Untitled

“Jewish Taste?” in Paris and Berlin
The differences between Jews in Berlin and Paris may perhaps be crystallized
in their responses to the appearance of Ost-Juden in their midst. Jews in Paris
appear to have reacted to these Jews whose Judaism was made visible – through
their clothing and hair – to all, with systematic efforts to mark their difference, to
claim their Frenchness. The response in Berlin, as the recent work of Michael
Brenner most strongly emphasizes, was much more complicated. 45 While many
Berliners reacted in ways analogous to the Parisians, for a significant number of
Jews in Berlin, migrants from Eastern Europe and the shtetls they had left behind
represented a possibility for recreating an authentic Judaism. While Parisian Jews
seem to have been fearful of being marked as “other,” as “alien,” by association
with these Jewish newcomers whose everyday practices were so different from
French norms, many Berliners seem to have been less worried, perhaps more
confident in their anchoring in German society, or perhaps, and I think this is more
likely, sharing with their fellow Germans a sense that conformity in everyday
practices was not necessarily required of them. A full explanation of how the
relationship between Frenchness and Germanness, between national belonging in
the two nation-states and everyday taste was different, must await another context,
but for now the crucial point is that Jews in Paris and Berlin used the aesthetic
repertoire available to them to express likeness and difference from the non-Jews
with whom they identified (for reasons of class, national, professional, or political
location) and to mark likenesses and differences with their fellow Jews. In the end,
I would argue, the different tastes of Parisian and Berlin Jews speak to the power
of the nation in shaping everyday taste. Deviations from dominant patterns are
found at the level of individual experience rather than in something that could be
called a “Jewish taste.” Taste in everyday things is, therefore, revealing in how
modern individuals live and negotiate among their multiple identities, within the
very powerful framework of the nation.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr Heike Schroll and Gisela Erler at the Landesarchiv Berlin
(LAB), who provided invaluable help negotiating the archive, Carla MacDougall
for her research assistance, and Tom Holt for his most helpful reading of this
chapter. Annette Timm and Carol Scherer provided great assistance in both
academic and everyday life in Berlin. Joachim Schlör and Andreas Hansert were
generous with suggestions of useful sources in Berlin for this project. The research
could not have been done without the financial support of the University of
315