The process of German-Jewish emancipation and identification with bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century entailed the reinvention of Judaism as a “religion of reason,” thereby purging it of elements of irrationality and mysticism that came to be associated with the imagined “ghetto Jews” of Eastern Europe.^[1] This division between the modern “assimilated” Western Jew and the traditional or “backward” Eastern Jew was a product not only of the acculturation of Jews to Western European society but also of their internalization of the culture of the Enlightenment with its cognitive division between Eastern and Western Europe.^[2] Yet the process of acculturation also incorporated a nostalgic “return to the ghetto”: an attempt to recapture a “vanishing past” by “collecting Judaica, visualizing Jewish religious life, describing its family setting and emotions and even imagining a return to Jerusalem.”^[3] Although many German Jews expressed contempt toward their “backward” eastern co-religionist, especially when they encountered them as new immigrants to Germany, there was a simultaneous process of identification and romanticization of the Eastern Jew. This romanticization of the Eastern Jew was popularized by central European Zionists such as Martin Buber at the fin de siécle but truly came into vogue after the First World War.^[4] Indeed, as one historian argues, German Jews created a “distinct Jewish identity within a non-Jewish society” in the Weimar Republic.^[5] Far from German Jews being “beyond Judaism,” they were engaged in a process of inventing new traditions based on sites of memory such as archives, monuments, and encyclopedias. German Jews reinvented their traditions, reconstructing a Jewish past as part of the redefinition of their Jewish identities.^[6] The construction of the Eastern Jew as a figure of authenticity was part of this creation of a new Jewish cultural identity. The Eastern Jew was imagined as a Jew who spoke Jewish languages, practiced religious traditions, and asserted his Jewishness. For German Jews, the Eastern Jew functioned as a site of memory of a purified Jewishness that was imagined as existing somehow untouched by Western modernity.^[7]
A central theoretical concern of this paper is to reevaluate the relations between “Eastern” and “Western” Jews, which have been interpreted using a dichtomy between “tradition” and “modernity”, “community” and “assimilation.” The dichotomy tends to obscure the fact that eastern European Jews were clearly participating in the processes and discourses of modernity at the same time as their Western co-religionists.^[8] Such bi-polar conceptions have recently been challenged by scholars employing the insights of cultural studies and cultural anthropology which do not consider cultures as bounded objects or essences, but as processes of social construction and negotiation.^[9] In German-Jewish historiography these new approaches have shifted the focus away from the model of Jewish “assimilation” to a fixed and unchanging German culture toward analyzing how Jews since emancipation have created their own subculture, constructing new identities within German society while maintaining their difference.^[10] In this rethinking of German-Jewish identity as a process of acculturation, the place of the Eastern Jew in German-Jewish collective memory takes on a new significance. As Steve Zipperstein has observed regarding the to some extent analogous process of the American Jewish romanticization of the shtetl in the 1950s, Jewish life in Eastern Europe functioned as
a self-reflexive yardstick for the successes and failures of contemporary Jewish life as imagined against the backdrop of a world fixed in time in a rareifed, obliterated place … the region would also now remind Jews of good as well as bad things: of comfortable, reassuring joys of family, piety, community, spirituality, of a supposedly seamless, holistic way of life left behind in the rush for the bounty of social mobility.^[11]

Zipperstein’s observations are useful for thinking about the German-Jewish imagination of the “Eastern Jew.” As for American Jews, for German Jews the imagination of the Eastern Jew also served as a means of evaluating Western modernity. Further, the Eastern Jew functioned as a site of memory, a repository for an “authentic” tradition, a figure which could be used to construct an “imagined community” of a diasporic or national Jewish identity. Finally, as I will argue, the construction of the Eastern Jew paralleled that of the colonial Other. For these reasons, an examination of the figure of the Eastern Jew can offer insights into German-Jewish identity in general and the imperial dimensions that identity in particular.
In this article, I will analyze some widely read German-Jewish travel accounts about eastern Europe by Arnold Zweig, Otto Heller, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth which were published in the interwar period before the Nazis came to power. I will explore the ways that these writers constructed the place of the Eastern Jew in German-Jewish collective memory. The travel accounts are particularly interesting, because they document the conflict between the writer’s image of the Eastern Jew and the “reality” that he observes. The accounts are less valuable for the information they convey about the experience of Jewish life in eastern Europe, then for the insight they offer into the role of cultural memory in the construction of German-Jewish identity in the interwar period.^[12] In particular, they show the means by which writers both identified and distanced themselves from the figure of the Eastern Jew. Although each writer imagined the Eastern Jew from a different political or ideological perspective, the accounts point to shared patterns of “remembering” the Eastern Jew.

