Ostjuden
Ostjuden was a term used in Germany and Austria during the first half of the 20th century to refer to Jews from Eastern Europe. The term often had a pejorative connotation and, like other disparaging epithets of earlier use, evoked the negative qualities that German racism had attributed to Eastern European Jewry since the 19th century.
Because the stereotype of the Eastern Jew blended antisemitism with anti-Slavic sentiment and xenophobia, hostility toward Eastern European Jews could be found among both antisemitic non-Jewish Germans and assimilated German Jews alike. The latter sometimes reacted with fear and contempt to the arrival in Germany of Jews who spoke Yiddish, dressed differently, practised Orthodox Judaism, and lived in extreme poverty. Other German Jews, however, were fascinated by Eastern European Jews and viewed them with sympathy and admiration, seeing in them a more authentic form of Jewish life and religious expression, a resistance to the values of bourgeois society, and the prototype of a Jewish identity untainted by assimilation.
The term Ostjude was widely used in völkisch and Nazi antisemitic propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s, but has been used neutrally in Jewish historical studies since the 1980s. In the German-speaking Jewish world and in Israel, the Ostjude is contrasted with the Yekke, the stereotype of the German Jew, bourgeois and largely assimilated into Western European culture.
Etymology
The precise origins of the German term Ostjude are difficult to trace. While it is frequently attributed to Nathan Birnbaum, a Jewish writer and journalist who used the adjective ostjüdisch in 1897 and introduced the noun Ostjude in 1904, this attribution is disputed among scholars.Initially applied to Jews living in Eastern Europe, by the time of World War I the term was more specifically used to denote Eastern European Jewish migrants settling in Western Europe, and had acquired a pejorative connotation within German-speaking communities, joining the ranks of other derogatory labels like Schnorrer, Betteljude, and Polacke. In Austria-Hungary, the Yiddish term Galitsianer was commonly used to denote Jews from Galicia and was sometimes extended to refer to Eastern European Jews in general.
The term Ostjude has also been used neutrally, without negative connotation, by Jewish intellectuals. Notably, Birnbaum and others, particularly in the years before World War I, sought to bridge the divide between native and immigrant German Jews by presenting a positive, sometimes idealised, image of Eastern European Jews. Furthermore, the term has been employed in a neutral sense in scholarly studies of Jewish history and culture, especially since the 1980s.
In the German-speaking Jewish world and in Israel, the Ostjude is often contrasted with the Yekke, who is the stereotypical German Jew, bourgeois, largely assimilated into Western European culture. In everyday conversation and writing, Yekke is often used as a synonym for snobbery and insensitive meticulousness, while the word Ostjude evokes the image of the Jew as a victim of his own people.
Eastern European Jews in Germany
In Germany, Ostjuden generally referred to Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe who were present in small numbers throughout the 19th century, with far larger numbers passing through or arriving after the early 1880s. The label gained currency in public debate and increasingly took on a pejorative sense in the decades around World War I, when Germans began to complain about the "danger of the Eastern Jews" or the "Eastern Jewish question". In its derogatory sense, Ostjude evoked clichés of poverty, filth, ignorance, promiscuity, and cultural backwardness – negative qualities that German racism had projected onto Eastern European Jews since the 19th century, if not the 18th. To many Germans, including assimilated German Jews, they were seen as a separate and inferior ethnic community. Moreover, Jews in general and Eastern Jews in particular were accused of being dishonest and deceitful, as well as traitors to their country, enemy agents and communist revolutionaries.These prejudices reflected and distorted real cultural and social differences between German Jews and Eastern European Jews. German Jews were largely assimilated and rarely spoke Yiddish, a language often disparaged as mere "jargon". Its use was seen as incompatible with higher culture, and all sectors of German-Jewish society were pressured to abandon it in their pursuit of modernisation and acculturation. Beyond language and accent, Eastern European Jews stood out for their distinctive dress, strict Talmudic education, and adherence to Hasidism, which clashed with the Enlightenment and bourgeois values embraced by Western Jews undergoing assimilation. Furthermore, they often lived in extreme poverty, concentrated in the dark and overcrowded ghettos of large cities or in isolated rural villages, from which they fled due to pogroms and persecution. Economic poverty was accompanied by a lack of political rights: while Jewish emancipation in the West followed the French Revolution and was largely achieved by the 19th and 20th centuries, official antisemitism persisted in Russia, with violent manifestations as late as the 1880s.
