Sexual unions and the Jewish Question. Russian Jews and Germans decided to save Germany together. Prophecies of the Holocaust
Anti-Semitism is a shameful phenomenon. Actually, any oppression, and especially the physical destruction of people based on nationality, is criminal, especially if it is initiated by the government and carried out on a national scale. History knows cases of mass genocide against representatives of different nations. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed by the Turks at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Not everyone knows how brutally Japanese soldiers dealt with the Chinese during the occupation of Nanjing and Singapore in the late 30s. Mass executions were carried out during the war by the allies of Nazi Germany, the Croatian Ustasha. By historical standards, recently, in 1994, terrible purges on ethnic grounds (Hutus killed Tutsis) shocked Rwanda.
But there is a people who were subjected to the most severe ethnic persecution in the twentieth century, called the Holocaust. Modern Germans cannot unambiguously explain why their grandfathers, who grew up under the influence of Goebbels’ propaganda, exterminated the Jews. It is possible that the ancestors themselves would not have found a clear argumentation for their actions, but in the thirties and forties, in most cases everything was clear and understandable to them.
Woe from mind?
When asked why Jews were exterminated in different countries (and this happened not only in Germany in the twentieth century, but also in other countries at different times), one can most often hear the answer from representatives of this people: “Out of envy!” This version of the assessment of tragic events has its own logic and truth. The Jewish people gave humanity many geniuses who shone in science, art, and other areas of human civilization. The ability to adapt, a traditionally active position, an active character, subtle and ironic humor, innate musicality, enterprise and other absolutely positive qualities are characteristic of the nation that gave the world Einstein, Oistrakh, Marx, Botvinnik... Yes, you can list for a long time who else. But, apparently, it’s not just a matter of envy of outstanding mental abilities. After all, not all Jews are Einsteins. There are simpler people among them. The sign of real wisdom is not its constant demonstration, but something else. For example, the ability to provide yourself with a friendly environment. Such that no one would even think of offending representatives of this people. And not out of fear, but out of respect. Or even love.
Revolutionary money grab
People of different nationalities strive for power and wealth. Anyone who truly wants to taste these attributes of earthly paradise looks for ways to achieve his goal and sometimes finds them. Then other people (who can be conventionally called envious people) have a desire to redistribute goods, in other words, to take away values from the rich and appropriate them or, in extreme cases, divide them equally (or in a fraternal way, this is when the eldest has more). During pogroms and revolutions, successful owners of fortunes of different nationalities, from Zulu kings to Ukrainian top government officials, come under analysis. But why were the Jews exterminated first in almost all cases of mass robbery? Maybe they have more money?
Aliens and xenophobes
For historical reasons, Jews did not have their own state from ancient times until the mid-twentieth century. They had to settle in different countries, kingdoms, states and move to new places in search of a better life. Some of the Jews were able to assimilate, joining the indigenous ethnic group and dissolving into it without a trace. But the core of the nation still retained its identity, religion, language and other characteristics that define national characteristics. This in itself is a miracle, because xenophobia to one degree or another is inherent in almost all indigenous ethnic groups. Otherness causes rejection and hostility, and these, in turn, make life very difficult.
Knowing that a common enemy could be the best reason to unite a nation, Hitler exterminated the Jews. Technically it was simple, they were easy to recognize, they go to synagogues, keep kashrut and the Sabbath, dress differently and sometimes even speak with an accent. Moreover, at the time the Nazis came to power, Jews did not have the ability to effectively resist violence, representing an almost ideal ethnically isolated and helpless victim. The desire for self-isolation, which determined the survival of the nation, once again worked as a bait for pogromists.
"My Struggle" by Hitler
Did the Germans know about Auschwitz and Buchenwald?
After the defeat of Nazism, many Germans claimed that they knew nothing about concentration camps, ghettos, high-efficiency crematorium ovens and giant ditches filled with human bodies. They also did not know about soap, and candles made from human fat, and other cases of “useful disposal” of remains. Some of their neighbors simply disappeared somewhere, and the authorities did not reach them with information about the atrocities committed in the occupied territories. The desire to disclaim responsibility for war crimes among ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers and officers is understandable; they pointed to the SS troops, who were primarily engaged in punitive operations. But there was also Kristallnacht in 1938, during which not only stormtroopers in brown shirts acted, but also ordinary people. Representatives of the sentimental, talented and hardworking German people with sweet rapture destroyed the property of their recent friends and neighbors, and they themselves were beaten and humiliated. So why did the Germans exterminate the Jews, what were the reasons for the sudden outbreak of fierce hatred? Were there any reasons?
Jews of the Weimar Republic
To understand the reasons why the Germans, their recent neighbors and friends, exterminated the Jews, one should immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. Many historical studies have been written about this period, and those who do not want to read scientific tomes have the opportunity to learn about it from the novels of the great writer E.M. Remarque. The country suffers from unbearable indemnities imposed by the Entente countries that won the Great War. Poverty borders on hunger, while the souls of its citizens are increasingly possessed by various vices caused by forced idleness and the desire to somehow brighten up their drab, miserable life. But there are also successful people, businessmen, bankers, speculators. Entrepreneurship, due to centuries of nomadic life, is in the blood of Jews. It was they who became the backbone of the business elite of the Weimar Republic, which existed from 1919. There were, of course, poor Jews, artisans, working craftsmen, musicians and poets, artists and sculptors, and they made up the majority of the people. They basically became victims of the Holocaust, the rich managed to escape, they had money for tickets.
The Holocaust reached its peak during World War II. “Death factories”, Majdanek and Auschwitz, immediately began operating on the territory of occupied Poland. But the flywheel of mass murder based on nationality gained special momentum after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR.
There were many Jews in the Leninist Politburo of the Bolshevik Party, they even made up the majority. By 1941, large-scale purges took place in the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, as a result of which the national composition of the Kremlin leadership underwent significant changes. But at the lower (as they say, “local”) levels and in the bodies of the NKVD, the Bolshevik Jews still maintained quantitative dominance. Many of them had experience of the Civil War, their services to the Soviet government were assessed as indisputable, they participated in other large-scale Bolshevik projects. Is it worth asking why Hitler exterminated Jews and commissars in the occupied Soviet territories in the first place? For the Nazis, these two concepts were almost identical and eventually merged into a single definition of “liquid commissar.”
Vaccine against anti-Semitism
National hostility was gradually instilled. Racial theory began to dominate almost immediately after the Nazis came to power. Chronicle footage of ritual sacrifices appeared on cinema screens, during which rabbis killed cows by cutting their throats with a sharp knife. and women can be very beautiful, but Nazi propagandists were not interested in such things. For propaganda videos and posters, “walking manuals for anti-Semites” were specially selected, with faces expressing brutal cruelty and stupidity. This is how the Germans became anti-Semitic.
