During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance.Footnote ¹ Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

Exploring Europe and journeying to Palestine, America, and the Soviet Union brought tourists into contact with decisively different societies that encapsulated competing concepts and models of modernity, Jewish cultures, and identities. Whereas the United States commonly stood for capitalism and liberalism and the ideology of the melting pot, the Soviet Union promised to solve and overcome class, ethnic, and religious differences by promoting a new radically secular form of Jewish self-understanding in contrast to Zionists' aspirations in Palestine, who labored to forge a new national Jewish community and culture. In addition to these three different destinations and visions, Europe featured in the east vestiges of what was deemed a more vibrant form of Jewish culture and in the western metropolitan centers eastern European Jewish immigrant communities. All of these locations attracted a considerable amount of attention in the German Jewish public sphere.

To survey foreign places became a means to experience, situate, and think about the self and the community.Footnote ² Travelers' self-reflection was thus enabled by what James Clifford has called cosmopolitan competencies—the arts of crossing, translation, and hybridity.Footnote ³ As Siegfried Kracauer, the perceptive sociologist of the Weimar Republic, also observed, travel “granted access to the Beyond.”Footnote ⁴ Indeed, an emotional attachment, or a cultural, religious, and ideological commitment to distant spaces emerged at the turn of the century as a new core experience of German Jewish history. Yet, travelers' descriptions often combined confidence with a sense of crisis, enchantment with critical distance. Moreover, at the beginning of the 1930s, the initial enthusiasm about America, Palestine, and the Soviet Union and the currency of the competing ideologies, political cultures, and societies had significantly lost their appeal for many travel writers. In the end, most of the published travel reports, while revealing cosmopolitan competence, document only an ongoing search.

Traveling became more often a search than an experience of homecoming that testified not only to a great deal of curiosity but betrayed a profound sense of not feeling at home at home. This is particularly true for the travel writers from the Austrio-Hungarian Empire such as Arthur Holitscher, Joseph Roth, and Egon Erwin Kisch; from Silesia such as Arnold Zweig; and from Pomerania such as Alfred Döblin, who all had moved to Berlin. To many the German capital appeared as an urban center without tradition that was destined to reinvent itself constantly and to destroy its own history and to leave its inhabitants alienated and in isolation.Footnote ⁵ Holitscher, who had been born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Budapest in 1869, felt that the size of the German capital alone made any sense of community impossible, and extrapolated probably from his own experience when he observed that modern man does not have a home.Footnote ⁶ Within the urban setting that gave rise to a sense of anonymity and disenchantment, longing and belonging took on varied forms and emerged as interrelated categories and not necessarily in opposition. Travelers' longing therefore constantly transformed itself and became attached to new places, while a sense of belonging became ever more elusive. In his path-breaking essay, the sociologist Georg Simmel noted that “wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point.”Footnote ⁷ What Simmel describes here—the key elements of the stranger who does not belong—also often became a key feature of the traveler. Nevertheless, the fleeting attachment to foreign places, the engagement with their cultures and politics, and the process of reflection engendered by the encounter allowed travelers to think about themselves, culture, and politics in a more global context and to engage the conflicting forms of Jewish identities and cultures.

* * *

In 1910, the future historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem ventured into the Swiss Alps. The high alpine valley of the Gotthard offered an empty canvas to the young soul-searching Scholem. Infatuated with the subliminal space of the glaciers and critical of the prescribed forms of sightseeing, Scholem, like many other Jewish travelers, believed in his original search.Footnote ⁸ Much more than an encounter with masses of ice and snow, Scholem's revelation in the Alps extended far beyond the glacier. Saturated with historical references and biblical quotations, his diary entry on the Swiss Alps invoked eastern European Jewish neighborhoods such as Whitechapel in London's East End and the barn district of Berlin.Footnote ⁹

What appeared in Scholem's diary as the liberation from his assimilated family life in Berlin and as the mapping of the European landscape with spaces of Jewish authenticity reflected the pervasive enchantment with the culture of eastern European Jewry, which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly took hold of a generation that had rebelled against the Jewish culture inherited from its fathers and mothers.Footnote ¹⁰ The initial glorification of the Ostjuden reflected the searching generation, which situated eastern European Jewry in opposition to western European Jews. Touring eastern European Jewish neighborhoods in larger cities therefore acquired a new popularity. Beth Wenger underscored the extent to which New York's Lower East Side was transformed from dangerous to desirable and how uptown Jews temporarily visited the East Side during the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, in addition to the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, and skyscrapers, which functioned as icons of modernity and progress, New York's Lower East Side formed a formidable space of exotic curiosity for uptown Jews, but its place was not limited to the Jewish imagination of America.

