life outside Israel. Non-Zionist voices countered this with the argument that an affirmative embrace of the Diaspora condition could have world-historical significance. Jewish understandings of Diaspora itself diversified in reaction to its supposed conclusion via the ‘return to the homeland’ constituted by the establishment of statehood.
German Jews, known in Israel as ‘Yekkes’ to this day, left significant lasting marks on the Jewish society of Mandatory Palestine from the early twentieth century onward. Major centers of their migration included the port city of Haifa, the northern town of Nahariya, and the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia – each of which has been the subject of dedicated research. German-Jewish influence made itself felt in Tel Aviv, too, perhaps most visibly in the migration of architecture: the Bauhaus style.[4]
The Diaspora Portal strives to paint a holistic picture of the various historical phases of German-Jewish migration, so as to lend visibility to the historical points of departure, continuities, and ruptures of the German-Jewish Diaspora over an extended period.
Jews from Germany began migrating to other countries as early as the 1830s – long before the Nazi seizure of power – primarily to North America. In addition, most of the more than two million Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States between 1881 and the 1920s also traveled via Germany as a transit country. As a result, the United States had become the most important center of Jewish life outside Europe by around 1900. New German Jewish immigrants already made up a significant proportion of Jewish communities in many places during the nineteenth century.
Exile and emigration: 1933–1945
Starting in 1933, the German-Jewish Diaspora ballooned to a never before seen dimension. After control of Germany was transferred to the Nazi Party, between 250,000 and 300,000 German Jews managed to emigrate – often after losing their possessions, enduring long waits, and passing through assorted European transit points. A further 150,000 or so German-speaking Jews followed suit in the wake of the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 amidst the growing radicalisation of Nazi policies of persecution and forced expulsion.
After the war began in September 1939, emigration became increasingly difficult. Many Jews were caught up in the fighting in the countries where they had sought a safe haven; in October 1941, the Nazis finally outlawed all emigration.
Between 1933 and 1941, around 400,000 to 430,000 Germanophone Jews were forced to leave their Central European Old Countries due to growing antisemitic discrimination and persecution. There is still no way of precisely calculating the total number of women, children, and men who were forced to escape the countries and regions where they were raised. Estimates suggest that in addition to the 270,000 to 300,000 Jews from Germany, roughly 130,000 came from Austria and around 25,000 from the ‘Sudetenland’ and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now in the Czech Republic.[5] In all of these regions, they were unprotected and at the mercy of Nazi tyranny, which came to an end in May 1945 with the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht.
The role of the Nazi period as a turning point in Jewish history is a visible focus of the Diaspora Portal, but we do not restrict the project to the period of Nazi rule. Where it is historically accurate and supported by sources and research, we also examine German-Jewish lifeworlds beyond the German-speaking world both before 1933 and after 1945. In doing so, we seek to make productive use of and draw insights from the intergenerational possibilities of Diaspora by considering multiple generations in their respective historical developments and interconnections.
This broader time frame cannot be applied equally to all countries. Nevertheless, we also include places where no German-speaking Jewish community had taken root before 1933 and where no lasting one developed afterwards. In order to document the German-Jewish Diaspora – which was shaped in many cases by transmigration, as a transnational history of entanglements and relationships across time and space – we also make a point of including diasporic structures that were short-lived.
Miriam Rürup
Liliana Ruth Feierstein, “Diaspora,” in: Christina von Braun/Micha Brumlik (ed.), Handbuch Jüdische Studien, Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2017, 99-109.
Sheer Ganor, Somewhere from Long Ago: The Global Displacement of German-Speaking Jewry (forthcoming).
Grit Jilek, Nation ohne Territorium. Über die Organisierung der jüdischen Diaspora bei Simon Dubnow, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013.
Steven M. Lowenstein, “Epilogue: The German-Jewish Diaspora,” in: Michael E. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4: Renewal and Destruction, 1918-1945, New York: Columbia UP, 1998, 393–402.
Miriam Rürup (ed.), Praktiken der Differenz. Diasporakulturen in der Zeitgeschichte, Göttingen: Wallstein 2009.