After the Victory, the commandant's offices of the victorious countries pursued a policy of denazification, in all four occupation zones: Soviet, American, French and British. Residents of the defeated Reich were actually forced (under the threat of being deprived of food rations) to watch revealing documentaries. This measure was aimed at leveling the consequences of twelve years of brainwashing of the deceived Germans.
Same like that!
Talking about geopolitics, preaching the ideals of racial superiority of the Aryans and calling for the destruction of nations, the Fuhrer nevertheless remained, paradoxically, an ordinary person who suffered from a number of psychological complexes. One of them was the question of one's own nationality. Understanding why Hitler exterminated the Jews is difficult, but one clue may be the origins of his father, Alois Schicklgruber. The father of the future Fuhrer received the infamous surname only after an official declaration of paternity, certified by three witnesses and made by Johann Georg Hitler in 1867 for reasons of inheritance.
Alois himself was married three times, and there is a version that one of his children from a previous marriage tried to blackmail the “leader of the German people” with information about the half-Jewish origin of their common father. This hypothesis has a number of inconsistencies, but due to the chronological remoteness it cannot be completely excluded. But it can explain some of the subtleties of the sick psyche of the possessed Fuhrer. After all, an anti-Semitic Jew is not such a rare occurrence. And Hitler’s appearance does not at all correspond to the racial standards adopted in the Third Reich. He was not a tall, blue-eyed, blond man.
Occult and other reasons
It is possible to try to explain why Hitler exterminated the Jews from the standpoint of the ethical and philosophical basis that he provided for the process of physical extermination of millions of people. The Fuhrer was fond of occult theories, and his favorite authors were Guido von List and In general, the version of the origin of the Aryans and ancient Germans turned out to be quite confused and contradictory, but with regard to the Jews, the policy was based on the mystical assumption that they, identified by Hitler as a separate race, supposedly represent danger to all humanity, threatening it with complete destruction.
It is difficult to imagine that an entire nation could be drawn into some kind of global conspiracy. With a multimillion-dollar population, someone would definitely spill the beans about the inhumane plan, in which everyone from the shoemaker Rabinovich to Professor Geller participates. There is no logical answer to the question of why the Nazis exterminated Jews.
Wars are committed when people refuse to think for themselves, relying on their leaders, and without a doubt, and sometimes with pleasure, carry out someone else's evil will. Unfortunately, similar phenomena still occur today...
Germany, which served Jews as a temporary refuge for a millennium, was one of the Torah centers where the great of the great studied and taught in the yeshivas of Mainz, Worms, Frankfurt: Rabbeinu Gershom, Rashi, Rosh, Maarai and others. The communities of these German cities became the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry. At the same time, Germany became the birthplace of Askala, Reform and Nazism, which destroyed millions of Jews physically and spiritually.
Jews of Germany before the 9th century AD
In Jewish sources, Germany has always been called Ashkenazi, as stated in ( 10:3 ): “And the sons of Gomer are Ashkenaz, and Rifat, and Togarmah.” In the Talmud ( Yoma, 10a; Jerus. Talmud, Megillah, 71b) explained: “Homer is Hermamiah” (גמר זה גרממיא), and since one of Homer’s sons was “Ashkenaz,” this name began to designate the Germans in general, although the Midrash identifies the Germans not with Ashkenaz, but with Togarma.
There is a legend that Jews moved to some cities in Germany after the destruction of the Second Temple. The first information about the settlement of Jews in Germany dates back to the beginning of the 4th century, namely to the Jewish community in Cologne.
The first yeshivas and the first pogrom
IN 4560 (800) the Pope recognized him as heir to the throne of the Western Roman Empire, and prosperous times began for the Jews of Germany. Karl saw in the Jews a force capable of leading the country to economic prosperity. Charles encouraged Jewish merchants and protected their property.
The spiritual life of the Jewish community also flourished. Many Jewish sages moved from Italy to Germany and France. At the request of the Mainz Jewish community, Charlemagne invited R. Kalonymus from Luca (Italy) to move to Germany. R. Kalonymus and his son founded the first yeshivas in Germany.
After the division of the Empire by Charles's heirs into three independent kingdoms - Italy, Germany and France, the situation of the Jews of Germany worsened.
IN 4772 (1012) a terrible misfortune befell the Jews of the city of Mainz. The authorities demanded that they either convert to Christianity or leave the city immediately. Pogroms began in the city. Most of the Jews fled from there, but there were also those who, under pain of death, betrayed the faith of their fathers. A year later the decree was canceled and the remaining Jews were again allowed to return to Mainz.
German clergy in the 9th-11th centuries. was characterized by complete tolerance towards Jews, and the pogrom in Mainz was the only one in that period.
Yeshivas and sages before the Crusades
In defending the Jewish faith from external attacks, Mendelssohn made a serious mistake. He divided the “fundamentals of faith” and “practical observance of the commandments”, which Jews are obliged to fulfill as a decree of the King. This division of values has had serious consequences. Mendelssohn himself strictly followed the practical instructions of Judaism and emphasized that this was the duty of the Jews. However, his students began to neglect fulfilling the commandments, citing the teacher’s thought that this was not the basis of faith.
Mendelssohn tried to persuade German Jews to accept European culture. The first step towards this was the propaganda of the transition from the Yiddish language to the pure German language. Mendelssohn did not see the danger that threatened German Jews as a result of the widespread penetration of European culture into the Jewish masses and, unwillingly, prepared the way for the assimilation of German Jewry. Already Mendelssohn's children stopped keeping the commandments, and all his grandchildren were baptized.
Mendelssohn's students continued the work of their teacher in introducing the ideas of the Enlightenment to the Jewish masses. This movement has a name (literally "Education"). The goal set by Mendelssohn - the union of Judaism with the Enlightenment - was sacrificed to another goal - to replace the Divine Torah with Askala. As Askala ideas spread among German Jews, assimilation increased and the number of Hebrew-speaking Jews decreased.
Emperor Joseph II, patron of the Enlightenment, ordered the opening of schools that separated Jewish children from the study of the Torah and Talmud and created a bridge to assimilation and baptism.
David Friedlander succeeded in completely destroying Jewry in Berlin. He created a school in which, in accordance with his program, a group of teachers managed to educate students in the spirit of superficial Enlightenment. Graduates of this school led the assimilation movement in Germany, which attracted their children to Lutheran Christianity.