The Eastern Jew and the Colonial Other

The relation between German Jews and “Eastern Jews” is seldom seen in the context of German or Austrian imperialism.^[13] This is surprising, when we consider the centrality of the war in shaping the travel encounters between German Jews and eastern European Jews both during the German occupation and in the interwar period. Although it is generally recognized that the First World War constituted a transformation in the German consciousness of the Eastern Jew, often to the point of ignoring the ongoing contact between Eastern and Western Jewry that had existed in Wilhelmian Germany,^[14] little attention is granted to the imperial dynamics of these encounters. The upheavals of war and the Russian Revolution contributed to the substantial growth in the migration of eastern European Jews to Germany during this period.^[15] German perceptions of this migration also fueled the antisemitism directed against eastern European Jewish immigrants — many of whom had been employed as forced laborers in the occupied territories and in Germany during the war.^[16]
This imperial context for our discussion becomes all the more significant when we consider the similarities in the construction of the Eastern Jew and the colonial Other as a site of memory. Traditional Jewish culture had its own means of memory transmission, but with modernity new vehicles of memory transmission were constructed and Jewish traditions were reinvented.^[17] In Western imperialism the colonial Other has often been incorporated into the cognitive map of Western modernity by being distanced temporally — what Johannes Fabian has termed “a denial of coevalness.” These colonized cultures are distanced in time as a means of affirming Western identity, and the cultures are made to represent stages of development which “the West” has supposedly left behind it. Although time is linear, allowing the colonial Other to advance toward Western modernity, the Other remains in a separate time trajectory.^[18] Were the Other to advance, the West would have advanced that much further, and thus the Other is continually imagined to be trapped in “backwardness.”
Although the Western Jewish memory of Eastern Jewry functioned in a similar manner, the dynamic was different because the Other was constructed as belonging to the same cultural identity as the observer; thus the Jew is both subject and object of the anthropological gaze. The processes of distantiation and recognition function dialectically. For example, in a lecture held at the Women’s auxiliary of the Kant Lodge in Königsberg in March 1918, Rosalie Perles discussed the relation of her grandfather’s generation to Germanness and Jewishness. For her grandfather, there was no conflict between Germanness and Jewishness and both the “ancient Jewish and German” cultures “could be embodied, so to speak, in the same person.”^[19] For one to understand this assimilation to German culture, Perles insisted that one should look at the conditions in the ghetto, “the scene of their lengthy history of suffering.”^[20] Drawing on descriptions of the nineteenth-century Jewish ghetto in Pressburg, which consisted of one street in which 1,000 people had to live, Perles related this image to that of the German occupied territory in eastern Europe, in which the Russian conditions of poverty should be seen less as a “ghetto” than as “hell.” Perles suggests that although the miserable conditions of the Jewish masses might result in the their physical and moral decline of many, “a strong tribe will still remain which will rescue itself and under better living conditions thrive.”^[21] Perles’ narrative thus retains an identification with eastern European Jewry, but there is no mention in her speech about how the German occupation of eastern Europe might have contributed to the current condition of Polish Jewry. Nonetheless, the Eastern Jewish experience could be equated with a universal Jewish “ghetto” past. Western Jews could imagine that the Jewish traditions they observed in eastern Europe were those of their grandparents or great-grandparents. They could also imagine the Eastern Jew joining a modern Western future.
The authenticity of “traditional” Judaism was also constructed according to this same temporal, ethnographic logic. The claim for “authenticity” requires a rootedness in the past, and the linear trajectory of modernity is necessary to make this claim. The processes of affirmation and distantiation are therefore structured according to a linear time model as well as spatially distributed across the divide between eastern and western Europe.^[22] Indeed, the concern for the “loss of tradition” and the recognition of the need to preserve it would not be understandable without this linear time model. The writers of the travel accounts saw themselves as travelling not only through space but also through time. They were exploring not only eastern Europe but were also engaged in a “return” to what they perceived to be their own past or roots.