Travelers' experience of eastern European Jews in the prewar period remained ambiguous, however, marked and marred both by paternalistic views and assumption of cultural superiority and elements of envy. Holitscher crossed the Atlantic in 1911 and 1912 and subsequently published the impression of his journeys, which informed Franz Kafka's novel Der Verschollene.Footnote ¹² On board, Holitscher decided to learn more about the eastern European Jews in America, but instead of an idealized appreciation, Holitscher viewed the immigrants from a critical distance. To him, these eastern European Jews formed their own ghetto even while traveling; they did not intend to conquer the west and would remain impoverished in New York.Footnote ¹³ Meeting eastern European Jews allowed Holitscher to assert his sense of cultural superiority at a time when his future collaborator Herman Struck, the widely traveled artist, religious Zionist, and native of Berlin, began to promote a very different perspective on eastern European Jews.

At the first Jewish art exhibition at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, Struck exhibited several graphics of eastern European Jews that gave dignity to the otherwise often dismissively treated eastern European Jews. Struck's evocative images of three older Polish Jewish men cast these figures as pensive and weary, but also with an aura of distinction, embodying Jewish cultural and religious life. These images, which celebrated the endurance of these Jewish patriarchs, were most likely based on eastern European immigrants he had studied in the west as he himself had yet not been in eastern Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ Far from simply celebrating the richness and power of the Jewish diaspora, Struck combined his infatuation with eastern European Jews with his endorsement of Zionism. He therefore journeyed in 1903 to Palestine and Egypt.Footnote ¹⁵ His illustration to a travelogue on Palestine contributed, in the eyes of the cultural Zionist Martin Buber, “toward a discovery of Palestine for the eyes of our souls, and for the Jewish sensibility.” The sketches of Palestine formed the counterpart to the drawings of eastern European Jews: “As your Jewish heads reveal the innermost nature of our people, so in your Palestine landscapes the Jewish earth appears.”Footnote ¹⁶ Struck's sketches visualized therefore a supplementary relationship between the diaspora and Palestine and the Jewish cultural tradition and social renewal.

In addition to the three sketches of eastern European men, Struck's exhibit at the Congress included a self-portrait that presented the twenty-five-year-old artist aged and with a trimmed beard, thereby forging a link between himself and the portrayed eastern European Jews. Notwithstanding the gendered view of the Jewish tradition that this male lineage presented at the Congress, Struck portrayed separately also an older, tired, and withered woman as the incarnation of the Jewish people.Footnote ¹⁷ With this notable exception, women usually surfaced during the prewar period only in the writings of other women. Among those who inquired into the lives of eastern European Jewish women was Bertha Pappenheim, also known as the patient Anna O., who was featured in the coauthored studies on hysteria by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Pappenheim came from a wealthy Orthodox Viennese family, and while retaining her alliance to Jewish traditional culture and religion, she protested the exclusion of women from male-dominated Judaism. To represent women's interests better, she founded the League of Jewish Women in Germany in 1904 and crusaded against prostitution.

Since the Enlightenment, cultivating domestic virtues to secure a peaceful home for the husband had grounded males' public authority in the private sphere, while it disqualified women from participation.Footnote ¹⁸ Women such as Pappenheim challenged this gendered dichotomy of public and women's domestication in the private sphere in the fin de siècle. Her commitment to traditional womanhood with its assertion of distinct women's abilities translated private virtues into public expression of social engagement. Traveling helped her define her role as a social welfare activist by embracing her female voice, which was informed and legitimized by personal observation of the interior and domestic lives of eastern European Jews.Footnote ¹⁹

Pappenheim's published travelogue reported not simply on the issue of white slavery but critically engaged various programs and reflected on women's identity. Far from being nostalgic, she was critical of religious traditions, social practices, philanthropic efforts, and Zionist programs. She questioned the feasibility of turning eastern European Jews into farmers and industrial workers and criticized philanthropic endeavors for their lack of attention toward women. Instead she proposed the creation of a professional body of women welfare workers.Footnote ²⁰ Her initial enthusiasm and wholehearted identification with eastern European women weakened, however, when she projected her ideal of modern Jewish women upon the eastern European Jews. Modesty, devotion to religion, and modern education appeared here as truly Jewish female virtues. It was only among the Orthodox circles that she found traditional yet educated women. In her opinion, true enlightenment resided among the Orthodox women and not in the group of the more secular and assimilated women in the cities.Footnote ²¹

* * *

The outbreak of World War I halted Pappenheim's work on behalf of women as Zionists and non-Zionists proudly declared their patriotism and enrolled in the European armies. Yet the war did not disrupt traveling, especially because the experience of war and rising anti-Semitism contributed to the search for competing and alternative models of society. Wars traditionally are seen primarily as an element of confrontation and nation building. At the same time, World War I was also, in the words of Ute Frevert, an important moment “in terms of foreign encounters.”Footnote ²² Crossing borders brought individuals not only to the battlefield but also into contact with different customs, languages, and traditions. This is particularly true for Jewish combatants. During the war, many German-speaking Jews encountered eastern European Jews when they served as soldiers of the German army in the east. The German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig recorded in his letters to his mother the profound impression eastern European Jews had made upon him. He thought that the Jewish boys were “magnificent” and confessed that in Poland, he “felt something I rarely feel: pride in my race, in so much freshness and vivacity.” Rosenzweig's newly found veneration still reverberated with the uncertainty that had brought him close to conversion only a few years earlier. Indeed, he noted that western European Jews in comparison had become “philistine, bourgeois.” In contrast, he found in the eastern European Jews an affirmation of his own identity. Even five-year-old eastern European Jewish children lived in the “context of three thousand years.” He was also struck by the “masculine character” of the Hasidic pupils as well as by the overall sense of comfort and confidence with which the eastern European Jews moved around.Footnote ²³

