Since the end of World War II, German Jewish historiography has tended to be Berlinocentric. This is understandable, as Berlin was home to Germany's largest Jewish community, and many members of the founding postwar generation of German Jewish historians either came from there or had family ties to it. One consequence of this focus is that there have been few English-language local histories of Jewish communities other than that of the imperial capital. Nils Roemer's German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms runs counter to this trend and constitutes a genuine breakthrough in our approach to the German Jewish past.
Roemer's focus is on the tension between popular history and memory in Worms, one of the founding communities of Ashkenazic Jewry. Beginning with the First Crusade and continuing as such today, Worms is remembered as a site of horrendous violence, the resting place of pious Jewish martyrs, and a great Jewish intellectual center. Rather than merely telling this story, Roemer brilliantly examines the way Worms was celebrated and remembered from the Middle Ages on. The book is divided into discrete periods—the medieval, the early modern, the modern, the Nazi period, and the postwar era. Each succeeding stage saw how the memories and rituals commemorating Worms became increasingly complex and elaborate.
By the Middle Ages, Worms's reputation as a site of Jewish suffering and scholarship was firmly established. Accounts of the First Crusade proliferated, and Worms created its own rituals of remembrance to honor its Jewish martyrs. These included reading their names out loud in the synagogue on the Sabbath preceding Shavuot, as well as the imposition of a fast day on the 23rd of Iyyar, accompanied by the prohibition against performing marriages, cutting hair, and trimming beards on that date. The fast day was observed until the nineteenth century. And thanks to the chronicle of the distinguished Talmudist, kabbalist, and descendant of the Kalonymous family, R. Eleazar b. Judah, who was born in Mainz in 1160 and died in Worms in 1238, Worms also assumed centrality as a place of scholarship, where previously it did not enjoy such a reputation. Eleazar's account somewhat displaces Mainz and Speyer, as he establishes a scholarly chain of tradition extending from Babylonia to the Rhineland. The city's reputation as a prominent intellectual center was reaffirmed repeatedly when pilgrims began to visit the graves of distinguished rabbis, and Roemer gingerly suggests that such practices reflect the Christian practice of worshiping saints, even taking into account the important differences between the ways both faiths regard the relationship between the living and the dead. Very often, medieval rabbis voiced stringent opposition to such practices, but the multitude of names carved into the headstones indicate that there were stern rabbinic rulings as well as popular, defiant, religious practices. It is in such practices, textual, liturgical, and experiential, that Roemer rightly identifies the creation of remembrance culture.
Roemer identifies the early modern and the modern eras as key to the embellishment of medieval patterns of remembrance and to the creation of new ways that the Jews of Worms used to link themselves to the city and its history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, stories, legends, and artistic renderings depicting Worms and its Jews were spread far and wide thanks to the advent of printing. The community sexton, Juspa Shammes, compiled some 250 tales drawn from a vast array of materials, which were reworked to tell the story of Jewish settlement, destruction, and rebirth. It is significant that in an era when printed codes of law first emerged and began to impose a certain uniformity and homogeneity on Jewish life, the telling and retelling of the story of Jewish Worms served to preserve local distinctiveness and difference. Moreover, the publication of such texts—Juspa Shammes's appeared in nine editions—in Yiddish further served to disseminate the story and make it accessible to a broader cross-section of Jews, including women.
Even though the eighteenth-century Haskalah was barely felt in Worms, the impact of the Enlightenment and its critique of Judaism, as well as a general Jewish longing for equality and modernization, saw many of Worms's most time-honored Jewish rituals fall by the wayside in the nineteenth century. Religious reformers, powerful in the city, excised medieval piyyutim from the liturgy and abrogated the fast day of the 23rd of Iyyar. This did not mean that such customs were entirely lost. The interest in history among Jews in the nineteenth century meant that the ancient customs of Worms Jewry became the stuff of local historical research and thus were preserved. Rather than performing the old rituals, studying their history became the secular manifestation of modern Jewish identity, with a specifically regional cast.
In telling this part of the story, Roemer issues a profound challenge to traditional historiography on the rise of history writing among Jews. For him, this undertaking is generally represented as the work of lone revolutionaries who set about shattering the ancien régime of Jewish consciousness. But as Roemer shows, the turn to history was no mere revolution from above. Beginning in the 1860s, a huge number of local community histories began to appear, the work of amateur Jewish historians. By the 1880s, well over 1,000 articles and reviews treating the histories of individual communities and regions had been published in various Jewish and non-Jewish periodicals, clearly demonstrating the vibrancy of local Jewish historical studies and the broader influence of the era's Heimat movement. In privileging the few, Jewish historians have tended to ignore the many, who did so much to promote Jewish historical knowledge and consciousness.
Into the twentieth century, Worms's storied past took on ever greater importance for non-Jews as well as Jews. Among the former, regional historical and monument-preservation societies, travel books, and municipal tourist interests took greater care to include Jewish sites in their inventories of places of historical importance. And for German Jews, the further they stood at a remove from their ancestors, the greater their need to reignite ancient connections, a complex process that was enacted through historical research on Worms, the publication of books and photographs, and the creation of Jewish tourism. Jewish heritage tourism, something we equate with late-twentieth-century Jewish sensibilities, actually had its origins not in a post-Holocaust culture of lament and mourning but in an early twentieth-century celebration of communal pride and search for historical continuity, motivated by nostalgia and the recognition of deep, but natural, ruptures between the Jewish past and present.
Amid the growing antisemitism of the Weimar era, Jews again reimagined Worms, now seeing it less as a site of anti-Jewish violence and martyrdom than as a symbol of the inseparability of Deutschtum and Judentum, as various Jewish organizations sought to counter the prevailing mood by stressing the ancient rootedness of Jews in Germany by using Worms as an example. The hyper (German) nationalist organization Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten held its annual general assembly meeting there in 1925, while the family of one Rhineland lawyer, Siegfried Oppenheim, dispensed with the traditional last line of the Passover seder, replacing it with “Next Year in Worms-on-the-Rhine, Our Heimat.”
The claims of a union between the Jewish spirit and German soil, as Leo Baeck put it after visiting Worms to celebrate the synagogue's 900 year anniversary, came to naught during the Nazi period. During Kristallnacht, the mob set the synagogue ablaze. The ancient cemetery survived, most likely because Georg Illert, a local Christian archivist, perpetuated a legend that Heinrich Himmler had expressed great interest in the cemetery during a visit to Worms in 1930.
Only about 500 hundred Jews from Worms survived the Holocaust, and they spread across the globe. None sought to return permanently, but so many began to visit the city not long after the war's end that in 1950, Hannah Arendt described Worms as a “shrine of Jewish pilgrimage.” Worms in the postwar era was characterized by a confluence of interests, whereby the needs of some Jewish survivors from Worms and tourists to it matched those of the city fathers, but for different reasons. The latter desired that they and their community be morally rehabilitated, which led to the rebuilding of the synagogue and in 1961, the Rashi chapel. Still, there were myriad disagreements between a host of Jewish parties—survivors, as well as between Israeli and American interests. All had different opinions about custodianship over archives and other historical relics of the now bygone community. The rebuilding of the synagogue in a city without a Jewish community was a particularly sore point for many. For Jews, the disagreements over what to do reflected the fragile nature of memory and belonging and the pain caused by historical rupture, all of which led once again to the time-honored Jewish practice of remembering and reimagining Jewish life and death in Worms.