Within fifty years, about half of Berlin's Jews were baptized. An epidemic of baptisms swept through many large cities, among them Königsberg and Breslau.
During this period, famous Jewish sages still remained in Germany. In Berlin, the head of the community was R. Zvi Hirsh Levin. A witness to how the community was disintegrating, he remained the spokesman for the opinion of the last learned rabbis in Germany and the few members of the community who were faithful to the word of the Creator. In a farewell letter to the community council, in which the rabbi announced his resignation, he wrote that he could no longer bear responsibility for a community whose members despise the word of the Lord and commit all possible sins.
Most of the rabbis in Germany tried to fight Askala, but they were unable to stop the epidemic. The spiritual level of the Jews of Germany fell continuously. The influence of the sages was reduced to an extremely narrow circle of yeshiva students.
Reform Judaism
Reformed Judaism arose as a natural consequence of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which penetrated so deeply into the hearts of the Jews that they did not hesitate to abandon the faith of their fathers en masse. Reformists offered Jews another opportunity for economic and social advancement. Leaders of Jewish Reform began to adapt the ancient faith to a rapidly changing society.
The first reformist temple was opened in Sesen (Germany) in 1810. Israel Jacobson, who headed it, introduced an organ, a mixed choir (which tradition prohibits), German ceremonies, German songs, German prayers and church vestments for the ritual. The reform continued to grow and, despite much opposition from the rabbis, achieved control over many of Germany's Jewish communities.
Reform leader Abraham Geiger completely rejected Talmudic Judaism and even spoke of the need to abolish all the institutions of Judaism. Even more radical was Samuel Goldheim, who opposed circumcision, covering the head during prayer, wearing a tallit and shofar on Rosh Hashanah, belief in the Messiah, and mentioning Zion (Temple Mount), Jerusalem and the Land of Israel in services (“we have no other homeland, except the country of birth and citizenship"), and Goldheim moved the Jewish Shabbat from Saturday to Christian Sunday. The followers of the Reform began to call themselves “Germans of the Mosaic religion.”
First World War
The First World War irreversibly changed the entire Jewish world. If the Second World War (which arose from the conflict of 1914-1918) marked the end of European Jewry, then the First was the beginning of the end.
About 40,000 Jews fought in the German army. The Jews emerged from this war not only with great physical, but also with even greater spiritual losses. The war almost completely destroyed the entire necessary infrastructure of the religious system and strengthened the tendency toward secular life and radicalism in Jewish society, which began at the end of the 19th century.
Hitler's rise to power
In 1933, Adolf Hitler Germany. This became the seal on the verdict on European Jewry.
Hitler outlined his racial, national and political theories in the book Mein Kampf. In it, he presented a plan for a new Germany and Europe where the Aryans would dominate. He was going to free the world from Jews, communists and gypsies. And he was going to make other “lower races”: the French, the Dutch and especially the Slavs slaves of the Aryan race, that is, the Germans.
Hitler's use of propaganda, his appeal to the deepest instincts of the German population and his machine of terror allowed him to quickly gain power.
Almost immediately, he began to persecute Jews with discriminatory decrees, organized boycotts, and officially sanctioned violence. By the end of 1934, Germany was already completely under the dictatorial power of Hitler, and the Jewish population, numbering more than half a million, was on the road to complete disenfranchisement, impoverishment, and then destruction.
Prophecies about the Catastrophe
Despite the unprecedented scale of the tragedy, which would seem impossible to imagine or imagine, the Catastrophe of European Jewry ( Megillah, 6b):
“Rabbi Isaac said: what does this mean? Tehillim, 140): “Lord, do not let the desires of the wicked [come true], do not let his evil plans come true, [so that] they do not come true”? [Our forefather] Yaakov said to the Holy One, blessed be He: Master of the universe, do not allow Esau the villain to fulfill his desire. “Do not let his evil plans come true” - this is Hermamiah of Edom, for if [they] go out [to war] they will destroy the whole world!”
The great sages of the Torah warned that Germany would give rise to great evil in the future. Rav Maze, the rabbi of Moscow, wrote, quoting the statement of the Magid from Kelm 130 years ago: in Germany they will still publish their “Shulchan Aruch” of hatred towards Jews, where it will be written: the best of Jews is a murdered Jew...
Rabbi Meir Simcha HaKohen from Dvinsk wrote in his book “Meshech Chochma”: “When the Jews decide that Berlin is Jerusalem... trouble will come to them, and precisely from the inhabitants of Germany, to whom they so want to get closer...”.
The Catastrophe of European Jewry
Much has been said about the Holocaust, and never enough. The persecution began with the Boycott of Jews announced in Germany on April 1, 1933, and the subsequent wave of racial laws aimed at Jews who worked in government agencies or in certain professions. The Nuremberg Law of September 15, 1935 ended equal rights for Jews in Germany and defined Jewishness in racial terms.
Anti-Jewish hysteria in Germany led in 1938 (on the night of November 9 to 10) to mass pogroms, which went down in history as Kristallnacht (due to the glass shards that littered the streets of German cities).
Starting that night, the Nazis forcibly deported 10 thousand Polish Jews from Germany, most of whom had lived in this country for so long that they began to consider themselves real Germans. This step was followed by others, as a result of which 6 million Jews were exterminated, of whom at least 140 thousand were German subjects.
During World War II (mainly 1941-42), Germany became a center for the transfer of deported Jews from occupied Western Europe to the death camps of Eastern Europe. Thousands of German Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps before the war began and died in Germany itself, along with interned Jews from other countries.
In March 1941, Hitler ordered the transition to the “final solution” of the Jewish question through the physical extermination of Jews. In September, Jews were ordered to wear a yellow sign on their clothes. In October, mass deportations of Jews to Eastern European ghettos, forced labor camps, and death camps began. The property of Jews who were deported or committed suicide was confiscated by the government as the property of “enemies of the people and country.” By mid-1943, Germany was declared “cleansed of Jews.”
Germany in the second half of the 20th century.
After the collapse of the Nazi regime, many assumed that the Holocaust marked the end of German Jewish history and that Jews would never return to Germany. But after the war, about 200 thousand Jews arrived in Germany as displaced persons. Most of them did not consider themselves part of German Jewry and did not participate in the restoration of Jewish communities undertaken by the native German Jews who remained or returned to Germany. They created the organization Sheerit ha-pleta ("surviving remnant"), whose goal was resettlement to Israel.
