Reforming identities: Jews’ experience of German colonial expansion

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates German Jews’ conceptualization of colonialism, and its consequent meanings regarding their identity formation in the years between 1884 and 1919. The discussion tackles the intersections and disjunctions of identities among German Jews of various orientations, as inspired by the colonial venture and within globalization process. The analysis reveals the interplay between the endorsement of colonialism by Jews as part of their German national identification, and the impact of growing antisemitism and racial attitudes nourished by the encounter with other ‘inferior races’ in the colonies. It explores the ideological parallels that Jews perceived between German and European colonization, and the Zionist settlement in Palestine. The article also demonstrates how Jews’ increasing exposure – real or imagined – to different places and cultures as part of the colonial experience stirred ideas of Jewish racial superiority and distinctive nationalism, alongside transnational perspectives that encouraged a broader sense of Jewish solidarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Germany
• Jews
• colonialism
• identity
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Jacob Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1966, p 295.

2 Susann Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, Early Modern Women in the Low Countries. Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past, London: Routledge, 2011, p 23.

3 For this trend in the historiography of German colonialism, see: Sara Lennox Friedrichsmeyer and Susanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatliche Machtanspruch und Wirklickeit im kolonialen Namibia, Münster: Lit, 2004. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkley: University of California Press, 2005. Birthe Kundrus, ‘Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeption: Überlegungen zur Kolonialisierung des Nationalsozialismus’, Werkstatt Geschichte, 43, 2006, pp 45–62. Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism. A Short History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

4 Hans-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p 39.

5 Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa. Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the new South, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Geoff Eley, ‘Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imaginary, 1840–1945’, in Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (eds), German Colonialism in a Global Age, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, pp 19–45.

6 For this matter see the following works: Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880, Frankfurt: Campus, 2005. Andreas Eckert, Herrschaft und Verwalten: Afrikanische Bürokratien, staatliche Ordnung und Politik in Tanzania, 1920–1970, Munich: de Gruyter, 2007. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Quingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Kundrus, ‘Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeption’, Werkstatt Geschichte, 43, 2006, pp 45–62. Ulrike Lindner, ‘German Colonialism and the British Neighbor in Africa Before 1914: Self Definitions, Lines of Demarcation, and Cooperation’, in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds), German Colonialism. Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp 254–272. Guettel, German Expansionism.

7 Christian S Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, pp 7–8.

8 Sebastian Conrad, Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p 25. Kristinn Kopp, ‘Arguing the Case for a Colonial Poland’, in Langbehn and Salama (eds), German Colonialism, pp 146–163 (here p 149).

9 Matthew P Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany. Expansionism and Nationalism 1848–1884, New York: Berghahn Books, 2008, pp 4–5, 58, 110.

10 Marie Muschalek, Violence as Usual. Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019, pp 5–10.

11 Exceptional in this regard is Stefan Vogt’s work about German Zionists: Stefan Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen. Der deutsche Zionismus in Feld des Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1890–1933, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016.

12 For such discussion see: Ethan B Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S Mandel, ‘Introduction. Engaging Colonial History and Jewish History’, in Ethan B Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S Mandel (eds), Colonialism and the Jews, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017, pp 1–2.

13 Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

14 Abigail Green, ‘The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights’, Past and Present, 199, 2008, pp 175–205.

15 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years War on Palestine. A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020, Introduction.

16 Continuity in this context appears also in later works: Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire, German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. A Dirk Moses, ‘Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust’, in Langbehn and Salama (eds), German Colonialism, pp 72–92. Louise Bethlehem, ‘Genres of Identification: Holocaust Testimonies and Postcolonial Witness’, in Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan (eds), Marking Evil; Holocaust Memory in the Global Age, New York: Berghahn, 2015, pp 171–192. Jürgen Zimmerer, From Windhoek to Auschwitz: On the Relationships Between Colonialism and the Holocaust, New York/London: Taylor & Francis, 2015.

17 Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, pp 77–80.

18 For settler-colonialism see: Raef Zreik, ‘When Does a Settler Became a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani)’, Constellations, 23(3), 2016, pp 351–364. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism. Theoretical Overviews, New York, 2010, pp 1–15. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, ‘Introduction. Settler Colonialism: A Concept and Its Uses’, in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, London: Routledge, 2005, pp 1–20.

19 Omar Jabary Salamanca et al (eds), ‘Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies (special issue), 2(1), 2013, pp 1–8 (here pp 2, 4–5).

20 Rachel Busbridge, ‘Israel-Palestinian and the Settler Colonial “Turn”: From Interpretation to Decolonization’, Theory, Culture & Society, 35(1), 2018, pp 91–115 (here especially pp 107, 110).

