Discuss the process in which German Jews embraced the concept of "Bildung" and became part of the German "Bildungsbrgertum" (educated bourgeoisie).

So, we must examine how Jews were allowed to enter into this stratum of society, apart from the pre-requisite economic criteria.   Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews of 1781 is an early example of a plan “for making the Jews acceptable to the Bürgertum”.   Among the demands made of the Jews was for the reformation of their occupational structure, i.e. they were exhorted to take up ‘productive occupations’, particularly agriculture, as opposed to commerce.   Volkov claims however, that both to the authorities and to Jews themselves, this was of relative unimportance when compared to the demand that Jews should acquire and use the German language.  For the educated middle class, both Jewish and non-Jewish, using Hochdeutsch was a statement of membership of the Bildungsbürgertum.

Perhaps the most important condition that had to be met in order for the Jews to enter the Bürgertum, however, was the adoption of the ideal of Bildung.  Yet this does not seem to have been a problem, as, beginning with Moses Mendelssohn, the Jews had been particularly drawn to the ideology of the emerging German Bürgertum, which emphasised the value of Bildung (education).  This was a concept, however, which meant much more than the difference between being educated or being uneducated.  It carried with it the meaning of character development or formation; one must cultivate oneself until one is a ‘harmonious, autonomous individual’.

David Sorkin, however, sees a problem with the Jews’ adherence to the ideal of Bildung in order to try to integrate themselves into the Bildungsbürgertum.   Sorkin’s main argument is that Jews transformed the message of Bildung to fit their own understanding of the emancipation process, and to quote Sorkin, “invested all of the concepts they derived from the majority culture with a range of meanings specific to their minority situation.”  While they believed that they had tapped into German culture, their reading of it was a misreading.  One way that Jews attempted to enter German culture was by entering Vereine, important associations of bourgeois German life.   While some Jews were accepted into these organisations, it was never in numbers appropriate to their economic standing in society.  Jews instead began to give secular content to previously religious organisations and to establish whole new secular associations within the Jewish community.   This establishment of parallel institutions created a corresponding Jewish subculture that was neither part of German culture nor distinct from it.  Jews were only partially integrated into the German nation.  Because of the issue of emancipation, the Jews intended to deny the social and political connotations of a subculture, and therefore the Jews themselves were unaware that they were in fact part only of a parallel subculture and therefore a separate community, hence Sorkin’s term for the Jewish subculture: an ‘invisible community’.

So, while it could be argued that the Jews in Germany achieved full integration as they achieved full citizenship rights, falling between the two historiographical extremes of the idea of complete assimilation and the idea that there never existed any kind of dialogue between Germans and Jews, as seen in Gershom Scholem’s ‘Against the Myth of German-Jewish Dialogue’, are far more complex, compelling and convincing interpretations of German-Jewish history, which, in their poignant explanation of the Jews’ ignorance of their separateness, could go some way towards explaining the tragedy that was not long to befall German’s Jewry.    

Bibliography

• Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von: Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, in: Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz, Jehuda (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World. A Documentary History, Oxford, New York 1980, pp. 27-34
• Katz, Jacob: ‘German Culture and the Jews’, in: Reinharz, Jehuda und Schatzberg, Walter (eds.), Jewish Response to German Culture. From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Hanover, London 1985, pp. 85-99.
• Meyer, Michael: ‘Reform Jewish Thinkers in their German Context’, in: Reinharz, Jehuda und Schatzberg, Walter (eds.), Jewish Response to German Culture. From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Hanover, London 1985.
• Mosse, George L.: ‘Jewish Emanzipation: Between Bildung and Respectability’, in: J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (eds.), The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Hanover, London 1985, pp. 1-16.
• Sorkin, David: ‘The Invisible Community: Emancipation, Secular Culture, and Jewish Identity in the Writings of Berthold Auerbach’, in: Reinharz, Jehuda und Schatzberg, Walter (eds.), Jewish Response to German Culture. From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Hanover, London 1985, pp. 100-119.
• Sorkin, David: The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, New York, Oxford 1987.
• Volkov, Shulamit: ‘The 'Verbürgerlichung' of the Jews as a Paradigm’, in: Kocka, Jürgen and Mitchell, Allan (eds.), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Oxford 1993, pp. 367-391.