Zionism and the Romanticization of the Eastern Jew

The romanticization of the “Eastern Jew” as a figure of authentic Jewishness was popularized by German Zionists at the turn of the century. The rise of nationalist mass politics, antisemitism, and pogroms against Russian Jews had stimulated a rethinking of Jewish identity by a younger generation of Jews who rejected the liberal Judaism of their parents.^[23] Before World War I, German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig (1897-1968) tried to make his name in German literature while maintaining his Jewish identity. Although entering the war with enthusiasm, his own experience of the slaughter of Verdun shook his faith in the superiority of the German cultural mission in the war. Zweig, like many other German Jews of his generation, became more critical of the war after the infamous Judenzählung of 1916, in which the Prussian ministry of war performed a census of Jewish soldiers in the German army. This action raised doubts of the willingness of Germans to accept Jews as members of the German nation. Zweig’s dissimilation was furthered by the Balfour declaration, which awakened hopes for a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Russian Revolution, which affirmed the hopes of the left in the possibilities of a socialist future.^[24] In 1917, Zweig was sent to serve on the eastern front in the administrative district Ober-Ost which included Lithuania, Courland, parts of Poland and Belorussia. It was here that Zweig, along with other German-Jewish intellectuals such as Hermann Struck and Sammy Gronnemann, experienced sustained contact with eastern European Jews in their indigenous context.^[25] It was after the war that Zweig turned to a Zionist-Socialism.
Much has been written about Zweig’s essay which accompanied Hermann Struck’s fifty-five lithographs of Eastern Jews made during World War I entitled The Eastern Jewish Countenance (Das ostjüdische Antlitz) published in 1919. Struck and Zweig’s book constructs a narrative of a homogenous Eastern Jew out of many lithographs of individuals. The authenticity of Eastern Jewish religious practice is romanticized and valorized as an “imagined community” of the shtetl.^[26] Yet behind Zweig’s romanticized image of the Eastern Jew rests not just a construction of an authentic model for a Jewish future, but an anxiety that modernity was making this Jewishness a thing of the past. In a public lecture held in Leipzig in 1923, Zweig discussed the contemporary condition of Eastern Jewry. Zweig believed that the upheavals after the war had destroyed the religious connections of Eastern Jews with each other. Eastern Jews were increasingly migrating throughout the world, becoming susceptible to assimilation. Indeed, Zweig wrote of a “radicalness of assimilation” that had never been seen in the Jewish people.^[27] In this situation every person’s behavior would count in an effort to preserve Judaism: “In such a time as this, passivity becomes suicide of the people. Today, don’t we clearly have the feeling that an axe hangs over our very existence?”^[28] Other Zionists expressed similar concerns. In his pioneering Sociology of the Jews, Arthur Ruppin suggested that intermarriage was destroying the Jewish gene pool.^[29] For Ruppin, secularization possessed a particular danger since the Jews did not possess external characteristics which bound them together. Only their religion preserved group identity.^[30] Ruppin feared that the increasing dispersal of Jews from eastern Europe in other parts of the diaspora would result in a loss of their Jewishness, since they would quickly acculturate into the host society.^[31] For Ruppin, other than the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, there was little hope for the future of the Jews.
Zweig’s romanticization of the Eastern Jew should be viewed against this background of his desire to preserve an authenticity that he feared would soon be lost. In a 1928 publication, Zweig reminisced about the Jewish Theater Troupe he encountered while participating in the German occupation of Vilna in 1916. Zweig valued the sense of community that the young people, mostly amateurs, expressed in their productions. Zweig was captivated by the Yiddish language plays. He viewed Yiddish as a site of tradition and memory for the Eastern Jew. Yiddish was “a reflection of Jewish life itself” symbolic in its mixing of Old German, Russian, and Polish while preserving the feeling and concepts of Hebrew. A mixture of “self and other” which “shared many centuries of Jewish life,” Yiddish created a new “unity” in the mouth of the Eastern Jew, “Jewish in tone, tempo, spirit, and being.” Yet this moment of community was only momentary: “Then they gave visiting performances, disappeared across the ocean, separated, dispersed themselves – we will never see them again, never hear Yiddish spoken in that way, never be touched by the secret, everyday, maternal magic of the Jewish East”^[32] Zweig reconfirmed this point in a 1929 afterword to the reprint of The Eastern Jewish Countenance: “Maybe we, the generation of the war, were the last ones who had the opportunity still to see the old Eastern Jewish countenance.”^[33]

Communism and the Construction of the Jew as Worker and Farmer

The Bohemian born Otto Heller (1897-1945) also experienced the Russian Revolution as decisive break with the past. Unlike Zweig, Heller did not see Zionism as a viable option for the Jews since nationalism would be an “anachronism” in a socialist future.^[34] Instead, Heller offered a Soviet alternative in which Jews would meet not in Jerusalem, but rather could celebrate: “Next year in the Crimea! / Next Year in Birobidjan!”^[35] One of the founding members of the Communist Party German Section, Heller lived in Berlin from 1926 until 1933. Although he was dismissed from the party, German Communist Willi Münzenberg befriended him and had him appointed secretary of the German branch of Gesard or OZET, the Society for the Rural Placement of Jewish Workers in the USSR.^[36] Heller published The Decline of Judaism: the Jewish Question, its Criticism, its Solution through Socialism in 1931, the only full-length German Communist book on the “Jewish question” which advocated Jewish settlement in the Crimea and Birobidzhan as an anti-Zionist alternative to Palestine.^[37] Part travel account, part history of the Jews, Heller’s book attempts to show the emancipatory efforts of the Soviet Union on behalf of its Jewish citizens.
