Two Millennia of German Jewish History

The permanent exhibition, Two Millennia of German Jewish History, offers visitors a journey through German-Jewish history and culture, from its earliest testimonies, through the Middle Ages and up to the present. This story is related in 14 Sections.

1. Beginnings
Scattered all over the world after their expulsion from Judaea, Jews first reached what is today Germany as traders with the Roman legions. The first known proof of their presence is a decree from the year 321 issued by Emperor Constantine to the Cologne municipal authorities.

2. World of Ashkenaz
The three most important Jewish communities in the Middle Ages – Speyer, Worms, and Mainz – were known as ‘Shum’ (Hebrew for garlic). The word is formed from the first letters of the Hebrew town names. These towns were centres of Jewish erudition in Western Europe. Christians and Jews lived peacefully side by side until the Crusaders murdered thousands of Jews on their way to Jerusalem.

3. Women's Lives
Glikl, trader, entrepreneur and mother, left a description of her life and the time in which she lived. Also known as Glückel of Hameln (1646-1724), she wrote her memoirs between 1691 and 1719, so generating the oldest preserved biography of a Jewish woman. The Jewish feminist Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936) translated the memoirs into German. 

4. City, Countryside, Court
After their banishment from the large towns in the 15th and 16th centuries, Jews found refuge in the rural areas of Southern and Western Germany. They became traders and so mediators between the town and the countryside. Some rose to become ‘court Jews’ and funded the financial requirements of the extravagant rulers. As their position was always envied, their livelihood was under constant threat.

5. Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment
Moses Mendelssohn, a poor Talmud scholar from Dessau, did much to shape the culture of his epoch. The world-famous philosopher, who enjoyed a legendary friendship with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, fought for tolerance between the religions in a time when Jews possessed no civil rights. His friends included many famous personalities of the day. 

6. Tradition and Change
Jewish religious daily life is subject to numerous rules and customs. For example, milk and meat products are not to be consumed together in a ‘kosher household’. Nobody should work on the Sabbath, so food must be prepared beforehand and kept warm. Scholars have reviewed the Jewish religious rules time after time, defining and modifying them to suit altered life circumstances. 

7. Family Life
For many Jewish families the significance of religious customs and rituals declined throughout the course of the 19th century. The upwardly mobile adapted to suit their cultural environment – they began to read classics like Schiller and Goethe, and sought a good education and a university degree for their children. Holding the family together formed the guarantee for life security.

8. German and Jewish at the Same Time
In Germany, Jews became citizens with equal rights in 1871, when the Constitution of the newly founded German Empire removed all legal restrictions on Jews. The majority wished to integrate into German society and remain Jewish at the same time. The liberal politician Johann Jacoby wrote in 1837: ‘As I myself am both German and Jewish at the same time, the Jew in me cannot become free without the German; nor the German free without the Jew.’ But the hope for acceptance in society was not fulfilled. After the founding of the Empire, anti-Semitism flared up again and demanded the repeal of emancipation.

 9. Modern Judaism
The search for modern forms of Judaism began with the Enlightenment. In the period following, schools were founded at which secular subjects were included in the curriculum. In religious worship, Christian figures provided models. The Rabbis were no longer just Talmud scholars but had university degrees and gave modern religious education classes. Judaism was consciously regarded as a living religion in a constant state of change and development. This influenced the various facets of the religion, in the reform movement as well as orthodox circles. 

10. Berlin, Berlin
Berlin, the great metropolis, became the focal point of attraction for the Jewish population. Jewish entrepreneurs became dominant in the Berlin clothing trade and founded the first palatial department stores such as Wertheim and Tietz. Ullstein and Mosse were pioneers in modern publishing, Arnold Schönberg revolutionised classical music, Max Reinhardt made history with his theatrical productions, Walter Benjamin’s collection of short prose Einbahnstrasse (One-way street) broke new ground with a theory of modernism, and the painter Max Liebermann was voted president of the Art Academy. 

11. East and West
The book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state), published in 1896 and written by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of Zionism, was a source of fascination, particularly to the younger generation with its search for a point of reorientation in the face of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Some looked with yearning to Palestine – the Promised Land – or to Eastern Europe, where the Jewish ‘shtet’ alluded to an intact Jewish community. Both concepts were more wishful thinking than reality. 

12. Equality in Danger
Jews joined most other Germans in entering the First World War with great enthusiasm and many were awarded medals for their service by the Fatherland. Some 12,000 Jewish soldiers lost their lives in the conflict. After the war, a Jewish politician, Walther Rathenau (1867-1922), succeeded in rising to the position of Secretary of State, one of the highest public offices. Right-wing extremists murdered him after a short period in office. The Nazi seizure of power and the abolition of equal rights for German Jews put an end to the period of common German Jewish history, which had existed since the Enlightenment. 

13. National Socialism
At least 6 million Jews were murdered in Europe under the Nazi regime, some 200,000 of them from Germany. The Jewish community reacted to the discrimination and restrictions by setting up Jewish schools and a welfare aid network, and preparing for emigration. About half of the Jewish population succeeded in leaving Germany before the final emigration ban in October 1941. 

14. Present
After the end of the war around 250,000 Jews in Germany waited, in camps for displaced persons, to emigrate. This number included nearly 50,000 survivors from concentration camps and the more than 1,500 Berlin Jews who had managed to survive in hiding. After a transitional period leading to the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and the state of Israel, around 20,000 Jews settled in West Germany and about 600 in East Germany. Today there are more than 105,000 members of Jewish communities in the Federal Republic of Germany, approximately 96,000 of whom are recent arrivals, immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The hesitant path to rapprochement between Germans and Jews is the central theme of this last section of the exhibition.