When the wave of mass aliyah and emigration overseas subsided (early 1950s), about 12 thousand Jews from among the former displaced persons remained in Germany. In the immediate post-war years, many Jews argued that their stay in the “cursed country” was temporary and that they would soon leave it. In the early 1950s. Other voices began to be heard and calls were heard to “build bridges” between the Jewish and German peoples.
Most of Germany's Jewish population in the second half of the 20th century lived in five large cities: West Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne. The rate of intermarriage among them was the highest in Europe (excluding Austria), especially among Jews born in Germany.
Germany and the Jews in the 11th century
The “older generation” of German Jews, who lived there by the beginning of the 11th century, are small representatives of pre-war German Jewry and their descendants; Jews from Eastern Europe who settled in Germany after World War II and former Israelis who came to Germany in the 1950s-80s.
More than 100,000 Jews now live in Germany. After the collapse of the USSR, tens of thousands of Jews from the countries of the former Soviet Union moved here, and Russian-speaking Jews make up the absolute majority in Germany. The reformist movement is active in Germany. There are about 30 reformist communities that actively work with immigrants from the CIS, which contributes to their secularization and assimilation.
In contrast, there are Orthodox communities, and among them are Chabad communities in 16 large German cities.
According to the June 1933 census, the Jewish population of Germany numbered about 500,000, less than one percent of Germany's total population of 67 million. When conducting the census, the Nazis adhered not to conventional methods, but to the racist criteria established by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and a number of subsequent decrees: Jews were classified as those whose ancestors in the second generation professed Judaism. As a result, thousands of people who converted from Judaism to another religion were equated with Jews, including Catholic priests and nuns, as well as Protestant pastors whose ancestors in the second generation were Jews.
Eighty percent of German Jews (about 400,000 people) had German citizenship. The rest mostly had Polish citizenship, many of them born in Germany and permanently residing there.
In total, about 70 percent of Jews lived in urban areas of Germany. Fifty percent of all Jews lived in Germany's 10 largest cities, including Berlin (about 160,000), Frankfurt am Main (about 26,000), Breslau (about 20,000), Hamburg (about 17,000), Cologne (about 15,000) , Hanover (about 13,000) and Leipzig (about 12,000).
KEY DATES
APRIL 1, 1933
NATIONWIDE BOYCOTT OF JEWISH-OWNED ENTERPRISES
At 10:00 am, Storm Troopers (SA) and members of the SS (the elite guard of the Nazi Reich) position themselves outside Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany and warn everyone that the owners of these businesses are Jews. “Jude” (German - Jew) is often written on the glass of shop windows, and a yellow and black Star of David is painted on the doors. Anti-Jewish inscriptions are left next to them. In some cities, SA members march through the streets shouting anti-Jewish slogans and singing party songs. In other cities, the boycott is accompanied by violence; A Jewish lawyer is killed in Kiel. The boycott ends at midnight. Local boycotts continued throughout the 1930s.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1935
INTRODUCTION OF THE NUREMBERG LAWS
At the annual party convention, the Nazis pass new laws declaring Jews second-class citizens and revoking most of their political rights. Moreover, Jews are prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with people of “Germanic or related blood.” “Racial desecration,” as it is called, amounts to a criminal offense. The Nuremberg Laws define a Jew as a person who has three or four Jews in the second generation of ancestors or practices a Jewish religion. Thus, the Nazis equate with Jews thousands of people who converted from Judaism to another religion, right down to Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant pastors who had Jews in their second generation of ancestors.
NOVEMBER 9, 1938
“NIGHT OF BROKEN WINDOWS”: NATION-WIDE POGRAM
In response to the murder of German diplomat Ernst von Rath by a young Jewish man in Paris, German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gives a fiery speech to Nazi Party loyalists in Munich, gathered to mark the anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 (Adolf Hitler's first attempt to seize power). The speech serves as the signal for an organized attack by members of the SA, SS and other Nazi Party organizations such as the Hitler Youth on Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship. Although Nazi authorities later describe the pogrom as a spontaneous act of communal violence, public participation in the pogrom was minimal. The Jewish pogrom continues until the morning of November 10 and goes down in history under the name “Crystal Night” (“Night of Broken Glass”). At least 91 Jews are killed and up to 30,000 are arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. After the pogrom, the transfer of Jewish-owned enterprises to “Aryans” took place everywhere, the so-called “Aryanization”.
For him, an SS officer, to fall in love with a Jewish woman in Auschwitz was madness. As well as for her to reciprocate her would-be killer. And yet, in hell, where people died by the thousands, there was a place for true love. He, a Nazi, saved her in a death camp; she, a Holocaust survivor, later saved him at his trial.
Austrian Franz Wunsch was born in 1922 in the tiny town of Dresdenhofen near the Czechoslovak border, and Jewish Helena Citronova was born in 1920 in what is today Slovakia. Almost neighbors in childhood, in the second half of the 30s they found themselves in different times of a broken world. Even before his 18th birthday, Wunsch joined the ranks of the SS and with the outbreak of war he went to the Eastern Front. Having received a serious knee injury, the guy could no longer fight in the army, but could be useful to Hitler in another field - in the extermination of Jews. He was sent to Auschwitz. How and what Tsitronova lived before the war and in the first war years is unknown, but the key chapter of his life began on March 20, 1942, when the girl, along with thousands of other Jews, was unloaded at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The next day, March 21, SS officer Wunsch turned 20 years old. Colleagues serving in Auschwitz prepared a special congratulation for him - the lyrical song “My heart yearns [for your love]”, and in Germany at one time it was successfully performed by Hitler’s favorite and vamp Pola Negri. It was impossible to invite a star to the celebration, so the new Auschwitz prisoner, Helena Citronova, acted as the performer. She was one of the few prisoners who knew at least some song in German. The girl was sickened to the point of entertaining the killers, but unfortunately the sisters kicked her painfully in the side - stop fooling around, this is a chance to survive. Having obeyed, the pretty brunette with dimples came out to the birthday boy and began to sing, not daring to wipe the hot tears from her cheeks. “Please,” Wunsch turned to her strangely softly, “sing again.” And she sang.
Helena attracted attention - it was a pity to send a bright girl with a charming smile to the work barracks, and upon arrival she was assigned to “Canada”. During the collapse of the empire, many Poles emigrated to North America and sent expensive gifts from there to their relatives - “from Canada,” a mythically rich country. In Auschwitz, “Canada” was the name for the place where about 1,500 prisoners, day and night, reviewed and sorted the belongings with which new death row prisoners arrived. In addition to clothes, this luggage contained money, silverware and jewelry, which is why the SS gave such an ironic name to a special section of Auschwitz. The confiscated goods were freed from yellow stars, indications of the names of the owners and other personal marks, placed in boxes and sent to Germany - and there the wealth was distributed among representatives of the titular nation.
