How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin

by Deborah Hertz

When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei , was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries.   The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.  

Genres: History, Jewish, Germany, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 27, 2007

About the author

Deborah Hertz was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1949 and graduated from Highland Park Senior High School in 1967. She attended New York University for two years and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for her Junior Year Abroad in 1969–70. She then returned to the United States and graduated with a major in humanities, summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota in 1971. She remained at the University of Minnesota and received her PhD in German history in 1979.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introductory chapter is worth reading by itself - explains how Third Reich ideology motivated a massive geneological research campaign to determine the "Aryan/non-Aryan" status of every citizen. The records produced by this effort still exist in German archives. The rest of the book is also interesting, mainly focused on cultural and family life in early 19th-century Berlin.

[Eliezer Sneiderman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent, nuanced book capturing the lives of liminal Jewish experience in the 18th an 19th centuries. I would highly recommend this book. Some of the material related to the history of the Reform movement, I had never seen before.

[Zoé Larocque · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book aims to answer various questions about the assimilation of Jews in Germany in the 19th century and why many of them chose to convert to Christianity. In addition, it is a question of whether conversion was the only way to truly integrate into German society and to achieve emancipation and whether this assimilation was really successful and at what price it was done. Deborah Hertz also attempts to assess whether German Jews, and even converts, could be considered fully German. Thus, the question of who were the Jews, a question very present during the Holocaust, was already omnipresent centuries before Hitler came to power. Hertz follows the lives of several members of the generations preceding the partial Jews who were persecuted during the Nazi era, most of these studied individuals having chosen conversion in the 19th century for various reasons. The book explores the motives for conversion, which are mostly quite distant from spiritual transformation as the years went on. The author manages to place personal accounts within a general history of the assimilation of Jews in Germany over the centuries. Hertz manages to draw complex biographical portraits of these people to better understand their choice to convert. The sentence “to the individual Jew everything, to the community, nothing” (p. 107) sums up quite well what the author tells with the different stories.

[Felix Sun · Rating 2 out of 5]

Catchy title and cover, I can't appreciate the content. It feels like a gossip columns of few random individuals than a piece of history. The most engaging part of the book was on the occupation of Prussia by the French, and it wasn't even the highlight.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 1820s, an unusually high number of Berlin Jews converted to Christianity, especially within the city's economic elite. The level of conversions was higher than it was in earlier decades OR in later decades. How come?

Hertz doesn't focus on directly answering this question. However, she hints at it by describing the lives of a few high society apostates. In the early 1800s, Berlin Jews were just emancipated enough to make friends among local high society- but at the same time, many jobs were still off limits to them because of their religion. So conversion was an easy way to get jobs as (for example) academics or lawyers. In addition, German nationalism was (at least in heavily Lutheran Berlin) tied in with Protestantism, so some might have felt that to feel fully German they had to be Christian.

Finally, Judaism had its own problems. Because Berlin limited Jewish in-migration, the city had few rabbis, and no religious leaders who were capable of inspiring people to stay Jewish (or at least none that Hertz mentions). Thus, there were no great rabbis to make traditional Judaism appealing. At the same time, the Prussian government refused to allow less traditional versions of Judaism, so people had no way to create a Judaism more relevant to their lives.

Hertz does not explain why the conversion rate fell after the 1820s; I suspect that the rise of Reform Judaism had something to do with it, but perhaps she will discuss this issue in a second book.