7 ms·

Having grown up as an American Jew, it has been a recurring revelation of how much of what I think if as "Jewish" culture is actually German.

arresin 2y ago
Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).
- searealist 2y ago
  Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
  - arresin 2y ago
    I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.
    - searealist 2y ago
      Well, your hypothesis is wrong. They are not related beyond a few percent at best.
    - kimixa 2y ago
      It looks like there's a mixed consensus on ancestry, but a fair bit of evidence they at least intermixed with European locals since prehistoric times [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/ No idea where the other guy got their %age numbers from, unless you only count specific parts of the family tree.
      - Amezarak 2y ago
        To be clear, that paper is not arguing Jewish ethnic groups were intermixing with European locals since prehistoric times, it is arguing that the Ashkenazi Jews (or perhaps it would be better to say: the proto-Asheknazi Jews) assimilated lots of European converts with ancestry in Europe dating back to prehistoric times.
      - searealist 2y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5380316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5380316/
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.
    - Amezarak 2y ago
      My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?
      - gizmo686 2y ago
        It is not that genetic simmilarity is inherently meaninglessness. Just that it is not a good proxy for the social concepts people are generally using it to talk about.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - runarberg 2y ago
      I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on junk-in junk-out statistical models (which is often the case with cluster-analysis). I’m simply curious here, cluster analysis is the only method I can think of (other than guessing/categorizing arbitrarily).
      - thrownv7032g 2y ago
        I'd think bones from a couple hundred or thousand or ten-thousand years ago would provide a okay trail.
  - moshegramovsky 2y ago
    A lot of people think I am Mexican.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    How do estimates of genetic origin relate to ethnic affiliation? Ethnicity is about culture, customs, and language, not genetics. As far as genetics go, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of question begging involved in identifying specific genetics with regional cultural groups in the first place.
    - searealist 2y ago
      You don't think people from a certain place tend to share similar genetics?
- woodruffw 2y ago
  It would be ahistorical, at least: many of the Jews in 1920s Germany had fled pogroms in Ukraine and Russia just 20 or 30 years prior. Many were not particularly integrated, and only spoke Eastern Yiddish dialects. (The Jews who were already in Germany prior were much more assimilated and less religious than their Eastern counterparts, which is why they often have more Germanic names. This appears in other forms across European Jewry, e.g. Litvaks, being more Western, typically being less religious and more assimilated than the Galitzianers.)
- moshegramovsky 2y ago
  The amount of assimilation was not homogeneous anywhere in Europe. In urban environments, some Jewish families were highly assimilated, and there was a great deal of interaction between Jewish people and Gentiles. If these dynamics are interesting to you, you might want to read about the haskalah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah?useskin=vector Out in the stetls (in rural towns), there was far less assimilation (although a lot of interaction). For example, in Poland prior to WW2, Jewish society was almost a parallel world. Polish Jews had their own religious institutions, shops, and, at various times, a parallel government. For centuries, Poland was like two separate worlds that inhabited the same physical space. It's really too bad that it ended. I grieve for something I never even knew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland?...
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  Most Yiddish speakers (or even their ancestors for many generations) didn’t live in Germany, though.
  - kzrdude 2y ago
    Many Germans didn't live in Germany at that time either, Hungary, Romania, contemporary Poland etc had very big German population.
math_dandy 2y ago
Was in Poland over the summer and, as a Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, I felt right at home culinarily (except for the pork).
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > Was in Poland ... as a Jew ... I felt right at home That settles it, then ;)
contingencies 2y ago
Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the region of modern Germany and its surroundings prior to the 20th century. Shifting alliances of nominally independent city-states combined with evidence toward enthusiastic adoption of distributed printing and popular literacy could be argued to underpin some of the more positive ideals of the EU today, despite the negative interludes.
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  > Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity Prussia, let alone Prussian “identity” is not something that existed well into the mid to late modern era.
  - contingencies 2y ago
    Yes, it's a relatively late concept, but one could rationally argue it's objectively more correct than 'German' in default modern interpretation, both spatially in that it additionally encompasses what is now western Poland, and temporally in that it is closer to the timeframe in question. As for identity, this can be argued until the cows come home, but many Jews served in the Prussian army (google suggests 100,000-150,000) and you don't put your life on the line without some sense of connection. Little did they know their families would soon be killed by the successor of the very state they had fought to protect.
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago
      Prussia was a state that included plenty of culturally in no way Prussian territories in the 1800s. Calling someone from Cologne Prussian was about as silly as claiming that Belgian Walloons were Dutch prior to 1830. Most people who lived in the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1900s weren’t really Prussian in most senses. There was a large population of Jews in Berlin but most of the remaining ones lived in the Rhineland, Westphalia etc. > don't put your life on the line Or you’re conscripted and not given a choice.

arresin 2y ago

Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).