Following Karl Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” and Joseph Stalin’s writings on nationalities, Heller defined Jews as a social and historical category that would cease to exist if the material conditions of production changed.^[38] Applying a Marxist developmental argument, Heller considered Judaism to be a feudal religion that had adapted to bourgeois class structures in western Europe, but not in eastern Europe where it remained in its medieval form. Heller viewed Judaism as dependent on the continued existence of a Jewish “caste” held together by the existing societal relations. If the caste were to die out, so would the religion. A devout communist, Heller saw no place for Judaism, or for religion of any kind, in a socialist future of humanity: “This religion [Judaism] is socially unadaptable, because it is only the inflexible law of a caste and the caste can only dissolve. It can not develop into a higher social order.”^[39] For Heller, the laws of Judaism were no match for the laws of history. The enlightenment in the West had dissolved the “ghettos” and the caste, allowing Judaism to become confessionalized [verkirchlicht], and indistinguishable from any other religion. Typical for his generation, Heller viewed the temples of the West with disdain: “the rabbis have become Jewish pastors.” Only in "the East" could one still find authentic Jews in which every member of the population could read and interpret the Torah. Heller characterized the “Sunday Judaism” of European and American Jews as a passing “curiosity.” Their magnificent synagogues were “nothing more than monuments made of stone that have nothing left to say to their visitors. Sites of piety, superfluous institutions in an irreverent age.”^[40] Heller perpetuated the “ghetto” image of the shtetl as “dirty, run-down, and uncultured.”^[41] Its destruction would only bring happiness to the people: “The destruction of the Jewish Religion through the proletarian revolution clears the path for Jewish nationality that still lives in the East … Only by the destruction of the Jewish religion … will the continued existence of the Jews in the East become reality based on a new social foundation, liberated from misery, from every national oppression … The final social, national and religious reservoir of Judaism in the west will be destroyed.”^[42] With the end of the Jewish religion, antisemitism, another medieval remnant, would also cease to exist.^[43]
Heller explained the failure of Eastern Jews to emancipate by the “fact” that they were not able to find a bourgeoisie into which they could assimilate as they had in the West. The “barbaric backwardness of society and economy” under the Russian tsars preserved the caste structure of the Jewish religion, thus allowing them to skip the stage of assimilation to the bourgeoisie and move from feudal society directly to the proletariat. The artisans, small business owners, and merchants would no longer be necessary in the socialist state; therefore they, along with the shtetl would eventually disappear. But Heller stressed that this decline was the “beginning of a new way of life”^[44] Backed by the progressive forces of History, any efforts of the bourgeois Jews to save Eastern Jews was futile. Only the change of the means of production, with the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, could alter this situation. Indeed this societal change was “the necessary precondition for the solution of the Eastern Jewish question in general.”^[45] Thus the Jews in eastern Europe would have to become agricultural and industrial workers to become a nationality. Heller documented the success of the Soviet Union in this regard with statistics of rising numbers of Jewish industrial workers and farmers that result from the Soviet industrialization and colonization measures. Heller thereby could celebrate the first Five Year Plan as “the last five years of the over three thousand year old history of Judaism.”^[46]
Heller traveled to visit the Jewish areas in the Soviet Union, the territory being colonized in the Ukraine and in Biro-Bidzhan. Arriving in the town of Islutschistoje, about to be renamed Stalindorf, Heller was quite surprised by what he saw: “The people were actual farmers. If they had not spoken in Yiddish, one would have never guessed that they were Jews.”^[47] In the commune of Chortiza, which Heller notes was one of the areas where the Chmielnicki massacres took place in the mid-seventeenth century, he described Jews and Ukrainians working together on the land. One Jewish worker was introduced by the Ukrainian head of the commune as “our minister of pigs” who was in charge of raising swine. Heller viewed those who did not adapt to the new social structures as obsolete. In Odessa he met two older Jews who were interested in hearing news from some Jewish visitors from Buenos Aires. He labeled them “a dying generation” since they do not realize where the future lies.^[48] With so many changes taking place, Heller even observed the creation of a Museum for Jewish culture in Odessa. Housed in a former palace, the museum contained many treasures of the Jewish people, which were no longer necessary in socialist Russia: synagogue candles, tapestries, parchments, paintings, and documents detailed the pogroms and history of the Jewish workers movement.^[49]
