In general, Berlin’s 170,000 Jews in the 1920s (4 percent of the city’s population, but a third of all Jews in Germany) were thoroughly assimilated to German culture and had established themselves in the middle classes. From their ranks came Jewish shopkeepers, business magnates, doctors, and artists. Others, however—a quarter of Berlin’s Jews by 1925—were “Ostjuden,” Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants from Poland, Hungary, or Russia.