Rosenzweig's confessional letters illustrate the intersection of his German and Jewish cultural and religious identity formation. Indeed, the involvement in the German war effort did not muffle the importance of cross-cultural encounters. Eastern European Jews surfaced even in publications with an overt nationalistic agenda. During the war, Struck, together with the German playwright, Herbert Eulenberg, published an illustrated travel account about Lithuania, White Russia, and Courtland. Struck had volunteered to serve in the infantry but, together with many other writers and artists, became part of the press office of the German Army Supreme Command for the east in 1915. Dedicated to the infantry of General Erich Ludendorf, the book vividly sketched, for those at home, the location of the German army's operations.

The German press office was intent on casting the territory as suitable for Germany's annexation and to promote the Germanization of the local population. Notwithstanding the dedication to Ludendorf, Struck's portrayal became an exercise in imagining and representing the diversity of the land and its people. In the midst of a wide canvas of Lithuanian farmers and Latvian and Polish women and mothers, Struck detailed in broad strokes the Jews of eastern Europe by relying on several iconographic traditions: the wooden synagogue of Grodno, the grave of Ger Zedek of Vilna, and Vilna's bustling Jewish lane, where he believed to have heard the echo of the ancient temple's wall and to have found a people who had remained true to themselves. Interspersed with these symbolic places are highly stylized portraits of individuals. His sketch of Rahel with dark brown hair gives her a confident appearance. The accompanying text describes her as soft and dreamy with a tendency toward “wistful swarming,” who does not understand politics or Yiddish, but speaks only Russian and French and is familiar with Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Nietzsche. She appears as a stereotype of a highly educated and assimilated Jewess, whose dark eyes, however, also embody sorrow. Playing Chopin exhibits not her cultural finesse, but rather causes tears to flow down her cheeks. Alongside this evocative portrayal, Struck chooses several men to foreground the extent to which the social and political circumstances have became discernible in their appearance. Toward this end, Struck presents a Jewish luggage carrier and carter, and an old, bearded, and slightly hunched Jewish man, who evokes the manifold troubles, disappointments, and disillusionment that his marked facial features reveal.Footnote ²⁴

Struck's images of the downtrodden existence of eastern European Jews during the war, however, became icons of endurance and strength in a new publication project, when he became the expert for Jewish affairs and commanded the Office for Jewish Affairs in Ober-Ost in 1917. In the same year, the German Jewish writer, Arnold Zweig, joined the press department of the German Army Supreme Command for the East and the two eventually collaborated on The Face of Eastern European Jewry, which appeared in 1919. The book makes obvious that World War I acted as a catalyst for prewar anxieties about changing gender roles, intensifying concerns over male identities and the family. The war experience no doubt initially provided opportunities to assert Jewish masculinity along with existing physical programs for the Jewish corporeal renewal.Footnote ²⁵ Yet Jewish men did not always succeed in preserving their status as anti-Semitism escalated and resulted in a census in October 1916 to document whether Jews carried their responsibilities on the frontline. The census, which dismissed these charges, was never published but was indicative of the heightened anti-Jewish hostility. Confronted with challenges to their patriotism and military honor, Jewish soldiers adamantly held onto ideals of a blissful domestic sphere to provide what, at times, remained elusive and unattainable to them.

Critical of modern life and Jewish culture in the west and informed by male angst, Struck and Zweig provided a richly gendered reading of eastern European Jews. With The Face of Eastern European Jewry, Zweig aimed to document Jews' indestructibility and their orientation toward purity, as he explained in a letter to Martin Buber.Footnote ²⁶ Neatly divided into distinct units, the book portrays various types of eastern European Jews, their institutions, religious services, work, politics, and family, and culminates in an account of Jewish youth. Following theories of environmental determinism, Zweig contrasted their endurance, authenticity, and spiritual vitality with Jews of the west, who had “traded part of our soul with Europe, giving up part of our Jewishness.” Instead of the setting of a bustling metropolitan center, where the urban dweller in the west has “no direct access to the passing of the year,” eastern European Jews lived in an organic environment. Their houses of worship were made of “weathered wooden boards” on “hilly streets or in a valley, in the middle of a village or in an outlying town,” where “old trees are always nearby.”Footnote ²⁷

Women did not appear in their discussion of Jewish traditions; they mainly cared for the family. Struck's illustrations of men visualized Jewish traditional learning and authenticity, and women were relegated to the roles of wives and mothers. Commenting on the illustrations, Zweig singled out a man holding the Torah and a woman with a child in her arms as the two representative figures of eastern European Jewish life. Their male desire fashioned and reasserted domestic female virtues, making women responsible for the Jewish people's vitality and elevating men to representatives of the spiritual values. Struck in his portraits and Zweig in his commentary on eastern European men particularly admired the older Jews for their sturdiness, ability to endure, lack of insecurity, and that their faces were “sincere and dreamy and of purity.”Footnote ²⁸ This preference for older Jewish men served to revert the image of Jewish learning that had come to be associated with feeble and emasculated men.Footnote ²⁹ These older men united elements of Jewish spirituality and learning with an ability to endure and persist.