Heller also visited the Jewish colony of Biro-Bidzhan, a territory in the far east of the country which the Soviet government wanted to colonize in order to secure it against a Japanese invasion. The territory was sparsely inhabited, home to only 1,200 Koreans, Kazakhs, and Tungus. Although advocated as a Jewish territory, Jews never amounted to more than 23% of the population there.^[50] Nonetheless, Heller had faith in the future of Biro-Bidzhan. Upon arriving, he described it as “Jews in the Jungle.” A Soviet film team was filming a documentary about the territory which was to detail the emigration from the shtetls, the “arrival of the first pioneers, the meeting with the native inhabitants of the land, their struggles with floods, epidemics, mosquito plagues, forest and the wild.” Such a “primitive” scene would soon be juxtaposed with the modernity of the “first settlements, the first streets, the rattle of the first automobile motors, the roar of first tractors and tanks.”^[51]
Heller distinguished his “red counter-Palestine” from the Palestine of the Zionists: “Biro-Bidzhan is not a colonial country with brown, yellow and black peoples who cultivate the land in the least expensive manner … with their bare hands” for the Western colonial powers.^[52] In comparison to the colonial slaves of Palestine, he asserted that the Jews of Biro-Bidzhan would work the soil collectively and would share the benefits that their work produced.^[53] The modernity of his industrialized utopia was quite apparent: “The dream of Palestine will be ancient history when in Biro-Bidzhan automobiles, trains, steamships will travel, the smokestacks of enormous factories will smoke, and the children of a free Jewish worker and farmer generation will jump around in gardens full of flowers.”^[54]
Heller thus viewed Eastern Jewry as the carriers of Jewish tradition, a religion that had no place in a socialist future. Although recognizing the “authenticity” of the Eastern Jew in comparison to what to him seemed an empty spiritual practice in the West, Heller could identify with Eastern Jews only in so far as they were involved in the socialist project. In his utopia, the Jewish people would live as a nationality working together with other peoples as farmers and industrial workers. For Heller, the Eastern Jews would have to form a connection to the soil in order to engage in industrial production and to be molded into a nation. The Jews who were able to accomplish this would gain inclusion in a socialist future of a homogenous international proletariat; those who did not, would be left behind, becoming living relics of a bygone age.

The Eastern Jew as Object of the Western Ethnographic Gaze

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) published his Journey to Poland in 1925, a fascinating book, in part because of its rich depiction of the variety of cultures in interwar Poland,^[55] but mostly for what it says about Döblin’s own negotiation of his Jewish identity. Döblin did not travel to see the Poles, but rather the Jews are at the center of his account of Poland. Indeed, even though he at times longs to speak to a Catholic priest or monk, his lack of knowledge of Polish made this impossible.^[56] Upon his arrival in Warsaw, Döblin singles out in a crowd a man in a caftan and black cloak who spoke loudly in words that Döblin considered to be German. Döblin is shocked: “They are Jews. I am astonished, no, frightened.”^[57] For Döblin the Eastern Jews, unlike Jews in Western Europe, are truly a “people ”: “They are a people [Volk] … they have their own language, religion, customs, their ancient national feeling and national consciousness.”^[58] Although Döblin’s account characterizes Polish Jews as a diverse group of people with various levels of acculturation and belief, it nonetheless perpetuates the stereotypical image of the “Eastern Jew” as a figure of “authenticity.” Indeed the history and culture of the Jews in Poland were substantially different, as the interwar Polish state was a construction of territories which had formerly been parts of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires.^[59]
Döblin possessed an ambivalent attitude toward Polish Jews that reflects his own Polish-Jewish origins. Döblin was born in Stettin of Jewish parents and grew up in Berlin where after his university study he practiced medicine until the outbreak of the war. He served as a volunteer in the German army, but soon became disillusioned with the war and protested against it. Although he supported the workers’ councils in the German Revolution of 1918-1919, he later turned away from the radical socialism and joined the Social Democrats in 1921.^[60]
Döblin exhibits a strong aversion to the “backwardness” and “primitiveness” he perceives in Jewish ritual practice. On Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, Döblin observes the Jews of Warsaw going to the “ghetto” to honor the dead. He effeminizes the Eastern Jew by focusing on the behavior of women at the at the graveyards, which he found quite disturbing: “They lie on the graves, crying, screaming, accusing, lamenting, shouting, calming the dead … Here is the place where they pray out loud; the women’s religious service above the graves. The men stand upright with their prayerbooks, seriously and solemnly mumbling and bowing; at their feet cower the women and girls, in the grass, wailing, moaning, crying out the shrill sing song”^[61] Döblin thus distances himself from what to him appears to be an uncivilized and effeminate Jewishness. He returns to his hotel and writes “It is something dreadful. It is something primitively natural, atavistic. Does that have anything to do with Judaism? … it is the remains of another religion, animism, cult of the dead.”^[62] In order to find shelter from the “primitive” display, Döblin must return to his hotel, a safe-haven that possessed all of the comforts of European civilization.