21 Nicola Robinson, ‘Utopian Zionist Development in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland’, in Geoffrey Berry (ed), Utopias and Environment, New York, 2016, pp 29–41. And see also: Katz, Moses Leff, and Mandel, ‘Introduction’, in Katz et al (eds), Colonialism and the Jews, pp 1–2. Dimitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben Gurion, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018, pp 54, 82. Derek Penslar, ‘Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?’, in Katz et al (eds), Colonialism and the Jews, pp 275–300 (here p 276).

22 For such works, see: Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State. The Political History of a Minority, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Christopher Clark, ‘The Jews and the German State in the Wilhelmine Era’, in Michael Brenner, Rainer Liedtke, and David Rechter (eds), Two Nations. British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999, pp 163–184. Yfaat Weiss, ‘Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism’, Jewish Social Studies, 11(1), 2004, pp 93–117. Michael Brenner, Vicky Caron, and Uri R Kaufmann (eds), Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

23 Ludwig Bamberger, Gesammelte Schriften, Band V, Berlin: Rosenbaum & Hart, 1897, p 364.

24 Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, Stuttgart: Dietz, 1899, pp 169–171.

25 Eduard Bernstein, Die Wahrheit über die Einkreisung Deutschlands. Dem Deutschen Volke dargelegt, Berlin: Verlag Neues Vaterland, 1919, pp 30–31.

26 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (henceforward AZdJ), 16 Dec 1898, nr 50.

27 Im deutschen Reich, Nov 1910, nr 11.

28 AZdJ, 5 Oct 1900, nr 40.

29 AZdJ, 31 Oct 1913, nr 44.

30 AZdJ, 21 Sep 1917, nr 38.

31 Moritz Julius Bonn, Nationale Kolonialpolitik, München: M. Rieger, 1910, p 19.

32 Bonn, Kolonialpolitik, p 4.

33 Conrad, German Colonialism, p 27.

34 Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen, p 174.

35 Altneuland, Aug 1905, nr 8.

36 Altneuland, Aug 1905, nr 8.

37 Conrad, German Colonialism, p 151.

38 Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, pp 77–78.

39 John Philipp Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012, pp 67–68.

40 AZdJ, 31 Aug 1906, nr 35.

41 AZdJ, 26 May 1911, nr 21. Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen, pp 377–387. Derek J Penslar, Shylock’s Children. Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, Berkley: University of California Press, 2001, p 170.

42 AZdJ, 12 Apr 1907, nr 15.

43 AZdJ, 3 Jul 1914, nr 31.

44 Isabel V Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005, pp 27–43. Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp 37–75. Klaus Bachmann, Genocidal Empires. German Colonialism in Africa and the Third Reich, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018, pp 37–75.

45 Bonn, Kolonialpolitik, p 14.

46 Shulamit Volkov, Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012, p 67.

47 Walther Rathenau, Tagebuch 1907—1922, Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1967, p 106. Volkov, Walther Rathenau, p 70.

48 Rathenau, Tagebuch, p 103.

49 Rathenau, Tagebuch, p 113.

50 Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, p 220.

51 Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israel Culture, Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp 231–232.

52 Jüdische Rundschau, 26 Jan 1906, nr 4.

53 OW, 6 Mar 1908, nr 10, Arisch-christlicher Zivilizationsexport.

54 This topic is discussed in detail in: Derek J Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918, Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1991.

55 Rana Barakat, ‘Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History’, Settler Colonial Studies, 8(3), 2018, pp 349–363 (here especially pp 349–353).

56 Michael Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Time, Vol. 3, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp 290–299. Volkov, Germans, Jews and Antisemites, pp 24–61. Francis R Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p 3.

57 Susannah Heschel, ‘The Rise of Imperialism and the German Jewish Engagement in Islamic Studies’, in Katz et al (eds), Colonialism and the Jews, pp 54–80 (here pp 75–76).

58 Derek Penslar, ‘Zionism, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism’, Journal of Israeli History, 20(2–3), 2001, pp 84–98. Ian Davidson Kalmar and Derek Penslar (eds), Orientalism and the Jews, Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005. Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen, pp 157–171. Shumsky, Beyond the Nation State, p 83.

59 Lynn S Swarts, Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation: Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German Fin de Siècle, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp 190–191. And see also: Ost und West, May 1910, nr 5, Die Zukunft des Orients.

60 Henriette Hannah Bodenheimer, Im Anfang der zionistischen Bewegung. Eine Dokumentation auf der Grundlage des Briefwechsels zwischen Theodor Herzl und Max Bodenheimer von 1896 bis 1905, Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1965, pp 23–24.

