The Jews of the German Empire
Amid their rapid urbanization, the experience of the socially integrated and emancipated Jews of Germany foretold what was in store for world Jewry in a rapidly changing world.
Jewish Demography of Newly Unified Germany
The third-largest Jewish community in Europe lived in the German Empire, which came into being in 1871 after a decades-long protracted and complex process of unification. The unification of Germany—from Alsace in the southwest of the country to East Prussia in the northeast—occurred under the sign of German nationhood.
The newly unified Germany was home to 561,612 Jews in 1880. About two-thirds of them—363,000—lived in Prussia, of whom 54,000 were in Berlin, the capital of the empire. Rapid urbanization reduced the number of Jews in the small localities, and increased their population in the major cities of Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, and Cologne.
Social Integration and the New Jewish German Culture
Most German Jews, who now enjoyed full political equality, integrated into urban bourgeois society and adopted the lifestyle, culture, and mentality of the middle class. A Jewish German culture in its various forms replaced the traditional Ashkenazic religious culture: there was a great increase in the number of Jewish students enrolled in German high schools, and many graduates acquired higher education and joined the liberal professions.
Social integration in the era of emancipation, which was especially rapid in urban centers, marked a real demographic turning point. In 1880, there was a 1:10 ratio between interfaith marriages in Prussia to intra-Jewish marriages. A mere ten years later, one in five weddings involving a Jewish person would be interfaith. The number of conversions to Christianity remained small but continued to grow; whereas 76 Prussian Jews converted out in 1880, 460 did so in 1900.
A declining birth rate decreased the overall number of German Jews, especially in relation to the rest of the population. Yet even as German Jewish integration became ever more complete, there was a sudden and unexpected surge of antisemitism (the term itself was coined in German in 1879) which, though it would ebb and flow in strength over the next decades, would thereafter remain a central dimension of cultural life.
The situation of German Jewry in 1880—good and bad—indicated what was in store over the following decades for widening swaths of Jewish society around the world—how Jews would experience an age of equal rights, urbanization, developing capitalism, and cultural integration, but also an age marked by new forms of fear and uncertainty in a rapidly changing world, the rise of “scientific” racism across the West, periodic economic shocks, and deep wells of discontent with modernity’s effects and the perceived role of Jews therein.