Indeed, Zweig in his comments on the illustration described an older man, who “turns his eye away from me and into the distance, distance that is nothing but time,” and also individuals who have “eaten from the bitter bread of exile” but have nevertheless “no sense of hopelessness” and who are not confronted with degradation. Even more, Zweig admired eastern European men's patriarchal role in society and their control of sexual desires, which find their place in procreation, whereas in the west sexuality had become a “destructive and menacing demon of the bourgeois world.”Footnote ³⁰ For these western European men the sensual had become impure as long as it was not for the purpose of marriage and procreation. Zweig apparently therefore deemed an “erotically tepid” relation an ideal marriage and with some measure of envy looked at religious Jews, who “dance naturally without women” in the prayer halls.Footnote ³¹

Zweig was clearly in the throes of divergent ideologies. Conservative gender politics, anti-urban sentiments, and a vicarious commitment to traditional Judaism commingled here with Zionism and skepticism toward socialism. He was fearful and keenly aware that secularizing forces also had affected eastern European Jews. The young generation in Poland had thrown itself into political activism, drifting toward socialism. Zweig believed that this form of assimilation impoverished Judaism. The forces that drove the youth toward revolution moved them away from Jewish tradition, which was simply a “consequence of our stateless, landless existence,” and Zweig hoped that the youth's embrace of Zionism would allow them to fulfill their socialist ideals within a Jewish community in Palestine.Footnote ³² In the end, the mixing of gender, nostalgia, and politics directed the reader away from eastern Europe, where life did not seem to provide a future for the younger generation outside the forces of assimilation and secularization, while the older generation appeared as a remnant of a distant past. Nostalgia for a fleeting culture, enchantment with traditional gender roles, and despair intersect in Zweig's texts and Struck's images.

* * *

The collapse of the political and social order in Germany at the end of the war simultaneously gave rise to a sense of confidence and crisis. The new progressive government under the socialist Friedrich Ebert and the political and economic weakness created a culture marked by violent political clashes and hopes for renewal and regeneration. The now more clearly politicized travel accounts and their depiction of foreign spaces therefore bespoke a measure of hope, as well as a profound dissatisfaction and weariness with present-day Germany and the state of the Jewish communities. Heightened expectations and pessimism increasingly grated against each other in their accounts and testified to the upending of previously existing convictions and certainties.

Writing about eastern European Jews continued to be a practice that tested conflicting forms of Jewish self-understanding and concepts of metropolitan cities, while political ideologies provided a short-lasting solace to travelers, who trailed off to Palestine, the Soviet Union, and America. The increasing, if tenuous, attraction of these spaces suggests a significant reframing of thinking about oneself as many central European travelers came out of the war disillusioned and hoping for a new beginning. Holitscher's journeys now took on the form of a search for impending world revolution. He became a pacifist and pinned his hopes on the Russian Revolution to usher in a new harmony and overcome social, national, and ethnic differences.Footnote ³³ His intense expectation drew partly from his disillusionment about Europe and America. Frans Masereel's woodcuts to Holitscher's descriptions of Paris and London invoke an apocalyptic destruction of cities with the sky marked by airplanes unloading their bombs. It describes American war tourists enveloped in the memory of death and destruction and heading toward their own demise because of their voyeurism.Footnote ³⁴ From the perspective of World War I, Europe and the New World appeared now in a new fashion.

Nevertheless, a few years into the Weimar Republic, Berlin's Jewish wanderers took part in the pervasive revival of the figure of the flaneur. Their written accounts aimed to make the city legible to urban readers, who, increasingly, were seized by the popularity of big-city stories, texts, photos, and films. Their city strolls, however, were also attempts to interpret the city as a cosmopolitan metropolis to create a sense of belonging. Within the genre, the perceived invisibility of the Jewish community and tangible sites let Berlin's Jewish flaneurs drift through the city almost without referring to specific Jewish sites—with the notable exception of the eastern European Jewish quarter. In his exploration of the city, the converted Lutheran and celebrated flaneur, Franz Hessel, who never again embraced Judaism, gave Jewish sites only very short references. He referred in his travelogue of Berlin only to the old historical quarters with the Jewish cemetery and the Scheunenviertel as description of Jewish life in Berlin. The location—in one of the oldest parts of the city, where Jews had originally settled—intensified the sense of time travel.Footnote ³⁵

