Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

By Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785335549

Book preview

PART I

Imaginations

Remembrance and Representation of Spaces and Boundaries

1

Of Sounds and Stones

The Jewish-Christian Contact Zone of a Swiss Village in the Nineteenth Century

Alexandra Binnenkade

Space. The Final Frontier.¹

The history of Jewish-Christian coexistence is a history of spatial orders.² In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the mainly rural populations of Lengnau and Endingen, two villages in the northeast of Switzerland, experienced belonging and exclusion, power and powerlessness, center and periphery, success and failure intimately by means of space. Owning land, living on it, and being named after it, in particular, were pivotal points of reference in an agricultural society’s coordinate system of values. The right to settle—this existential legal, economic, and at the same time social value—was denied to Switzerland’s Jewish population until 1879. Communal and subsequently cantonal (later national) citizenship rights on both the collective and individual levels were reserved for landowners. It is no surprise, therefore, that the debate on Jewish civil rights ultimately turned out to be a question of the land in which it literally played out.³ As elsewhere around the world, in Lengnau and Endingen the distribution of land signified the distribution of power. Conflicts evolved around spatial relations, while social relations simultaneously molded the physical sphere.

Material and Immaterial Aspects of the Contact Zone

Thus far, scholars have primarily used written sources—normative and administrative texts—to describe everyday life in Lengnau or Endingen. The majority of these refer to separation and conflict rather than contact. Over the years, the narrative scholars have derived from analyzing these has solidified into an account of two distinct societies within one spatial frame. In so doing, scholars have implicitly reinforced the impossibility of successful Jewish-Christian coexistence, omitting the unspectacular but peaceful side of contact, which in fact was the rule, not the exception. This hegemonic narrative needs to be changed. To this end, a different category of source needs to be taken into account.

Reading space as such a source opens a window onto hitherto undiscovered aspects of everyday life in the village and changes the meaning of contact. Space is intrinsically rooted in social practice; it is being done: performed, constructed and reworked; an interactive and entangled core element of the contact zone. Taking its material character as seriously as its immaterial qualities, I seek to test a previously uncontested narrative (written and oral) against the presence and enactment of physical elements such as streets, woods, and, most of all, houses.⁴ In this chapter, I present two approaches to the analysis of space: the first one begins with the materiality of a specific place, a very special kind of house, and links it to statistical data and narrative identity politics; the second is captured with the notion of layers and discusses immaterial factors, like sounds or times, that create Jewish and Christian spaces.

The capstone of the prevailing narrative is Lengnau’s and Endingen’s historical denomination as Judendörfer. The expression suggests a Jewish majority or cultural dominance. In fact, however, the Jewish population never accounted for more than one-third of Lengnau or 50 percent of Endingen over the two hundred years of Jewish presence. Today Judendorf is a name the two villages chose to apply to themselves to demonstrate (and promote) their cultural uniqueness in the area. Specific buildings such as the synagogues, the cemetery, the Jewish bakery, and the mikveh, but particularly houses with dual doors, have become the architectural signifiers of these Judendörfer and a shared Jewish-Christian lifeworld. These houses will be the topic of a close analysis later in the chapter.

Researching Space

After a Marxist-oriented initial surge of attention in the 1960s and 1970s, which ebbed together with the influence of the Annales, a second wave of interest in space as a research focus arose in the late 1990s within the context of cultural studies. The oft-cited topographical, topological, or spatial turn has been widely discussed.⁵

Within this scholarly context, I conceptualize space as a dialogical category. I link texts or images about social interaction and symbolic representation to the analysis of material, haptic objects in such a way that reading them together can generate productive analytical back-and-forth movement. Such an analytical movement allows me to draw conclusions about the micro-practices of contact and reveals a much more complicated fabric of actors and interactions than earlier historiography had suggested. The result is no longer a story about Christians and Jews but also one about Catholics and Protestants, citizens and villagers without communal rights, about representatives of the canton and local dignitaries, and, most of all, about the individual women and men in the village.⁶ Therefore, I use a vocabulary that distinguishes different levels of agency within a spatial perspective.

Spaces, as Michel de Certeau has said, come into being. Space creates connections, a social fabric of moving elements. It is imbued with the entirety of all the unfolding movement therein. De Certeau describes space as an act of a present (or of a time) that is modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts.⁷ In his understanding, spaces are the living or at least changeable results of relationships; spaces are being done in time. De Certeau’s spotlight on time and the constitutive role of contexts makes spaces particularly interesting for historians. Spaces are articulated, organized, lived, felt. They depend on activity and variation. At the same time, they are also described, interpreted, represented. They are, therefore, excellent media for capturing and describing social change, as I will do in the second section of this chapter.

Places are the building blocks of space. A place, like a tree or a house, is the manifestation of an order in accord with which the elements are distributed in relations of coexistence.⁸ De Certeau explains the characteristics of places based on the possibility of referring to something as behind, above, to the left of something else. Places are fixed points in a specific constellation. They structure spaces.