The inhabitants of “Canada,” mostly women, were in a privileged position. In parallel with their work sorting confiscated suitcases, the “Canadians” served the German command in everyday life, so they had to look neat and attractive. They were hardly beaten, except perhaps as punishment for hiding something from the sorting, they were fed tolerably and allowed to keep their hair long.
Helena ended up in “Canada,” but every hour here could still be her last. The day after his birthday, Franz went into the barracks, where the women continued to shake out endless suitcases and bundles. Among the prisoners, he quickly found Helena. “He threw me that note. I immediately destroyed it, but I saw the word “fell in love” in it. “I fell in love with you,” that’s what it said,” Helena admitted many years later in the BBC documentary “Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.” “I thought it was better to die than to have a relationship with an SS man. For a very long time I felt nothing but hatred for him. I couldn’t even look at him,” Helena recalled. Meanwhile, Franz, ignoring her carefully hidden, but still palpable hostility, stubbornly continued to court her. He sent her cookies, protected her from the nagging of other guards and, most importantly, protected her from going to another camp inside Auschwitz. He was her armor from death, and she, most likely, was his attempt to hide from hellish reality.
The love relationship between the Aryan Franz and the “Jew” Helena had to be carefully hidden, the price of failure was life. Love changed Wunsch - a principled Jew-hater, he began to look at his victims with different eyes. And once he helped save the life of Helena’s sister. It happened like this. A new carriage with prisoners arrived in Auschwitz, in which Helena's sister Rosinka found herself along with her children. Helena understood that both Rosinka and her children were on the right path to the gas chamber. “Canada” was adjacent to the ovens - the girls working here saw more and more batches of doomed people every day and inhaled the suffocating smell of burnt flesh. When Helena, without any hope of help, blurted out to Franz that her sister and the kids were now also here, he turned white and demanded to know her exact name. There was not a minute to lose - he knew that these three were already on the list for destruction. Wunsch saved his sister literally in the last minutes before being sent to the “shower”, convincing the crematorium authorities that she was a worker from his group. But the nephews could not be saved. “Children can’t live here,” he told Helena briefly.
That day, Helena looked at him with different eyes - she realized that she felt something other than hatred for him. “What he did meant a lot. There were times when I forgot that I was Jewish and he wasn’t, and to be honest, in the end I loved him. He risked his life more than once for me,” she recalled. In the summer of 1944, Wunsch was caught hiding some small items worth a total of 30 Reichsmarks and was kept in solitary confinement for 5 weeks. By luck, Helena managed to stay in “Canada” for more than a month. Quick glances, notes left in secluded places, rapid meetings - for three years the couple managed to protect their passionate feelings from the eyes of strangers. But outside the camp, their relationship had no chance.
In January 1945, due to the advance of the Red Army, 60 thousand surviving Auschwitz prisoners were forced on a death march to Wodzisław Śląski to be sent to other concentration camps. Franz could no longer protect Helena from this test. He gave a pair of leather boots to his beloved and her sister - in the hope that durable shoes would somehow help them survive the hike. In addition, Franz gave Helena the address of his mother in Vienna, who could shelter them. The girls survived that inhuman ordeal, but did not go to Vienna. Together they made their way to Czechoslovakia. When, on the way home, they were once again pressed against the wall by a soldier starved for female love, Helena and Rosinka showed their numbers on their hands - and the rapist did not add grief to those who had gone through the camp hell.
Franz Wunsch worked in trade after the war, Helena went to Israel. They met only once - in 1972, when Wunsch, along with his colleague Otto Graf, stood trial on charges of mass extermination of Jews. Prosecution witnesses said that he was wildly cruel to prisoners, regardless of their gender, killed members of the Sonderkommando, and also sometimes sorted new arrivals, deciding who should go to the barracks and who would “go to the shower.” According to the indictment, he also released the deadly Zyklon B into the cells on at least one occasion. Helena spoke in his defense along with her sister, who for the first time in all this time publicly told how Franz saved them. “Desire changed my violent behavior. I fell in love with Helena Citronova and it changed me. I became a different person thanks to her influence,” Wunsch admitted in the dock.
The judge at the trial considered that “there is more than enough evidence of guilt.” However, two SS men were released from punishment - according to Austrian laws, the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of war criminals had expired. Perhaps it was the sincere confessions of his beloved that prevented prosecutors from looking for other ways to “lock” Franz in prison forever or demand his execution. Wunsch was released, but they never saw Helena again. And if they met in one of the Viennese cafes, they didn’t tell anyone about it - something, but they knew how to keep secrets. In 2003, Helena Citronova, who preserved her rare beauty, admitted in a program for an Israeli channel: “I haven’t forgotten a minute. I remember everything... I was a little different from others, and everyone knew this story. There was a stain on me, he was an SS man. But, in fact, my life was saved thanks to him. I didn't choose all of this, it just happened that way. These relationships turned out to be possible only in such a place - on another planet.”
Two years after this interview Helena died, Franz followed her four years later. In 2014, the book Whispering Birches was published in Britain. A story of love and courage in Auschwitz” - about the feelings that flared up between an SS man and a prisoner from “Canada”. Its author, Paul Richard Sully, claimed that we and the events in the book are fictitious. But there is no doubt that the plot of this novel was inspired by the story of Franz and Helena, the story of their strange love with a hint of pain, fear and tragedy of millions.
I APOLOGIZE TO THE READERS. NONE OF THE CHAPTERS IS FINISHED: I AM WRITING THIS BOOK NOT FROM A DRAFT, BUT DIRECTLY ON PROZA.RU
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Part 2 Gallery of Germanized Jews and Germans with Jewish ancestors.
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Part 1.
THREE GROUPS OF GERMANS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE JEWS.
Of the six presidents of the General Evangelical
Lutheran Consistory, a German organization that led
Lutheran and Calvinist churches of Russia, (institution,
corresponding to the Orthodox Synod), three were close
descendants of baptized Jews. The irony of this fact is that
that the grandfather of two of them, the Baltic barons of the brothers Iskul von
Gildenband, was Abram Peretz, once the de facto leader
Jewish community of St. Petersburg. However, one should be surprised
there's nothing here. During the years of the first Russian revolution, the Germans
formed their own party. Historians believe its origins
manifestation of the awakening of national consciousness among
Germans of the Russian Empire. It was headed by the son of those who transferred to
Jewish Lutheranism Felix Schottlander. All the children in his family
parents married or were married to Baltic nobles.
