Antisemitism among the Educated

Since the early nineteenth century, universities and scholarship counted as symbols of Jewish emancipatory hopes, even at times when individual success and upward mobility in the academic milieu was by no means the rule for Jewish scholars. In the German Empire, the »quiet« discriminatory barriers in the job market were augmented by »loud« forms of exclusion and aggressive hostilities, among student fraternities as well as professors. The essay »Unsere Aussichten« (Our Views, 1879) penned by the Berlin-based historian Heinrich von Treitschke marked the turning point from corporative reservations and professional distance to public defamations and a new antisemitism. In 1930, the Jewish historian Arthur Rosenberg described this new discourse, with which Jewish were being collectively attacked and subjected to blanket accusations, as »university antisemitism.« In his book »Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People«(1946), published in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and the Holocaust, the linguist Max Weinreich painted a dark picture of the German development through which scholars of all disciplines and the institution of the university itself collaborated with the Nazis.

This research colloquium, which will take place at the Dubnow Institute during the winter semester, will explore Rosenberg and Weinreich’s diagnoses in six lectures, exploring the related question of antisemitism among the educated. The focus will lie not so much on the ideological history of this prejudice, instead addressing social and institutional history case studies drawn from Berlin and Prague alongside individual and institutional reactions of Jewish contemporaries who tried to combat this academic hostility toward Jews.

Program

17 October 2024, Dubnow Institute
Mathias Berek
Zuversicht und Enttäuschung: Moritz Lazarus‘ Antwort auf den akademischen Antisemitismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert

28 November 2024, Dubnow Institute/Stream
Martha Keil
Der Mediävist Samuel Steinherz (1857 Güssing – 1942 Theresienstadt) und die »Affäre« um sein Rektorat an der Karls-Universität in Prag 1922

12 December 2024, SAW Leipzig/Stream
Shulamit Volkov
Gelehrter Antisemitismus: Spannung und  Kontroverse im Zeitalter der Emanzipation

16 January 2025, Dubnow Institute/Stream
Werner Treß
Die Ursprünge der modernen Judenfeindschaft im Kontext der deutschen Nationalbewegung 1813 bis 1819

23 January 2025, Dubnow Institute/Stream
Horst Junginger  
Max Weinreich reconsidered: Hitlers Professoren – vor und nach 1945

6 February 2025, Dubnow Institute/Stream
Alexander Friedman
Eduard Goldstücker und der akademische Antisemitismus im Osten Europas in den späten 1960er Jahren