Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
BERLIN'S JEWS
Jews have been part of Berlin's make-up since the earliest days of the twin towns of
Berlin-Cölln. As elsewhere in Europe, their history has been studded by
episodic
persecution
, though nothing comes close to their ruthless extermination by the Third Reich.
Nevertheless, the Jewish community also has a history of determinedly and repeatedly rising
to
prominence
against the odds: punching well above its weight in the city's prewar
entrepreneurial and cultural scene and again today with the numbers of Jews in Berlin
doubling over the past two decades.
Berlin's earliest Jewish settlers gravitated to a tight-knit area around today's Jüdenstrasse
(see p.68) where, banned from most other trades, they successfully traded and lent money and
slowly built a community. But in di
cult times - of economic hardship or epidemics - they
frequently became scapegoats. Bouts of persecution included during the plague of 1349;
1446, when they were driven from the city; and the
witch hunts
of 1510 when fifty Jews were
tortured to death or burnt at the stake, with the rest again barred from the city. Though
readmitted thirty years later, they found themselves barred once again in 1573 following a
spate of pogroms after Joachim II was murdered and his much-disliked Jewish finance minister
was accused of the crime.
Jews were permitted to return to Berlin in 1671, following the expulsion of several rich
families from Vienna and given the economic woes of Brandenburg which, in the wake
of the detrimental thirty-years war, sought powerful people to help with its rebuilding.
Despite suffering personal restrictions and extra taxes, the Jewish population grew, so
that by 1700 the city had 117 Jewish families, and in 1712 its
first synagogue
was built
near today's Rosenstrasse.
The numbers of Jews in the Spandauer Vorstadt and particularly in the
Scheunenviertel
slum was greatly bolstered by a 1737 order that all Berlin's non-home-owning Jews must move
there and that Jews could only enter the city through its northern gates. From that point on,
and particularly in the nineteenth century, the area became a refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms
in eastern Europe and Russia.
A big part of Berlin's draw was the loosening of Prussia's restrictions and the growing equality
of its Jewish population, relative to the rest of Europe. By 1869 German Jews had full rights,
and within years Jews rose to prominence in government, one influential group, dubbed the
“
Kaiserjuden
”, becoming close advisors to the Kaiser. By the 1920s Jewish department stores,
such as
Wertheim
, had become part of the landscape and Jews were also highly active in the
cultural scene with musicians such as the
Comedian Harmonists
extremely popular.
By 1933, when the
Nazis
assumed power and state-backed persecution started, there were
160,564 Jews in Berlin: around four percent of the population and one third of those in the
German Reich. The process of persecution began with an SA-enforced boycott of Jewish
shops, businesses and medical and legal practices on April 1 of that year; many of the
wealthiest Jews left the same year, as a series of laws banning them from public o
ce, the
civil service, journalism, farming, teaching, broadcasting and acting were introduced. Then in
September 1935 the
Nuremberg laws
effectively deprived Jews of their German citizenship,
by introducing apartheid-like classifications of “racial purity”. There was a brief respite in 1936
when Berlin hosted the Olympic Games and the Nazis, wishing to show an acceptable face to
the outside world, eased up on overt anti-Semitism, but by the following year large-scale
expropriation of Jewish businesses began. Jews who could see the writing on the wall, and
had money, escaped while they could (even though other European countries, the US and
Palestine all restricted Jewish immigration), but the majority stayed put, hoping things would
improve, or simply because they couldn't afford to emigrate. However, after the violent
escalation of Nazi anti-Semitism of
Kristallnacht
- the night of November 9, 1938 - their
4
president. Kennedy's city parade included a stop at the viewing platform in front of
the Brandenburg Gate - draped for the occasion by the Russians in enormous red
flags and communist placards - before he retreated to Schöneberg to deliver his
impassioned “Berliner” speech (see p.115). he day proved so emotional that at the
end of it JFK commented to his aides “we'll never have another day like this one as
long as we live”.