For many other urban strollers, Alexanderplatz opened up a space that many viewed as exotic. Enticed by places of exchange and contrast, urban explorers turned toward the eastern Jewish population, who settled in the Scheunenviertel. Alfred Döblin, the accomplished writer and neurologist, for example, often explored the barn district. The proximity of his medical practice to the barn district made visits quite easy and he watched with great interest guest performances by eastern European theater groups from Vilna. Here, Döblin saw “spontaneous artistic results of a living tribe.”Footnote ³⁶ He also captured the vibrancy and the constant change as well as the increasing ethnic and religious diversity of the city. The presence of eastern European Jews not only added to the metropolitan diversity but they also came to symbolize it: “[T]hese people, who understand Yiddish, this mix of languages which is a naturally grown Esperanto, live at Alexanderplatz and have no money.”Footnote ³⁷

For Döblin, writing about eastern European Jews asserted his view of Berlin as a cosmopolitan center. Whereas he remained silent on German Jews in his city exploration, he portrayed the “Galician settlement” of the Scheunenviertel. His narrative about the barn district formed a vital component of his “Berlin miniatures” that enlisted foreign newspapers, Russian cafes, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans to canvas the capital's ethnic and cultural diversity.Footnote ³⁸ Experiencing and writing about it asserted his right to the city—a right that seemed threatened in the face of the anti-Semitic barn district riots of 1923. In subsequent days after the November riots, this “breathtaking incident” inspired him to undertake an increased scrutiny of Scheunenviertel and its culture: “I went again and again into the pogroms street, sat in the small Krakauer Cafe, observed the people, spoke to this and that one.”Footnote ³⁹

These urban experiences eventually led him to journey to eastern Europe, where he visited the Jewish quarters in Warsaw, Vilnius, Lublin, Lemberg, Krakow, Zakopane, and Lodz. For Döblin, the passionate city-dweller and defender of modernity, this travel took on a very different form. It was not only his ignorance of the Polish, Russian, and Yiddish languages that formed a barrier to his entry into an unknown world, but also his lack of familiarity with Jewish customs. Repulsed and intrigued but unable to grasp, he described these customs, in some cases, as tribal rites of foreign peoples.Footnote ⁴⁰ The religious customs of the Day of Atonement seemed to him to be “something horrifying” and “instinctive, and atavistic”: “Does this have anything to do with Judaism? These are the embodied remains of prehistoric imaginations. These are remains of the fear of the dead, the fear of souls, which are still roaming about. It's a feeling, handed down to these people with their religion. It is the remnant of a different religion, of animism, of a cult of the dead.”Footnote ⁴¹ The fright, however, changed into admiration for the Polish Jews, to whom he attached the “optimism of the striving people” and saw them as “a symbol for the only thing that contains future, birth, and creation.”Footnote ⁴²

Döblin's case highlights the ambivalence that encounters engendered as well as the differences between his exploration of the Scheunenviertel and eastern Europe. Notwithstanding his double vision, his trip to Poland reassured him in his belief that Jews form a people even without a territory.Footnote ⁴³ While Joseph Roth, the accomplished novelist and journalist, certainly sympathized with this view, he was nevertheless critical of Döblin's occasional relapse into western opinions, prejudices, and stereotypes about Poland, but he appreciated the book's sympathetic attitude toward the eastern European Jews.Footnote ⁴⁴

Roth, who was born in a small Jewish community at the eastern border of the Habsburg monarchy, surveyed eastern European Jews in the east and west at a time when he himself had turned away from left-wing political engagement in favor of nostalgia for the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. To him the eastern European Jews were no longer an embarrassment or an embodiment of authenticity. Chronicling the life of eastern European Jews served to promote his preference for transnationality. His identification with eastern European Jews led him to dismiss Zionism as a form of hyper-assimilation and the desire for a homeland as an anachronistic return to nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Wandering Jews essentially narrates Roth's encounters with eastern European Jews, comprising several articles he had previously published in major German newspapers. In describing the various eastern European quarters, Roth retraced his own biography. He depicted Vienna, the city that had welcomed him at the age of nineteen; Berlin, where he had worked as a journalist; and Paris, his destination as a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925.Footnote ⁴⁶ To him France appeared as a counterweight to Germany and represented continuity, tradition, and tolerance for cultural diversity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Unlike Vienna or Berlin, Paris had become a truly metropolitan city that was much more enjoyable than Berlin: “There's no fun in Berlin. But fun rules in Paris” and in the Jewish restaurants, which, unlike those of Berlin's barn district, were “merry, warm, and noisy.” In the Jewish inns in Paris, eastern European Jews spoke a cheerful “Kauderwelsch.” Pleasure came at a price here, too, however, when Roth presented, like many other travel writers, women as the major promoters of assimilation.Footnote ⁴⁸