searealist 2y ago
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
- arresin 2y ago
  I’ve met many, many Jews. To me visually, many (especially the stein, berg, etc) looked exactly like Germans.
  - searealist 2y ago
    Well, your hypothesis is wrong. They are not related beyond a few percent at best.
  - kimixa 2y ago
    It looks like there's a mixed consensus on ancestry, but a fair bit of evidence they at least intermixed with European locals since prehistoric times [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806353/ No idea where the other guy got their %age numbers from, unless you only count specific parts of the family tree.
    - Amezarak 2y ago
      To be clear, that paper is not arguing Jewish ethnic groups were intermixing with European locals since prehistoric times, it is arguing that the Ashkenazi Jews (or perhaps it would be better to say: the proto-Asheknazi Jews) assimilated lots of European converts with ancestry in Europe dating back to prehistoric times.
    - searealist 2y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5380316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5380316/
- darby_nine 2y ago
  Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.
  - Amezarak 2y ago
    My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?
    - gizmo686 2y ago
      It is not that genetic simmilarity is inherently meaninglessness. Just that it is not a good proxy for the social concepts people are generally using it to talk about.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - runarberg 2y ago
    I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on junk-in junk-out statistical models (which is often the case with cluster-analysis). I’m simply curious here, cluster analysis is the only method I can think of (other than guessing/categorizing arbitrarily).
    - thrownv7032g 2y ago
      I'd think bones from a couple hundred or thousand or ten-thousand years ago would provide a okay trail.
- moshegramovsky 2y ago
  A lot of people think I am Mexican.
- Gormo 2y ago
  How do estimates of genetic origin relate to ethnic affiliation? Ethnicity is about culture, customs, and language, not genetics. As far as genetics go, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of question begging involved in identifying specific genetics with regional cultural groups in the first place.
  - searealist 2y ago
    You don't think people from a certain place tend to share similar genetics?
woodruffw 2y ago
It would be ahistorical, at least: many of the Jews in 1920s Germany had fled pogroms in Ukraine and Russia just 20 or 30 years prior. Many were not particularly integrated, and only spoke Eastern Yiddish dialects. (The Jews who were already in Germany prior were much more assimilated and less religious than their Eastern counterparts, which is why they often have more Germanic names. This appears in other forms across European Jewry, e.g. Litvaks, being more Western, typically being less religious and more assimilated than the Galitzianers.)
moshegramovsky 2y ago
The amount of assimilation was not homogeneous anywhere in Europe. In urban environments, some Jewish families were highly assimilated, and there was a great deal of interaction between Jewish people and Gentiles. If these dynamics are interesting to you, you might want to read about the haskalah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah?useskin=vector Out in the stetls (in rural towns), there was far less assimilation (although a lot of interaction). For example, in Poland prior to WW2, Jewish society was almost a parallel world. Polish Jews had their own religious institutions, shops, and, at various times, a parallel government. For centuries, Poland was like two separate worlds that inhabited the same physical space. It's really too bad that it ended. I grieve for something I never even knew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland?...
ffgjgf1 2y ago
Most Yiddish speakers (or even their ancestors for many generations) didn’t live in Germany, though.
- kzrdude 2y ago
  Many Germans didn't live in Germany at that time either, Hungary, Romania, contemporary Poland etc had very big German population.

math_dandy 2y ago

Was in Poland over the summer and, as a Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, I felt right at home culinarily (except for the pork).

ignoramous 2y ago
> Was in Poland ... as a Jew ... I felt right at home That settles it, then ;)

contingencies 2y ago

Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the region of modern Germany and its surroundings prior to the 20th century. Shifting alliances of nominally independent city-states combined with evidence toward enthusiastic adoption of distributed printing and popular literacy could be argued to underpin some of the more positive ideals of the EU today, despite the negative interludes.

ffgjgf1 2y ago
> Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity Prussia, let alone Prussian “identity” is not something that existed well into the mid to late modern era.
- contingencies 2y ago
  Yes, it's a relatively late concept, but one could rationally argue it's objectively more correct than 'German' in default modern interpretation, both spatially in that it additionally encompasses what is now western Poland, and temporally in that it is closer to the timeframe in question. As for identity, this can be argued until the cows come home, but many Jews served in the Prussian army (google suggests 100,000-150,000) and you don't put your life on the line without some sense of connection. Little did they know their families would soon be killed by the successor of the very state they had fought to protect.
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    Prussia was a state that included plenty of culturally in no way Prussian territories in the 1800s. Calling someone from Cologne Prussian was about as silly as claiming that Belgian Walloons were Dutch prior to 1830. Most people who lived in the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1900s weren’t really Prussian in most senses. There was a large population of Jews in Berlin but most of the remaining ones lived in the Rhineland, Westphalia etc. > don't put your life on the line Or you’re conscripted and not given a choice.