Stones

One such constellation, for example, consists of the buildings of Lengnau and Endingen. People actively determined their distribution throughout the village. Once built, the houses defined the village space. Geographical maps from different points in time show that most of the houses built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belonged to Jewish owners. These new houses were doubly separated from the older Christian houses, by both a road and a river. In this process Lengnau underwent a de facto spatial segregation into a mostly Christian and a mostly Jewish part. But it would be too easy to conclude simply from this architectural arrangement that everyday life in Lengnau was indeed heavily segregated.

Exploring the physical qualities of the site today, one can observe that the new side of the village is located on the sunny—that is attractive and valuable—flank of a little hill. In this area Lengnau’s farmers, who were all Christian at the time, produced wine and cultivated crops, working their land on a daily basis. Thus, from the beginning Christian farmers spent time on both sides of the river. Written sources and a short walk through the village further show that the public house where the municipal council, the village’s highest political body, held its weekly meetings was located in the new part of the village. The public house was not the only important public structure. The post office, which acted as a central communication hub for the local community, was also located directly next to the synagogue. Also, most merchants sold their goods in this part of the village. The communal public scales, which were used to measure crop yields, and some wooden benches, mounted under shady trees at the turn of the twentieth century, were also located here. These benches embodied the material invitation for villagers to sit and chat with others or simply to watch the daily business. The places in the village that seemed Jewish at first glance were, in fact, jointly created by Christians and Jews, they were rural and a little urban at the same time.⁹ This contact zone offered pivotal services and opportunities for interaction. Growth on this newly developed side of the River Surb did not primarily signify marginalization. Progressively, the synagogue square became the new center of Lengnau.

Written documents do not convey such information about the complex relationship between Jewish and Christian villagers. It is the places that reveal these secrets—and, along with them, the meaning of contact. Following the definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary, bodies in contact touch each other’s external surfaces. Transferred to social relations, contact as a cultural form means neither blending nor a distinct and sharp separation. Contact implies (only) partial involvement with the Other, an involvement that emerges from the material and immaterial practices of daily interaction.

What Makes a Space Jewish? Houses with Dual Doors

Today Endingen and Lengnau represent their character as former Judendörfer not by pointing to their synagogues but by highlighting specific private houses. These buildings, which were essentially semidetached but each of which might house multiple families, are easy to spot: they have two identical entrance doors built into one frame, so-called dual doors (Doppeleingänge). Most of these houses were taken down over time. But they are one of the first distinctive architectural landmarks mentioned in descriptions of the history of Lengnau and/or Endingen. Dual doors have become the most important symbol for the local Jewish-Christian culture of the past. One of the doors is usually identified as the entrance for Christians, while the other is shown as the one the Jewish inhabitants used. The reason given for this phenomenon in talks, in books, or, lately, on walking tours of the locality is a historic prohibition on Jews and Christians living together under one roof, which dates back to a decree codified in eighteenth-century law.¹⁰

For local villagers, dual doors signify segregation. Apparently paradoxical, these houses are labeled as Jewish (Judenhäuser) and thereby assigned to only one of the two groups that lived in Lengnau and Endingen. The current narrative does not specify whether the local Catholic citizenry demanded that this cantonal prohibition be enforced or whether it came exclusively from the cantonal administration and was thus imposed from the outside. Each case makes a different statement about the extent to which Jewish men, women, and children were accepted by their Christian neighbors. The prohibition implies that those who should not live under one roof should also have little contact in everyday life, which sheds an unflattering light on the Christian majority, local or regional. However, the material result of the order suggests that the relations were better than expected, because very obviously the dual doors bypassed an order and allow it to be interpreted as potentially unpopular. If we were to hold the image of this rural Jewish-Christian neighborhood next to descriptions of contemporary German towns where entire Jewish neighborhoods were closed off—sometimes even by a wall and gates, closed in the evenings as well as on Sundays and holidays like Christmas or Easter—the contact zone of Lengnau and Endingen was quite permeable by comparison.

There is no stronger symbol of the ambivalence of the Lengnau contact zone than these dual doors. However, scholars and villagers, so far, have exclusively associated dual doors with segregation and Jewishness. These explanations come into question once the materiality of the dual doors is more closely inspected. The following section explores the connection between narrative and materiality in the construction of a Jewish space. Space and place are, indeed, entangled, and there are historiographical gains to be made from such a spatial approach to everyday life.

Entering a Jewish House Raises Questions

Imagining everyday life behind these doors means looking at how the houses were built and what their architectural arrangements initiated, fostered, or prevented. In the house I entered, the doors led into a shared space. Seen from the inside, the doors look like a pretense. But what for? How far did this separation go in practice, how far could it go, architecturally and culturally, and why did the people in Lengnau and Endingen build those doors so close together instead of, say, using the two opposite narrow sides of the house (such houses exist in other villages) if they wanted to make sure people were really segregated? Why live in one house all together?