Berlin and Paris were only two stops on the itineraries of central European Jewish writers. Roth's counterpart, the roving reporter and socialist, Egon Erwin Kisch, who was born in 1885 in Prague into a middle-class German Jewish family, had become a celebrity in Prague in the 1920s and 1930s and in Vienna and Berlin, where he resided during the 1920s. Moved by his political left-wing orientation, he went to England and reported on the homelessness of Whitechapel; he described a night in an asylum for the poor by following quite closely the model of Jack London's People of the Abyss (1903).Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet in the midst of squalor and poverty, Kisch found a literary cafe in the East End of London called the “New-Yorker Restaurant,” where Yiddish publishers and scholars commingled with theater directors and poets. Along with this eclectic mix of Jewish intellectuals, the cafe was home to several journalists from major British newspapers who reported on the happenings in the Whitechapel ghetto. With the cafe as a place of encounter, Kisch inscribed into the fabric of London a transnational space. For him, the cafe represented the mixing of the “world historical restlessness of Judaism with the nervous homelessness of the Bohemian.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Kisch's portrayal of the literary cafe resonates with the perception that London was an imperial city embracing cultural and ethnic diversity, and his celebration of cosmopolitanism strikes a familiar chord in Jewish urban explorations.

England, however, paled in comparison to America, which had become Germany's model for economic and social modernization and its diversified and bustling consumer culture. The famous German Jewish author Alfred Kerr sought to reacquaint readers with America and criticized the dichotomy of viewing America as the embodiment of civilization and Europe as the bulwark of culture. To him Germany was “lacerated,” London had talent, but New York was genius.Footnote ⁵¹ Not all Jewish travelers shared this enthusiasm for America. In Holitscher's prewar America: Today and Tomorrow, a photograph of the Statue of Liberty had welcomed and introduced the North American continent to his readers.Footnote ⁵² Kafka, in his America (The Man who Disappeared), had dramatically changed this iconographic entry when he replaced the statue's torch with a sword, thereby juxtaposing the notion of liberty with an icon of dreadful power.Footnote ⁵³ Echoing this diminished enthusiasm for America, Holitscher, too, now felt that in the face of the skyscrapers, all existing concepts of humanity, beauty, and harmony had been shattered.Footnote ⁵⁴

Walking around the Lower East Side with his illustrator Struck was therefore not an experience of homecoming. Turning to the Bowery, they found eastern European Jews, who had always been wandering, lost on their way to the Promised Land enveloped in longing. The immigrants' transition from Europe to America embodied not just their liberation from hostility but also resulted in the creation of a new ghetto. Moreover, what had hitherto been a symbol of New York's modernity appeared now as an emblem of Jewish degradation. To Holitscher, it seemed as if the East Side was as bound to squalor and depravity as the Brooklyn Bridge was to the chains that secured it to the ground. In sight of the impoverished Jewish population, Holitscher saw no longer the “Babylonian stronghold” (Zwingburg) on the Hudson as a home for Jews, but Palestine as the old new home.Footnote ⁵⁵

Like Holitscher, Roth and Kisch discussed America critically. Roth's exploration of eastern European Jews in Europe stood in sharp contrast to his discussion of them in New York; in a telling fashion, those who crossed the Atlantic were quickly quarantined in sight of the Statute of Liberty, and thus they only dreamt about New York, apparently reflecting the restrictive immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924. Like Roth, Kisch was equally critical of America and opened his report with a satirical description of the difficulties a reporter faced to enter “God's own country.” His portrait amounted to an indictment of America's culture and what appeared as an excessive capitalist system that produced social injustice.Footnote ⁵⁶ Growing disenchantment with America in light of immigration policy also informed Holitscher's renewed discussion. At the end of the 1920s, he had given up hope that the American melting pot could overcome ethnic and social boundaries, noticed existing social and racial differences, and was fully aware of the fate of the homeless and weak.Footnote ⁵⁷

Whether travelers were disillusioned or captivated by America, they barely ever failed to take note of the eastern European Jews. This, however, was less self-evident in respect to the Soviet Union as many Jewish writers embarked on a trip to the young Republic.Footnote ⁵⁸ Most often oriented toward the political left, many commentators left the social and political situation of the Jews and their culture unmentioned. The promise of a new society that would not pay attention to ethnic differences often rendered Jews invisible in the travelogues of devoted tourists. Yet the endorsement of the ideology of universal brotherhood only partly explains the absence of Jews in many travel descriptions. The identification of Jews with the Soviet Union in anti-Semitic slander probably made many visitors reluctant to point out the prominence of Jews in certain areas of the Soviet administration.Footnote ⁵⁹ This explanation, however, does not suffice, either. In contrast to central European Jewish travelers, eastern European Jewish immigrants to America who visited the Soviet Union were much more outspoken about the situation of Jews in the socialist society. Their command of Russian and Yiddish allowed for a very different experience of the country.Footnote ⁶⁰ The ideological gaze, anti-Semitism, and linguistic and cultural barriers thus contributed to the invisibility of Jews in many travel reports by central European authors.