***
Despite the support of the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the situation
Jews in Prussian Elbing were still fragile. They lived
surrounded by an envious, evil people, the Germans, deprived
even by the standards of the Middle Ages of elementary human feeling -
sympathy for other people and at any moment ready for the sake of
own success or simply out of hatred for other people's success on
meanness and crime. Apparently, wanting to protect themselves and their
offspring, having such neighbors, the ancestor of the Prussian Junker family
Loelhoeffel von Lowensprung was baptized.
INTRODUCTION.
As I work on my research, new themes emerge. One of them is Jews who assimilated with the Germans and Germans who are descendants of Jews. This topic is complex. Although I study the period before 1917, the shadow of Nazism always hangs over the history of German attitudes towards Jews and other peoples. It would be dishonest to deny that the roots of German crimes in the 20th century go deep into German history and reflect the national character and moral “values” of the Germans. Hitler's Germans, who flooded Europe with blood and starved Leningrad, did not crawl out of nowhere, and were not an accident in German history. At the same time, it is wrong to see the history of Germany and the Germans only as a march to Nazism. Therefore, I chose two seemingly mutually exclusive information as epigraphs for this essay.
In fact, there is no big contradiction between them. For their acceptance by the Germans, the Christians and their descendants had to pay a high price for complete renunciation not only of their Jewish roots, but also of sympathy for the persecuted Jews. This happened not only in Germany, but also in German communities in other countries. The same Peretz grandchildren, holding high positions, were known for defending the interests of the Baltic barons, but did nothing to weaken state anti-Semitism, and the German party, led by Felix Schottlander, supported the anti-Jewish policies of Nicholas II.
The first question that arises when studying the Germans in the Russian Empire: Who is considered a German? The most prominent Germans in Russia came from families of non-German origin. The French Bryullovs, the Italians Klodts, the Danes Wrangels, the Swedes Girs, the Scots Barclay de Tolly, the English Pestels, the Frisians Iskul von Hildenband, the Dutch Rosings, the Jews Bloks. I name only one clan from each of these peoples, but there were many more. The families of German origin, despite their numerical superiority, produced far fewer personalities and talents of this magnitude.
This is clear from the history of the Russian army. Many Germans held general posts in it for generations. Their finest hour, like that of the entire Russian imperial army, was the Patriotic War of 1812 and the subsequent campaign of the Russian army in Europe. The most distinguished Germans in these wars came from families of non-German origin. There are two of them. The name of Barclay de Tolly is widely known; another Baltic, who made a worthy contribution to the organization of the Russian victory over Napoleon, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, Karl Tol, has been unfairly forgotten. The Tol family is of Dutch origin.
Before embarking on an essay about Jews among Russian Germans, let us briefly dwell on the assimilation of Jews in Germany itself. Before the formation of German racism, the conversion of Jews to Christianity was supported, often enthusiastically, by the Catholic and Protestant churches. Over the centuries, "thousands and thousands of Jews" converted to Christianity and merged with the Germans. Even the Nazis were forced to admit this fact. According to Nazi racial laws, in order to confirm their Aryan purity, German subjects had to provide the authorities with information about their ancestors no further than their grandparents. This classification also applied to military personnel, even to persons of the highest ranks. Otherwise, as the German military historian Adolf Kaspari noted, irreparable damage would have been caused to the highest echelon of the Prussian military caste—the backbone of the German army.
The Nazis had stricter requirements for Germans who wanted to advance to leadership positions in the Nazi party and state; they had to prove that their ancestors had been baptized no later than 1645. Even pathological German racists did not dare to delve deeper into time. An abyss could open under each of them.
An interesting case is that of Erich Ludendorff, the former de facto commander-in-chief of the German army in the First World War. Having lost the war, Ludendorff created the myth that Germany had won the war, but was stabbed in the back by its internal enemies, the Socialists and the Jews. This is despite the fact that, in proportion to their share among the population, Jews received more high awards than Germans - Iron Crosses. In response to Ludendorff's anti-Semitism, his opponents sought out documentation of a Jewish lineage among his close ancestors.
It is not without reason that even at the dawn of German racism in the 19th century, some of its founders, claiming scientific objectivity, noted the lack of “racial purity” among a large number of Germans, especially among city dwellers. As an example of the mixing of Germans-“Aryans” and Jews-“Semites”, these racologists pointed to the racial type, as one of them wrote, of the “greatest German geniuses” Luther, Goethe and Beethoven.
After Nazi authorities required applicants for high government and party positions to provide information about their ancestors, lists of baptized Jews in Berlin after 1645 were created. The sources were baptism records in Protestant churches. These lists amounted to about 60 volumes (!) And this is only in Berlin and for a relatively short period in the centuries-old history of Jews in Germany.
There are almost no genealogical studies about German descendants of Jews; on the contrary, both German authors and descendants of Jews, under German anti-Semitism, were more likely to falsify genealogies. In our time in modern Germany, since the 1960s, among the new generation, Germans have appeared who are largely free from the prejudices and lies of their ancestors; valuable works are occasionally published, although they can be counted on one hand.
Among them is a study of medieval Cologne with “astonishing” facts. In the city, the main economic center of medieval Germany, the ruling patrician elite included two families of baptized Jews. Having studied the genealogical lines going from them through the female lines, as far as possible with the surviving documents, the German historian came to the conclusion that their descendants were a significant part of the Cologne patriciate, the Westphalian nobility and industrialists of the Rhineland Germany, the most important economic region of the country.
Kulbach-Fricke K. "Ein getauftel Jude als Ahnherl des Kolner Patliziats und des rheinischen Adels". Genealogisches jahrbuch. 1999.
(“The baptized Jew as the ancestor of the Cologne patriciate and the Rhenish nobility”).
I briefly traced several genealogical lines descending from the Jewish families mentioned in her research, and drew attention to the well-known surnames Heyden, Wittgenstein and de Croix in Russian history. Their genealogies led me to the commander of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Navarino, Count Login Heyden, the hero of the Patriotic War of 1812, Field Marshal Peter Wittgenstein, and Peter the Great’s field marshal, Duke Karl-Eugene de Croix. Login Heyden arrived in Russia from Holland and was Dutch, but the roots of his family went back to Westphalia bordering the Netherlands. The Wittgensteins are a Westphalian aristocratic family. De Croix's father was a Walloon, his mother a Dutch countess, one of whose ancestors married a German aristocrat with ancestors from Cologne.
