Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Twentieth-Century Images of Court Jews: Ciphers for Troubled Emancipations in the Work of Selma Stern, Hannah Arendt, and Toni Oelsner

Mon, December 17, 8:30 to 10:00am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Harborview 3 Ballroom

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, early modern Court Jews became iconic symbols in discourses on Jewish inclusion in the nation state. Representations ranged across visual, historical, and literary productions, both philosemitic and antisemitic. Examples are found in historical writing (Selma Stern’s Jud Süss and The Court Jew (1928 and 1950)), in Nazi pseudo-science (articles of the Forschungen zur Judenfrage), in novels (Lion Feuchtwanger's Jud Süss. Roman (1925)), and in films ("Jew Süss" (1934), "The House of the Rothschilds" (1934), and their notorious Nazi remakes (1940)). The iconic status of the Court Jew in this period (1920–1950) was due to its usefulness as a site for thinking through or contesting contemporary Jewish emancipation and antisemitism.
This paper will explore the historical writings related to Court Jews by three German-Jewish women – Selma Stern, Hannah Arendt, and Toni Oelsner. All wrote as refugees in the US during the 1940s, and all used the Court Jew to work through Jewish emancipation, WWII, the Holocaust and its challenge to historical practice. Stern wrote the first comprehensive study on The Court Jew (1950), decisively shaping post-war historiography. Arendt politicized the Court Jew and Jewish banker in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, using them to explain the origins of antisemitism. Oelsner critiqued the scholarly origins of the antisemitic image of Jewish moneylenders in the works of German scholars, Wilhelm Roscher, Werner Sombart and Max Weber.
This paper contextualizes these women’s historical works in two ways: First, it sets them in the larger context of the cinematic and textual discourses on Court Jews and Jewish moneylenders from 1920–1950 to argue that racialized and materialist preconceptions were shared across all interwar discourses, philosemitic and antisemitic alike. And second, it sets these historical works in the context of these womens’ biographies to illuminate how the iconic Court Jew was forged (and contested) in the troubled waters of two emancipation movements – that of European Jewry and that of European women.

Author