ABSTRACT

Money would be essential to finance intensified defensive actions and to cope with attempted boycotts while maintaining the bourgeois standard of living to which most German Jews had grown accustomed. The role of Jews in the economy and, indeed, in the culture of Weimar Germany has been exaggerated by both Nazi and anti-Nazi writers, the former to disparage alleged Jewish decadence and domination, the latter to praise Jewish achievements and to identify anti-Semitism as being rooted in part in jealousy and envy. The statistical record offers convincing evidence that the overwhelming majority of German Jews was engaged in bourgeois occupations between 1918 and 1933. In practice, most Zionist vocational retraining programs aimed at preparing Eastern Jews for new lives in Germany or abroad. In all three areas of inquiry—economics, politics, and culture—the trend was for the Jews to evolve toward the average, toward what was more nearly "typical" of incomes, behavior, and tastes in the larger German society.