File:1927_IB.webp|thumb|left|upright=0.7|Cover of a German Nazi Party magazine Illustrierter Beobachter of 14 November 1927, showing the depiction of the stereotypical Ostjude
The stereotype of the Ostjude became a focal point for antisemitism, antislavism and xenophobia, attracting hostility from both openly antisemitic non-Jewish Germans and assimilated Jewish Germans alike. Among non-Jewish Germans, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke warned of the danger posed by the Polish-Jewish "tribe", described as "alien to the European, and especially to the German national character". Among assimilated Jewish Germans, journalist Hugo Ganz deplored the Ostjude's "laziness, their filth, their craftiness, their perpetual readiness to cheat", which, he wrote, gave rise to the "evil wish" that "this part of the Polish population did not exist at all". Similarly, the lawyer and activist Max Naumann described the Ostjuden as fundamentally foreign to German Jews – "foreign concerning the feelings, foreign concerning the spirit, physically foreign". The future German foreign minister Walther Rathenau characterised them as "a tribe of particularly foreign people", an "Asiatic horde on the sands of the March of Brandenburg", "not a living member of the people, but an alien organism in its body". Traces of the widespread prejudice against Eastern Jews can also be found in the work of the writer Karl Emil Franzos and in the autobiographical memoirs of Stefan Zweig.
This hostility also permeated political discourse. Official speeches and private comments rife with contempt towards Eastern European Jews were already present in the communications of Otto von Bismarck and spread from the 1880s, when political anti-Semitism was born in Germany. In a 1904 parliamentary speech, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow denounced Eastern Jews as scroungers and conspirators. In the 1920s and 1930s, völkisch and Nazi propaganda further fueled these prejudices, appropriating the term Ostjude and its associated racist stereotype. This is evident in the political rhetoric of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi newspaper, which stoked fears about the "danger of the Ostjuden". Goebbels, other figures within the Nazi regime and the propaganda film The Eternal Jew exploited the same trope.
The so-called "Ostjuden problem" was largely a fabrication of antisemitic propaganda. The vast majority of Jewish immigrants were merely transiting through Germany on their way to America and other destinations and had no intention of settling in a country that, with its entrenched hostility, offered little opportunity for a flourishing Jewish cultural life. The fabricated crisis, however, had tangible consequences. During the Weimar Republic, it led to the persecution of Eastern European Jews, including deportations, internment in camps, and violent attacks. Even naturalisation was often deliberately protracted and arduous for fremdstämmige Ostjuden.
Historian argues that the stereotypical image of the Ostjude stemmed from the divergence between a West where Jews were emancipated, assimilated and bourgeois, and an East where political exclusion of Jews and traditional Jewish culture persisted. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this divide, he suggests, contributed to a broader crisis in European Jewish society and its sense of international solidarity.
Fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire
Stereotypes of Eastern Jews circulated in Germany well before their large-scale arrival, but the so‑called “Ostjuden problem” became far more visible after a wave of pogroms swept through southern Russia and Ukraine between 1881 and 1884, followed by repressive measures and antisemitic state policies. This led to an unprecedented exodus of Eastern European Jews. Between 1881 and 1914, an estimated 2.4 to 2.7 million Jews fled Europe and sought refuge in America, South Africa, Palestine and Oceania. Most of these emigrants passed through Germany, heading for the ports of Hamburg and Bremen or other western European cities for their onward journeys. According to the historian David Vital, the influx of predominantly poor and less-educated Eastern European Jews was met with dismay by the established and emancipated Jewish communities of Western and Central Europe, who were confronted with the "sudden appearance on their doorsteps of a huge, untidy, endlessly marching army of distant cousins from the east".In France and Britain, protests erupted against the "foreign invasion" of unskilled workers willing to accept any wage, and the never-dormant xenophobia and antisemitic sentiments of the native population re-emerged. In Germany, the situation was further complicated by the continuing public relevance of religious affiliation: since being Jewish and a member of a formally established religious community entailed special rights and obligations, the influx of Eastern Jews posed a particular problem of integration into local communities. German Jews feared that immigrants from the East would disqualify them in the eyes of their non-Jewish compatriots, partly because the alarm over the arrival of Eastern Jews was often fuelled by antisemitic publications against the national Jewish minority. The traditionalist orthodox orientation of Eastern Jews, as opposed to the liberal-reformist orientation prevalent in German Judaism, led to tensions in synagogue life and rivalries in the ordination of rabbis.