When I began to study in more detail the genealogical lines coming from the Jews of Cologne, the result was completely unexpected. The largest group of Germans with Jewish ancestors in Russia who can be traced turned out to be the elite German Baltic barons, descendants of the Crusaders. The Westphalian nobility was the flower of medieval German knighthood, the main striking force in the German “Onslaught to the East”. The descendants of the Cologne crosses played a significant role among the knights. The most outstanding head of the Teutonic Order, which led it to the peak of military power, economic and cultural prosperity and international influence, was the great statesman, diplomat and one of the best commanders in German history, a close descendant of the Jews of Cologne on both his father and mother, Winrich von Knieprode in the 14th century.
The head of another order of the Livonian Crusaders in the 16th century was another descendant of the Cologne Jews, Gerhard Ketler, who turned the order into his personal possession of the Duchy of Courland. It is safe to assume that by the time of the conquest of the Baltic states by Russia, there was not a single ancient Baltic noble family in which the blood of Cologne Jews did not flow. From the Baltic nobles, descendants of the Cologne Jews who moved to Russia even before Peter I, came the families of the Russian pillar nobility Sokovnina (from them came the famous Old Believer boyar Morozova), Kozhina and Kolyubakina.
The feudal ladder of Germany was characterized by extreme immobility. The social gap between the feudal elite-powerful families and the urban patriciate was impassable. The descendants of the Cologne crosses through female lines made a rare ascent to the social pinnacle of Germany for the urban patriciate: they reached the royal thrones. By the beginning of the 18th century, they sat on the thrones not only of Courland, but of most of the hereditary monarchies of Germany. From Germany, their princesses married the Romanovs. The first of them was the wife of the son of Peter I, Tsarevich Alexei, her son Peter II became the first descendant of the Cologne people on the Russian throne.
He died as a teenager, Anna Ioannovna became the empress, and while dying she transferred the throne of the Russian Empire to her niece, a descendant of the Cologne people, Anna Leopoldovna. She ruled for her son, the ill-fated infant emperor Ivan VI, but not for long. She was overthrown by Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth, who bequeathed Russia to another descendant of the Cologne people, her nephew Peter III. Starting with him, the Cologne people no longer missed the Russian throne until the collapse of the empire. Even when the nimble Catherine the Great ended her hapless husband Peter III, Russia remained in their hands. Catherine was also a descendant of Cologne Jews. Subsequent Romanovs continued to marry princesses of the same origin, but without a fatal outcome for themselves.
Apparently, the situation with Jewish ancestors was similar to Westphalia in Swabia. An authoritative German publication of the second half of the 19th century, speaking out against the growing anti-Semitic racism, as an example of mixing with Jews favorable for Germans, noted that “all” well-born Swabian nobility were descendants through the female lines of one old noble family of crosses, but I have not yet reached in my research to Swabia.
Another interesting work is dedicated to the era of the founder of Prussian military power, King Frederick the Great. His military adventures brought Prussia to the brink of financial collapse and he had nothing to support the army. The threat of defeat and territorial losses loomed over Prussia. In a desperate situation, Frederick, who, according to the Judeophobic tradition of the Prussian monarchs, did not encourage the settlement of Jews in his capital, abruptly changed policy. He invited several families of prominent Jewish entrepreneurs to Berlin, gave them freedom to do business, and placed the financial affairs of the kingdom at their disposal. The Jews pulled Prussia out of the financial crisis and saved it. Until the last decades of the 20th century, German historians deliberately ignored this fact. The events in Prussia are interesting in themselves, but what happened to the daughters of these Jewish families is no less impressive. There were more than 20 of them and all but one (!) married Germans, almost all married Prussian Junkers, two or three married university professors, a respected profession in Germany.
Prussia is a relatively small country; one can imagine how significant the number of descendants of these Jewish ancestors was among the Prussian elite in the 20th century. The number of German aristocrats with Jewish ancestors increased especially significantly during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the impoverished Prussian nobility, it was customary to take brides from wealthy families of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Historians indicate that the number of such marriages numbered in the hundreds. The famous German writer Theodor Fontane even argued in 1891 that there were very few generals from the aristocracy who did not have Jewish blood in their veins. The creator of the German Empire, Bismarck, was a supporter of marriages between Germans and Jewish women, believing that this would increase the mental abilities of the Germans, of whom he had a low opinion. Ironically, he himself married a Pomeranian aristocrat, descended through the female line from the Jewish family of barons Bode. His eldest son is a descendant of another aristocratic family from the Jewish imperial counts of Sprinzenstein.
At the same time, already at the beginning of the 19th century, a new phenomenon arose in Germany - rejection of baptized Jews. It began with a group of ardent reactionary nationalists, opponents of the reforms that modernized Prussia after its defeat by Napoleon. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as German racism against Slavs and Jews grew, this anti-Christian hatred of many Germans even towards baptized Jews developed into racist anti-Semitism.
The German states, united Germany and church authorities did not support him. In the second half of the 19th century, despite the rise of racist anti-Semitism, baptized Jews achieved important ministerial positions in Prussia. Karl Friedenthal - agriculture and interior affairs, Heinrich von Friedberg - justice. He was also the Reich Minister of Justice of Germany. (There was no Reich Ministry of Agriculture in the German Empire). Eduard von Simson became the first President of the Reichstag of the German Empire. For comparison, in the Russian Empire of the 19th and early 20th centuries there was not a single Jewish minister. There were ministers of mixed origin, but only through the female line. (Note.
In Russian pre-revolutionary and modern publications, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Chancellor Karl Nesselrode and the Minister of Finance Yegor Kankrin are often called Jews by origin; in fact, they were Germans with Jewish ancestors).
What significance does the assimilation of Jews with Germans have for the study of Jews among Russian Germans? A significant number of Russian Germans were descendants of Jews. They could come from the most diverse strata of the German population of Germany from the nobility, hereditary military and clergy to the bourgeoisie, artisans, and peasants.
THREE GROUPS OF GERMANS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE.
The German population of the Russian Empire is clearly divided into three groups. Baltic (Baltic) Germans and German peasant colonists who lived in compact ethnic groups mainly in the agricultural regions of the Volga and Black Sea regions are ethnic Germans, although some of them came from people from other nations who had assimilated with the Germans. The most interesting and important for the history of Russia is the third group - Russian Germans - those Germans who settled among the Russians. These were German emigrants or natives of the Baltic states.
Russian Germans were not an ethnic, but a cultural and religious community. Moreover, it was an amorphous community with the current composition. It was made up of people of different ethnic origins, who were connected by belonging to the Lutheran or Calvinist-Reformed faiths and German culture and education received in German schools. Russian Germans were in many ways a fictitious community. Scandinavians, Dutch, Scots-Presbyterians, European and even Russian Jews were often identified by Russians with the largest Protestant population of the country, the Germans, but the commonality of religion and some elements of culture does not mean that people of non-German origin considered themselves Germans, even if they were related to them . They were often indignant if they were called Germans. People of that time were proud of their ancestors, the founders of the clan, and loved to emphasize the ethnic roots of their clans.
