Le-Dor va-Dor or Discontinuities? Family History as a Key Paradigm of German Jewish Studies

• In Event: Interdisciplinary Approaches in German-Jewish Studies Today

Abstract

In the last two decades of the 19th century, the interest in family history grew among German Jewish scholars. The fear of the loss of the sense of family (“Familiensinn”) and the endangered self-assurance (“Selbstgefühl”) were major motivations for scholars to embark on this line of research. My paper offers the Wertheimer family as a case study of 19th century family history in order to trace the continuities and discontinuities in this field as a paradigm for 21st-century German Jewish studies.
The Wertheimers were one of the great families of the Holy Roman Empire. The beginning of their history is marked by its founder, Samson Wertheimer (1658–1724), who became chief court factor of the imperial court in Vienna in 1703. Besides his business connections to the Habsburgs, Wertheimer also had commercial relations to other princes and German electorates. He wedded his seven children to other court factor families or to famous Jewish scholars. The Hungarian Jewish community appointed him their chief rabbi and shtadlan (intercessor). Moreover, Wertheimer was named honorary rabbi of Eisenstadt, Worms, Prague, and Krakow, and was revered as “Prince of Safed.” His descendants maintained this ancestral legacy in most respects.
The case study of the Wertheimers can illustrate how Jewish family history has been a prospering field in German Jewish Studies since the 19th century. It continues to raise questions crucial to understanding German Jewish history into the 20th and 21st centuries: How did the family network operate? How were roles and functions in the family gendered? How did the Wertheimers manage to stay an influential and respected family until the 1930s? These continuities notwithstanding, family history has always been subject to the changing trends in Jewish history and life style, as Jonathan Boyarin has shown. It can therefore, in turn, serve as an indicator of such shifts and changes in categories, concepts, and paradigms of German Jewish studies. What would be the old-new questions in the specific German Jewish context? The paper will conclude therefore with suggestions on how German Jewish Studies today can integrate fresh approaches into a concrete family history project.

Author

• Mirjam Thulin, Leibniz Institute of European History