Döblin’s account is filled with his own “anthropological” observations of the Jews. Citing a historian who describes the Semitic peoples as lacking the intense emotional life of the indogermanic peoples, Döblin questions, rather tongue and cheek, to what extent the Hassidim could be counted as Semitic.^[63] While in Lublin, he comments on the intelligence of the “Eastern Jew.” He finds them to be very clever and logical, in keeping with the stereotype of Jewish intelligence, yet they nonetheless isolate themselves from things foreign: “They reject and cannot accept; they are blind; they lack insight into many things and contexts. There is something plump and thoroughly rural, peasantlike about them – that sticks to them even after their ‘emancipation’.”^[64] The pseudo-ethnographic character of Döblin’s prose functions to create distance between himself and the Eastern Jew both temporally and spatially. The practices he observes are variously described as “medieval,” “ancient,” “primitive,” or “prehistoric.” The Eastern Jews inhabited another time period and were separated from the West by a spatial divide between western and eastern Europe, “civilization” and “barbarism.”
Yet Döblin’s assessment of the Eastern Jew was not wholly negative. At times he could identify with their spirituality. For example, Döblin was fascinated by the harvest festival of Succoth: “They [the Polish Jews] go to celebrate a festival of nature in the dark courtyards of the metropolis, next to trashcans.“ Döblin becomes ecstatic as he observed the construction of the sukkah, or field hut, finding it to be “a symbol for the only thing that carries the future, birth, creativity: for the spirit and the strength of the individual.”^[65]
Such a valorization of Polish Jewish authenticity was generally made in contrast to the Döblin’s image of Western Jews. Reflecting on the Jews he knew in the West Döblin remarked that they were “disconnected specimens, degenerated, far away from the center of the people that lives here and preserves itself.”^[66] Against western Judaism, Döblin celebrated the spirit and culture of Polish Jewry that produced the Baal Schem Tov or the Gaon of Vilna: “What happened in these seemingly cultureless eastern lands. How everything flows around the spiritual [das Geistige]. … Not a small group of people, but a whole mass spiritually bound.”^[67] For Döblin, it was an advantage that since the Romans conquered and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD, the Jews never had to deal with their own states, revolutions, and wars. He described them as a people who “carried the temple inside themselves.”^[68] With the rise of nationalism and modernity in Poland, the Jews were having to leave the shtetls. Döblin considered modernity to be slowly destroying Jewish life and considered Judaism as incompatible with the nation-state: “’state’ and ‘parliament’ are on the horizon – against the Gaon and Baal-Shem.” For Döblin, the temple the Zionist’s would construct in Judaism would not be the same as the one that the Eastern Jew carried inside himself. ^[69]
Döblin’s identification with Germanness also becomes apparent in the account. This became most clear when visited a German military cemetery in Vilna. Observing that he had heard “pleasant things about the German occupation,” Döblin explored the separate cemeteries for officers, civilians, and regular troops:

Outside in the Zakret Forest, I see the graves in long, long rows. Simple wooden crosses, also the special Greek Orthodox crosses from the Russians … innumerable dead lay underneath … That I feel tortured and ashamed, as I walk through the rows. That I have the feeling: I must apologize to them. Because they rest and I live. I don’t want to ask; I should not ask, how they are doing. I hope things are going well for them, as pleasant and beautiful as the long green grass that grows out of their graves.^[70]
Döblin expressed an ambivalence about the war experience not only because of the death of fellow Germans but for its effects on Jewish life in Poland as well. Döblin was deeply concerned with the future of Jews in Poland. He traced a history of Polish Jews’ encounters with modernity. Modernity for Döblin unlike Heller or Zweig was less an emancipatory, than a destructive force. For Döblin the “liquidation of the Jewish middle ages” began in the late nineteenth century as modern industry suddenly appeared before the shtetls beginning a “chronic crisis” that led to mass emigration. He notes that the First World War brought massive loss of homes, shops, and land to the Jews. In the subsequent civil war, epidemics, and pogroms killed a half million Jews.^[71] Indeed, as recent work on the German occupation of eastern Europe in World War I has shown, the occupation was more devastating than earlier historians have suggested.^[72] The German propaganda to gain support from eastern European Jews only exacerbated anti-semitism in the non-Jewish populations who accused the Jews of allying with the Germans. The occupation policies of forced labor and supply requisitions disrupted the local economies severely.^[73] Döblin’s recognition of the painful effects of the war effort that he had once supported in 1914, is at the core of his ambivalence about modernity’s promises for eastern European Jews.