61 A Dirk Moses, ‘The Contradictory Legacies of German Jewry’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 54 (2009), pp 36–43 (here p 41)

62 Moses, ‘The Contradictory Legacies’, p 42.

63 Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart (Köln: Jüdischer Verlag, 1911), pp 267–268. Etan Bloom argues that later on, in 1933, Ruppin expressed his positive impression of Hitler’s speech about the close correlation between blood, race, and artistic creation. See: Bloom, Arthur Ruppin, pp 356–357. And also: Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, p 88.

64 Raphael Falk, Zionism and the Biology of the Jews, Cham: Springer 2006, p 76.

65 Amos Morris Reich, ‘Arthur Ruppin’s Concept of Race’, Israel Studies, 11(3), 2006, pp 1–30 (here p 9).

66 For some of the main works concerning Jews’ discussion of racial identity, see: Joachim Doron, ‘Rassenbewusstsein und naturwissenschaftliches Denken im deutschen Zionismus während der wilhelminischen Ära’, Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, 9, 1980, pp 389–427. Annegret Kiefer, Das Problem einer ‘jüdischen Rasse’: Eine Diskussion zwischen Wissenschaft und Ideologie (1870–1930), Frankfurt: Lang, 1991. Todd M Endelman, ‘Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race’, Jewish Social Studies, 11(1), 2004, pp 52–92. Veronika Lipphardt, Biologie der Juden. Jüdische Wissenschaftler über ‘Rasse’ und Vererbung 1900–1935, Göttingen, 2008. Doron Avraham, ‘Reconstructing a Collective: Zionism and Race Between National Socialism and Jewish Renewal’, The Historical Journal, 60(2), 2017, pp 471–491.

67 Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, pp 61–67.

68 Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, p 68.

69 Bodenheimer, Im Anfang der zionistischen Bewegung, p 48.

70 Davis Trietsch, Palästina Handbuch, Berlin: Orient Verlag, 1910, p 169.

71 Martin Braach-Maksvytis, ‘Germany, Palestine, Israel, and the (Post)Colonial Imagination’, in Langbehn and Salama (eds), German Colonialism, pp 294–313 (here pp 295–296).

72 Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen, pp 174–175.

73 Die Welt, 8 Dec 1899, nr 49.

74 Gershon Shafir, ‘Settler Citizenship in the Jewish Colonization of Palestine’, in Caroline Elkinds and Susan Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, pp 41–58 (here especially pp 42, 52).

75 Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 68, 72.

76 Zachary Lockman, ‘Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir’, Settler Colonial Studies 2(1), 2012, pp 9–38 (here especially pp 14, 28–29).

77 Der Jude, 1916, Heft 4.

78 Abigail Green, ‘Nationalism and the “Jewish International”: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840–c.1880’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50(2), 2008, pp 535–558.

79 Green, ‘Nationalism and the “Jewish International”’, pp 536–537, 542.

80 Conrad, Globalization and the Nation, pp 51–53.

81 Alexandros Ph Lagopoulus, and Karen Boklund Lagopoulus, Meaning and Geography. The Social Conception of Regions in Northern Greece, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992, p 321.

82 Allgemeine Israelitische Wochenschrift (henceforward AIW), 13 Sep 1895, nr 37.

83 Der Israelit, 23 May 1898 nr 40.

84 AIW, 1 Mar 1895, nr 9.

85 Der Israelit, 2 Sep 1897 nr 70.

86 Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War, New Haven, CT, 2017, p 37. Conrad, German Colonialism, pp 52–54.

87 Susann Lewerenz, ‘Colonial Revisionism’, in Prem Poddar and Rajeev S Patke, and Lars Jensen (eds), A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures. Continental Europe and Its Empires, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp 224–226.

88 Moritz Julius Bonn, Das Schicksal des deutschen Kapitalismus, Berlin: S. Fischer, 1926, pp 34–40.

89 Stuart Ward, ‘The European Provenance of Decolonization’, Past and Present, 230(1), 2016, pp 227–260 (here p 237).

90 Der Schild, 15 May 1925, nr 10, Juden als Kolonialkrieger.

91 CV Zeitung, 8 Apr 1927, nr 14, Der Kyffhäuserbund.

92 CV Zeitung, 20 Jun 1930, nr 25, Alfred Wiener.

93 Lora Winderthal, ‘Gender and Colonial Politics after the Versailles Treaty’, in Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire (eds), Weimar Politics, Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, New York: Berghahn, 2010, pp 339–359 (here p 344).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation [grant number 1049/17].

Notes on contributors

Doron Avraham

Doron Avraham (PhD) teaches modern German history in the General History Department, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. His main fields of research are history of German political thought, German nationalism and religion, and German Jews' racial identities