This scholarly work focuses on part of the German rehearsal for
destruction that would take place under the Nazis. The book,
however, is more concerned with an earlier period - from 1870 until
1914. During this era, Germany had to develop attitudes and
implement policies toward the large numbers of East European Jews
who migrated west out of Poland. It might have been tempting to
look to German leaders or common Germans to determine what those
attitudes and policies were, but Wertheimer's careful scholarship
led him elsewhere. He wants to know who these Jews were who came
flooding into Germany, and how did not only the German bureaucracy
but already settled German Jews react to the new immigrants. As
Wertheimer develops his thesis, Germany emerges as a country of the
Middle Ages. Whereas in other Western countries, Jews were mostly
emancipated once they entered, in Germany there was no strong
central governmental attempt to protect immigrants' rights.
Instead, each local state devised its own rules, and, in most
respects, relied on historical precedents in barring the aliens
from certain places, disallowing them to engage in some
occupations, and using other equally demeaning measures. Such a
system, with its power focused entirely in faceless bureaucracy,
led to the hardening of anti-Jewish attitudes. Anti-Semitism became
both institutionalized and legitimized, Wertheimer argues, during
this period. There were privileged Jews already living in Germany
when the new immigrants arrived. It might be supposed that their
natural unease about new, large Jewish immigration would have made
them ungracious hosts. On the contrary, however, by and large,
native Jews acted charitably, Wertheimer says, and tried to help
their co-religionists. Their efforts, however, were severely
limited by the bureaucracies. This carefully researched, precisely
written book, creative in its use of sources, is provocative in its
scholarly assertions. (Kirkus Reviews)
When East European Jews migrated westward in ever larger numbers
between 1870 and 1914, both German government officials and the
leaders of German Jewry were confronted by a series of new
challenges. What policies did government leaders devise to cope
with the seemingly unending tide of Jews flooding across Germany's
borders? What was the actual, as opposed to the perceived,
character of these Jewish migrants? How did native Jews respond to
the arrival of coreligionists from the East? Drawing on archival
research conducted in East and West Germany, Israel, and the United
States, Unwelcome Strangers probes into these questions, touching
on some of the most troubling issues in modern German and Jewish
history--the behavior of Germans toward strangers in their midst,
the status and self-perception of emancipated Jews in pre-Nazi
Germany, and the responses of "privileged" Jews to needy, but
alien, coreligionists.
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