Upon his arrival in Moscow in September 1920, Holitscher intended neither to celebrate nor denounce the Soviet Union; he believed the truth would be found somewhere between the critics and the propagandists. Despite the posture of evenhandedness, he embraced communism and thought of the Soviet Union as a new model for Germany's future. Holitscher, however, while trying to insert himself into the proletarian socialist revolution and its ideas, remained an outsider. Embracing the views of pacifism, anarchism, socialism, and Zionism made him susceptible to criticism and increasingly isolated him, as he observed in his autobiography.Footnote ⁶¹

Holitscher was not the only Jewish traveler with conflicted ideological commitments who hoped to find some clarification by exploring the Soviet Union. The German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, went to Moscow to chase a love interest, to examine his own relationship with the Soviet Union, and to decide whether to join the Communist party. In the end, his love for Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924, remained unrequited and he never actually resolved the question of his ideological orientation. His diary documents, therefore, his two failed romances. He writes in his Moscow diary dismissively of Joseph Roth, on account of Roth's conversion from a Bolshevik to a royalist in the Soviet Union, yet rushes to clarify in a letter to Gershom Scholem that he is not traveling on an “official mission.” Living primarily during his extended stay in Moscow as a middle-class intellectual, he studied museums, churches, and markets. During his first weeks, he attended Aleksandr Granovsky's State Jewish Theater several times, but expressed his criticism of the performance and his frustration that he was often unable to follow the dialogues of the plays as well as other conversations with Jews.Footnote ⁶²

Others, such as Kisch, who also toured Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan placed Moscow within a European cultural orbit by emphasizing the poverty and filth of its Oriental parts. Moreover, in his glorifying account of the Soviet regime he established a connection between the Soviet Union and Germany, thereby presenting the October Revolution as the fulfillment of German socialism, hoping for its success in Germany and elsewhere.Footnote ⁶³ Roth, too, praised the Soviet stance against anti-Semitism but remained somehow ambivalent insofar as he thought that the integration of Jews into Soviet society would coincide with their total assimilation. He believed with somewhat striking distance that once the “Jewish question” was solved, the age of Zionism would pass away as would that of anti-Semitism and “perhaps even that of Judaism itself.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Critical of the two melting pots, America and the Soviet Union, others explored Palestine. With the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and the radicalization of the German Jewish Zionist movement that had already occurred prior to World War I, traveling to Palestine had became a major venue through which to promote the Zionist cause. Every returning visitor from Palestine was to become an apostle of the building of Erez Israel and to help to forge a connection between the land and the diaspora, the Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau proclaimed.Footnote ⁶⁵ Participating personally or vicariously in the making of the Zionist program offered a way to link German Jewry to a “normal, rooted, genuine people, engaged in a healthy national pursuit and propitiously wedded to modernity,” as Michael Berkowitz argued.Footnote ⁶⁶ Writing travelogues about Palestine by the late 1920s therefore was no longer a great novelty, as the devoted Zionist and journalist Robert Weltsch noted.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, leaving aside the myriad publications in newspapers and journals, well over three dozen travel accounts of Palestine had been published in Germany since the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁸ Published mainly by followers of the Zionist movement, Zionists were nevertheless not alone in their peregrinations to the Holy Land; non-Zionists, too, sought to make Palestine a reality for themselves.

During the 1920s, the authorities of the British Mandate significantly developed various historical sites when Palestine also became known for its new Zionist settlements and its many resorts. Less concerned with resorts, Holitscher's account displayed the ambivalence of a religious socialist and anti-nationalist. He believed that the fourth wave of immigration had diminished the original utopian socialism of the first pioneers in Palestine.Footnote ⁶⁹ He opposed the Jewish nationalist ideology, but saw the socialist Jewish pioneers in Palestine as the source of great hope. He, too, described Palestine as a place where God had been present and wondered when, if ever, the messiah would ride on a white horse into the redeemed world.Footnote ⁷⁰

Holitischer's meshing of socialism, nationalism, and even religious ideals never allowed him to embrace Zionism fully. Ideological orientation but also the intensified Jewish-Arab conflict clearly shaped travelers' impressions of the country and created a critical distance between themselves and the Zionist program. Visitors to Palestine, especially from the political left, castigated Zionists' alliance with European powers and imperial politics, and others saw the Zionists' cultural ambitions as the trivialization of Jewish culture.Footnote ⁷¹ Roth, for example, decided in 1929 to visit the barn district in Berlin and not Jerusalem as he believed that wherever Jews lived there was a wailing wall. Dismayed by the Jewish-Arab conflict, he believed that Zionism represented a form of “aping” European nationalism, a “degradation of Judaism” as Jews embodied a “kind of supranation, perhaps the anticipation of some future form of nation.”Footnote ⁷²

Moreover conflict erupted not just along the lines of ideological differences, but also as the advances of the Zionist settlement in Palestine made it difficult for non-Zionists to relate to the country outside the Zionist organization and institutional framework. Alfred Wiener of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) dismissed existing travel reports as tendentious. He believed that religious sentiments and political orientations had colored the experience and representation of the country's Jewish culture and life. He bemoaned the absence of an organization or organ that would investigate the nature of the country without any ideological commitment.Footnote ⁷³

