Zuversicht und Enttäuschung

On Thursday, 17 October 2024, 5.15 p.m., Mathias Berek (Technische Universität Berlin) will give the opening lecture of the series »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.