German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion
German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion

Author: Angela Kuttner Botelho

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-08-23

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 3110732068

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This book explores the fraught aftermath of the German Jewish conversionary experience through the story of one family as it grapples with the meaning of its Jewish origins in a post-Holocaust, post-conversionary milieu. Utilizing archival family texts and multiple interviews spanning three generations, beginning with the author’s German Jewish parents, 1940s refugees, and engaging the insights of contemporary scholars, the book traces the impact of a contested Jewish identity on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Jewish self. The Holocaust as post-memory and the impact of the German Jewish culture personified by the author’s parents leads to a retrieval of a lost Jewish identity, postmodern in its implications, reinforcing the concept of Judaism as ultimately a family affair. Focusing on the personal to illuminate a complex historical phenomenon, this book proposes a new cultural history that challenges conventional boundaries of what is Jewish and what is not.

Modern Marranism and the German-Jewish Experience
Modern Marranism and the German-Jewish Experience

Author: Angela Botelho

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13:

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This thesis sheds new light on the fluid boundaries of the German-Jewish experience in modernity. Using the historical Marrano as paradigm, the thesis argues for a theory of modern Marranism, defined as a hybrid Jewish identity emerging from radical social disjuncture. An examination of the selected literary texts from the nineteenth century onwards shows a persistence of Jewish identity in and despite conversion through memory preserved as narrative.

How Jews Became Germans
How Jews Became Germans

Author: Deborah Hertz

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0300150032

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A “very readable” history of Jewish conversions to Christianity over two centuries that “tracks the many fascinating twists and turns to this story” (Library Journal). When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, they considered it an urgent priority 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 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 brings out the human stories behind the documents, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Jewish Identity in Modern Times
Jewish Identity in Modern Times

Author: Walter Homolka,

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 1995-10-01

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1800735847

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There is no doubt about Baeck's contribution to Jewish theology in the twentieth century: it has been significant. Without ever departing completely from the ancient wellsprings of orthodoxy, he was a studious observer of the intellectual currents of his time and ambience; under theinfluence of liberal Jewish theology, he drew on and reworked those currents, weaving them into his own theological thought. A special aspect of Baeck's work is that he remained in critical confrontation with Christianity throughout his life, acting as a kind of builder of bridges between the two faiths." (From the Introduction.) It is on this aspect that the author focuses his study inwhich he examines Leo Baeck's critical evaluation of Martin Luther and Protestantism. At the same time Homolka shows how close the intellectual links between liberal Christian and liberal Jewish theology had become before the Holocaust: both sides attempted a new definition of the "essence" of their faiths and were searching for a new identity in an increasingly pluralistic and secular society.