To rectify this situation Wiener visited Palestine in 1927 to galvanize love for the land and the ancestors, and to promote colonizing and religious work liberated from political orientations for all Jewish Germans. Yet visiting the country apart from Zionism proved difficult; the tourist industry was very much controlled by Zionists, ever since the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund had helped to create the Palestine Express Travel Agency. He distanced himself from plans to create a Jewish culture entirely based on Hebrew, faulted the Zionist cultural program for low standards in schools, and feared that it would destroy the multilingual “Switzerland of the east.” Whereas Zionism propagated the notion of a Jewish homogeneous population, Wiener detected sharp cultural differences.Footnote ⁷⁴

In the same year, Bruno Weil and David Cohn embarked on their quest to Palestine. During their travel, Weil and Cohn were initially slightly disoriented after having investigated Egypt's vast historical landmarks, realizing that, comparatively, Palestine had very few historical sites to offer. While the Bible testified to what Palestine once was, Weil observed, its current condition had become involved in a contested debate.Footnote ⁷⁵ Their arrival in Jerusalem was accompanied by the realization that they had not arrived at the center of Judaism, but had entered the home of three world religions. Not religious himself, Weil saw the observance of religious precepts as a necessity in the holy land and interpreted the creation of a Jewish community that severed its ties to religious observance as a contradiction. Following upon these disheartening realizations, he detected high unemployment and viewed the country as an English colony. Moreover, he saw the country as part of the Orient. To create a Jewish community in this land would be tantamount to giving up on everything that Jews—since the emancipation in Germany—had fought for, he believed. Cohn remained equally critical and emphasized that Palestine had to be retained as a symbol of the messianic idea and the great past, but the modern country could not fulfill this role.Footnote ⁷⁶

Attempts by these non-Zionists to explore the country engendered fierce responses. Even before Wiener had embarked, his pamphlet submitted to the board of the Central Verein, while not meant for publication, became embroiled in a public debate.Footnote ⁷⁷ In his rebuttal, Richard Lichtheim, the German Jewish Zionist, took Wiener to task for favoring work in Palestine without a plan or goal, and, not entirely mistakenly, observed that Wiener had sought to find a non-Zionist Palestine for Jews in Germany but had failed.Footnote ⁷⁸ Weil and Cohn, too, triggered a short and intense exchange. Struck, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1923, challenged Weil in a letter from Haifa to the German Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld, where he related his private conversation with Weil. The letter to Blumenfeld appeared in the Jüdische Rundschau while Weil was still exploring the country.Footnote ⁷⁹ Irritated by the publication of a private conversation, Weil retorted. He cast the process as unseemly and defended his right to travel though Palestine and to make his own itinerary without a Zionist tour guide. Unwilling to contest these arguments, Struck, in his rejoinder, challenged the idea that a short-term visit would entitle a person to gain a meaningful understanding of the economic, religious, and cultural conditions.Footnote ⁸⁰

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The politics of emancipation propelled Jews' integration into the emerging German nation-state. Yet even during the period of heightened nationalism of the first decades of the twentieth century, Jews continued to express a sense of curiosity, belonging, or even an ideological commitment to foreign places. Walter Benjamin confessed his “fanatic urge to travel,” and Arthur Holitscher saw his endless traversing of the world as a continuation of Ahasvers' (the “Wandering Jews”) wanderings and believed that home was to be acquired only in traveling.Footnote ⁸¹ To be sure, these two travelers and writers were quite exceptional, but they were part of a much more diverse Jewish traveling culture of tourists and readers. German Jewish culture therefore did not appear as self-contained and localized. A wider global orientation and a comparative perspective mattered to the many travelers and their readers.

Travelogues about Europe, America, the Soviet Union, and Palestine testify not only to the great initial enthusiasm, but also to the growing uncertainty and fluidity and to the rapid and dramatic changes that Jews experienced during the first decades of the twentieth century. They illustrate a constant engagement with various conflicting models of modernity and Jewish identity. At the beginning of the 1930s, the currency of these competing ideologies, political cultures, and societies had significantly lost their appeal for many travel writers. In the end, most of the published travel reports, while revealing cosmopolitan competence, document not a process of homecoming but an ongoing search. Struck, who indeed emigrated and settled in 1923 in Haifa, was the only exception.

Traveling to America, Palestine, and the Soviet Union not only testified to vicarious interest but also underlined the constant search for alternative models for Jewish culture and self-understanding. In addition to these clearly ideologically marked territories, urban travelogues critically engaged the merits of socialism, liberalism, and nationalism. Moreover, they propagated models of cosmopolitan identities that embraced and promoted the metropolitan cities' cultural and ethnic pluralism. For some of the largely male urban explorers, inspecting ethnic neighborhoods provided them, in the words of Richard Sennett, a form of cosmopolitanism, the experience of diversity.Footnote ⁸² Writing about their experiences allowed these observers tentatively to connect their otherwise tenuous and mobile lives and to assert their link to different political movements and Jewish communities, and to see themselves as members of the nation-state, if however, with a difference.