In Lemberg, Döblin once again found Jews that disgusted him. Commenting on the Legionowstrasse in the Jewish quarter of Lemberg, he writes: “Whoever walks through it, knows what Lufthandel, unproductive work is and what the hostile words parasite and free-loader mean.” But he shifts the blame for their conditions onto the modernization of Poland under the tsar as well as onto the First World War: “This is the effect of a century of policies. A dead-end. A physical and economic degeneration…”^[74] Döblin expressed similar sentiments in his depictions of the town of Drohobycz in an industrial and oil producing area. He found the area “disgusting” with housing in a pitiful condition with broken windows and in disrepair: “Terribly, in the middle of this misery glows a powerful, freshly painted house … it is the synagogue. It had also become dilapidated, but they renovated it. … one should not have renovated it. The buildings should have been demolished long ago; it was decided, settled. The war came. And now in the holes the true victims of war decay.”^[75]

Born in Brody, the journalist and novelist Joseph Roth (1894-1939) wrote his Wandering Jews to correct the romanticization of the Eastern Jew as well as to challenge antisemitic discourse directed against the eastern European Jewish immigrants in the 1920s. Roth criticized Döblin’s work for offering a stereotypical depiction of the Poles. Although Roth found some value in Döblin’s more nuanced portrayal of Jewish life in Poland, which did not try to hide the negative elements of Polish Jewish life, he nonetheless faulted Döblin in a review of his book for his “western European arrogance of civilization.”^[76] In his Wandering Jews Roth extended this critique: “This book is not intended for those western Europeans who think that the fact that they grew up with and elevator and water closet gives them the right to make bad jokes about Rumanian lice, Galician leeches, Russian fleas.” Rather, Roth wanted to show that despite the lack of economic development, the eastern European Jews were “great people with great ideas” that could help renew Western civilization.^[77] Indeed Roth found that Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe were a benefit to Western civilization in that they could “interrupt the deathlike, hygienic boredom of this civilization.” He was critical of Westerners who forced the immigrants into quarantines, not realizing that “our whole way of life is a quarantine and all of our countries are barracks and concentration camps, with the most modern comforts, to be sure.”^[78] Roth also attempted to destabilize the distinction between eastern and western Jews: “Almost all Jews were once Western Jews before they came to Russia and Poland. And all Jews were once ‘Eastern Jews’, before part of them became Western Jews. And half of all the Jews who speak today with disdain or contempt about the east, once had grandfathers who came from Tarnopol.”^[79]
Although Roth gave a positive account of Jewish life in eastern Europe, valuing the vitality that Döblin disdained as uncivilized and barbaric, he nonetheless saw little hope for the continuance of traditional Jewish life in eastern Europe. For Roth, World War I, the fall of the Habsburg Empire and the Russian Revolution had irrevocably brought the legacy of Western modernity to eastern European Jewry. Roth had served in the Austrian army from 1916-1918 on the eastern front and been active in Galicia during the revolution and also reported the Russian-Polish war in 1920 for a Berlin newspaper. Left “homeless” with the breakup of the Habsburg Empire, Roth spent much of the interwar period living in hotels supporting himself by publishing in German newspapers.^[80]
For Roth, the promise of “Western European humanity” which had held such an attraction to Eastern Jews, had proven itself to be empty, as Western fears of immigration meant that the Eastern Jews were not welcome there. Indeed Roth also valorized the shtetl as more humane than Western civilization. For him, the “ghetto” was only located in the centers of the West: Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. He criticized the Zionists for not seeing the development of Judaism in as part of the development of the world: “these Jews do not notice that the progress of the world is destroying the Jewish religion and that fewer and fewer believers remain, and the number of the pious is dwindling”^[81] Roth portrayed the Zionists not only as blind to the forward march of modernity and its inherent secularization, but also criticized them for being pawns of European imperial politics. Roth was critical of the “benefits” of western civilization, which the Zionist settlers were bringing to the Arabs in Palestine: “electricity, fountain pens, engineers, machine guns, erroneous philosophies, and all the other junk that England delivers.”^[82]
Roth also attacks Döblin’s ethnographic narrative which portrays the mystical sect of the Hasidim as the object of a European scientific gaze. Commenting on the Hassidim’s dancing in celebration of the holiday of Simchat Torah, Roth finds it not to be “the dance of a degenerated race” but rather a sign of their very health and vitality.^[83] Yet strikingly Roth does compare the status of the Hasidim to that of the colonial Other. Indeed, Roth suggests that the Western European would find them as “distant and mysterious as the inhabitants of the Himalayas who are now in fashion.” Yet while identifying them with an exotic colonial Other, Roth also differentiates them:

They are difficult [for the Westerner] to research because they have already familiarized themselves with the superficiality of European civilization, being more rational than the defenseless objects of European research zeal, and one can not impress them with movie camera, binoculars, nor airplane. … Because the Jews live everywhere in our midst one considers them already discovered. Yet events occur in the court of a great rebbe that are just as interesting as those of the Indian fakirs.^[84]
Roth does not equate the Hassidim with the colonial Other: the Hassid is granted some agency in interacting with the Western Europeans and, indeed, does not need to be studied since the Hassidim are included in the category Jew, which has been thoroughly researched by Western scientists. Yet both the Eastern Jew and the colonial Other were figures that having been confronted with modernity could no longer remain “isolated” in a world of tradition.
Similar to Otto Heller, Roth traveled to Soviet Russia to observe the condition of the Jews there. Although writing with more distance than Heller, he relates similar observations regarding the Soviet treatment of the Jews as a nationality: the Soviets wanted to make the Jews into farmers, reestablishing the connection between people and soil. Roth does not see the Jewish nationalists in Russia as wanting to be “the heirs of the ancient Hebrews, but rather only their descendents.”^[85] Indeed, Roth observed that secular modernity was destroying the “spirituality of the masses,” replacing it with ideas of nationhood and nationality: “When this development continues, than the age of Zionism, the age of antisemitism -- and perhaps the age of Judaism will all be past.” Although Roth expressed ambivalence over what he saw as an inevitable future in Soviet Russia, he had to acknowledge the positive aspects of the Soviet treatment of the Jews. The Soviet Jews would no longer suffer and the non-Jews in Soviet Russia would not face the stigma of violence that had separated Jews and non-Jews in the past. These accomplishments Roth valorized as the “great work of the Russian Revolution.”^[86]

Conclusion

The First World War was perceived by German Jews as a profound break in the process of acculturation to German society. Although the mobilization of the German nation for war was greeted as a moment of inclusion, the persistence of antisemitism revealed that the Jews continued to be excluded from the German nation. The turn to Zionism, the cult of the Eastern Jew, and the Renaissance of Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic were clearly part of this process of dissimilation. Although these cultural expressions of dissimilation had their roots in the prewar period, the war popularized and radicalized these yearnings. Travel encounters during or after the war were attempts to reimagine a Jewishness that transcended the divide of East and West, even, as in the case of Döblin, if this was perceived as being an impossible project.
There is a deep paradox that lies at the heart of these authors' imaginations of the future of eastern European Jewry and of Jewishness in general. Whether they were envisioning a socialist Zionist future, the advance of socialism in Russia, or assimilation to Western culture, each imagined a future in which there was no place for the “essence” of the Eastern Jew—its “traditional” and “authentic” religious practice. The Eastern Jew functioned as a repository for this “authenticity” which they perceived to be unavailable in the West. Without the vital presence of the Eastern Jew, Judaism would be irrevocably lost, becoming a thing of the past.
Since most of these figures were highly acculturated to Western society, a tension arose in their conception of Western modernity. Their loss of faith in Western progress, a faith which had been shaken by the war, attracted them to alternative utopias to that of Western capitalism. However, these modern visions of the future contained no place for a vital Jewishness, a Jewishness that was located temporally in the past. In order for the Eastern Jew to participate in these modern utopias, he would have to shed his otherness. Yet this imagined past was constitutive of the writers’ own identities, as indeed becomes apparent in their travel accounts. The very fact that they made these journeys to the East testifies to the value they placed on their Jewishness. These interwar intellectuals found it difficult to imagine a modernity that was not based on a universal model of assimilation, the end product – in their eyes – being homogenous humanity. Yet at the same time, Jewishness was still a fundamental part of their identities. Thus their travel accounts function on some level as expressions of their own awareness of the limitations of their Western, acculturated identities—their recognition of the double bind they found themselves in as both subjects and objects of an anthropological gaze.