There are no written sources for what housing looked like in the two villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries except for inventories: lists of the possessions owned by the deceased. The only testimony of everyday practices inside this particular contact zone are the houses themselves. What these stones could tell us needs to be examined against the backdrop of the written and oral tradition, statistical surveys, the expertise of current heritage conservationists, and anthropological scholarship.

Normative Sources

The decree forbidding Jews and non-Jews from living under one roof is recorded in one of the oldest legal agreements about the right to settle that was granted to Jewish people in the Surbtal. It dates back to 1744 and was repeated in 1774. Article one stipulates that the 108 Jewish households then under the direct protection of the so-called Alte Orte—regions that had banded together and would later become the Swiss nation-state in a different legal and geographical form—were restricted to settling in Lengnau and Endingen. The importance of spatial regulation is demonstrated already in the second paragraph, which states that houses in which Jewish people lived were not permitted to be increased in their number, that is, new [ones] bought or built, and [the existing ones may be] increased neither in height nor in extent, yet [they may be] changed in their interior.¹¹ Jews were permitted neither to buy or sell nor to own a house. The intention of the authors is obvious: to limit the Jewish population.¹² But there is more to this regulation than meets the eye: Only those who owned a house had access to common land (Allmendnutzen), an exclusive and existential resource that was particularly guarded. The local authorities tried to prevent what they considered overuse of the common land, applying some kind of a protectionist first-come-first-served attitude against the Jewish immigrants. Therefore, the only housing option for Jewish settlers in the Surbtal was rental, which was widely practiced.¹³ The legal order concludes with the now famous provision that no Christian and Jew should live together under one roof.¹⁴

In current historiographical literature about Lengnau and Endingen, this legal text is understood as the normative blueprint for local architecture. The local historian Franz Laube-Kramer traced it back to a regulation of 1658¹⁵ and suggested that in the eighteenth century the original ruling that Jews and Christians should not live together got interpreted as not under one roof. In his reading, doors stand for roofs as the synecdochal symbol of the household: two doors stand for two houses, regardless of the actual number of roofs. He interprets the construction of dual doors as a local attempt to evade imposed segregation. For Laube-Kramer, the doors are a sign of friendly relationships and collaboration in the village against ignorant, probably even anti-Jewish, cantonal authorities outside of it. He explains the social side of their construction as follows: Familiar with the ban, a Jewish developer would commission a Christian villager to build a house with two apartments. Later on, he would formally rent one apartment from the Christian who built it, which, in fact, meant renting from himself. Of course, he would not have to pay rent for it. Meanwhile, the Christian party to the arrangement would live in the other apartment. Whether or not rent was paid remains unclear.

Who would have been eligible for such a deal on the Christian side? Another look at the houses shows that they were usually built without barns and had only small gardens, which, in a rural society, marked a conscious renunciation of an agricultural way of life. Whoever lived in these houses did not farm. This also indicates that these buildings did not house prosperous farmers and well-off tenants but rather those who earned their living as craftsmen, day laborers, or in other occupations with low incomes. Thus, following Laube-Kramer’s explanation, the living under one roof of Jewish and Christian neighbors at that time must have been more than just a matter of religious interactions; it was equally structured by class.

Statistics: Sharing a Roof in the Surbtal between 1700 and 1900

One of the oldest descriptions of the village originates from the year 1794. Hans-Rudolf Maurer, a Swiss priest and deacon who wrote much-cited travel books, like the one I quote from below, also reported on Lengnau and Endingen. Although he had a sharp eye for everything in the seemingly exotic (Jewish) village, he never mentioned houses with dual entrances. But he did describe the blue woodwork that distinguished Jewish houses from Christian ones, indicating that he did pay attention to the specifics of Christian/Jewish cultural everyday life.¹⁶ If he had noticed houses with dual doors, he would, most probably, have mentioned them. Thus, it must be concluded that houses with double doors must have been established only after 1800 or, at least, that they were not characteristic of the interreligious contact zone. But why would residents suddenly have followed a legal decree from the mid-seventeenth century in the early nineteenth century? Most of the buildings Maurer mentioned are not preserved today. What we do have, however, are statistical surveys that allow some conclusions about housing arrangements in Lengnau and Endingen.

The earliest survey of the housing situation in the Surbtal dates from 1778.¹⁷ It was meticulously made by pastor Fridolin Stamm, who lived in the area. At the time, about 70 percent of the Christian households were in single-family homes. The rest of the villagers lived in shared dwellings. The situation was slightly different for Jewish families: 77 percent occupied a single-family home, while multiple-family Jewish homes typically had more families in them than their Christians counterparts. The 1779 survey does not mention any houses shared by Christian and Jewish tenants. This means that at the end of the eighteenth century, Jews and Christians did not actually live under one roof. These arrangements did not change much over the next half century. The census of 1850 lists each house and its inhabitants, their names, occupation, status, including even former residents who had left the family