German-Jewish Family History Research, c .1900–1945

Abstract

Between 1924 and 1938 the Berlin-based ophthalmologist Arthur Czellitzer ran a society for Jewish family research. The society’s members came from all over Germany and many other parts of the world, reflecting an enthusiasm for amateur genealogical research among German-speaking Jews that had been growing since the late nineteenth century. The narrative family histories that many of these researchers produced offer an intriguing lens into the social histories of Jewish communities in central Europe, often reaching back many centuries. They also reveal the authors’ own senses of their German-Jewish identities in the precarious times in which they lived. Authors wrote to document and preserve family memories and to commemorate their ancestors’ lives and roles in German society. Many texts have a strong emphasis on families’ long-standing connections to Germany and individuals’ status as German citizens, but without losing sight of their Jewish cultural and religious heritage. Although most of these documents were written by men, women also play crucial and undervalued roles in the preservation and transmission of family histories. These family histories created vital links back to lost and threatened pasts and offer historians today valuable insights into the experiences and attitudes of German-speaking Jewish families during the first half of the twentieth century.