Sergei Witte, the most prominent “German” in the history of Russia (on his Ostsee father), who surpassed the German Empress Catherine II in talents and achievements, never mentioned his German ancestors, emphasizing the Dutch roots of the Witte family. Similar to him, families of Scandinavian and French origin behaved, even if they actually became Germanized, as happened with the Swedes Girs, one of whom, Fyodor Girs, the Germans elected president of the General Evangelical Lutheran Consistory. Along with the brothers Ukskul von Hildenband, he is one of three close descendants of Jews who led this organization. Another descendant of the Scandinavians, the outstanding physicist Sergei Frisch, talking about his ethnic roots in post-Stalin times, when there was no need to be afraid of anti-German repressions, emphasized that although the Frischs were considered Germans, they were actually of Swedish origin, but were Germanized in Russia.
JEWS IN THE BALTICS AND AMONG PEASANT COLONISTS.
Not only Russian Germans, but even in the Baltic states the Germans were of mixed origin. Crusaders from many Catholic countries helped the Germans in enslaving the Baltic states; later, the Baltic Germans willingly accepted for their prosperity representatives of other European nations who were more developed or stronger than the Germans, and there were many such peoples in Europe throughout history. At the same time, the Baltic Germans, with isolated exceptions, refused to move with the indigenous population, although the Estonians and Latvians were converted to Christianity. Even Estonian and Latvian priests who received German education were practically not allowed to serve in German churches. For the Germans, Latvians and Estonians were nothing more than draft animals. This attitude of the Germans towards the Baltic peoples was so different from the position of other conquerors in Europe, who accepted into their bosom “brothers in Christ” from the conquered peoples, that some historians call it German racism even before the emergence of racism in the 19th century as a political ideology.
What was the attitude of the Baltic Germans towards Jews? The Crusaders, who owned the Baltic states, forbade the Jews to settle on their lands. There is no doubt that baptized Jews settled in the Baltic States, but they disappeared among the Germans and we do not know about them. The 19th century Russian genealogist Evgeniy Karnovich, who studied the Baltic nobility, noted that some families elevating themselves to the aristocracy of Germany actually descended from baptized Jews who took the surnames of noble German families. Unfortunately, clearly wanting to avoid loud scandals, he did not name this birth. The Baltic states were for medieval Germans something like America for the Spaniards and English, a land where they could start life over again and rewrite their biography. It is not surprising that the claims of some Baltic noble families about descent from the old aristocratic families of Germany are unfounded, but which of these impostors were Germans and which were baptized Jews is unknown. Karnovich most likely collected his information in conversations with the Baltic Sea people.
In conquering the Baltic states, the German crusaders were ahead of Denmark, which at one time was the strongest power on the shores of the Baltic Sea. In the 13th century, an army of Danish crusaders, consisting of Danes and West Baltic Slavic vassals of Denmark, conquered northern Estonia, where the Danes founded the port city of Revel, present-day Tallinn. The Danes, no less zealous in the Christian faith than the Germans, but motivated by simple human compassion, allowed Jews to settle in their possessions. Weren't differences in the human qualities of Germans and Danes already evident then? It is tempting to look for the reason for the difference in treatment of Jews between the Germans and the Danes in the fact that the Danish conquest was led by a secular power - the Danish king. The German crusaders were a religious order under whose banner fanatics joined, but as shown by the Germans' complete disregard for the teachings of the church in their policy towards baptized Latvians and Estonians, the Germans were not distinguished by genuine loyalty to Christianity. After a weakened Denmark sold its Estonian lands to the German Livonian Order, the authorities of Revel, who retained a significant degree of autonomy in the conduct of city affairs, continued Denmark's tolerant policy.
Jews were able to settle in the Baltic states after part of it came under Polish rule in the 16th century. Their number grew even under the Swedes, who ousted Poland from the Baltic states. The Swedes sought the baptism of Jews and tried to achieve this by introducing all sorts of restrictions against the Jews. The German nobility and some cities, having discovered the economic benefits from the activities of the Jews, supported them. Peter the Great and his closest successors, understanding the contribution of Jews to the well-being of the region, made it easier for Jews to settle in the Baltic states. Hard times came for the Jews under the bigoted Empress Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the daughter of Catherine I of Skavronskaya, who came from baptized Jews, demonstrated to her subjects in every possible way her commitment to Orthodoxy, but, being an extremely selfish, selfish and primitive person in her understanding of Christianity, she allowed herself to grossly violate Christian covenants, but begged forgiveness from the Lord for her sins persecution of Russian Old Believers and Gentiles. With anti-Muslim repressions, she almost brought the Volga Tatars, traditionally loyal to Russia, to an uprising. In a short period of time, the Russian authorities destroyed 418 out of 536(!) mosques in the Kazan district alone.
Soon after seizing the throne, Elizabeth ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the empire. The Livonian provincial chancellery, the Riga magistrate and the military chancellery of Little Russia made a request to allow Jews to at least come to the fairs, pointing out the enormous losses to the treasury and private individuals in the event of a severance of ties with Jewish merchants. The Senate accepted the arguments of the local authorities and presented a corresponding report to Elizabeth. The Empress wrote in her report: “I don’t want interesting profits from the enemies of Christ.” Elizabeth did not even think about the well-being of her Christian subjects who suffered from the expulsion of the Jews. Jews had to leave the Russian Empire as beggars. All property was confiscated from them, especially items made of gold and silver, and money. Some of the Baltic Jews, finding themselves in a hopeless state, were baptized and merged with the Germans. No one examined their fate after baptism and the history of their offspring. A. Buchholtz. Geschichte der Juden in Riga bis zur Begrundung der Rigischen Hebraergemeinde im J. 1842. Riga 1899, pp. 51-52, "From the history of Estonian Jews I-V. Sections of the book of Kopla Jokton" http://hashahhar. livejournal.com/7142.html; E. Gurin-Loov, G. Gramberg. Jewish community of Estonia. Tallinn. 2001, p. 9.
Only since the end of the 18th century have we known about the Jewish origin of some of the Baltic “Germans”, those of them who achieved fame. Among the great cellist Karl Davydov, his brother the mathematician and mechanic with the European name August Davidov, the hero of the Japanese War, captain of the first rank Vladimir Ber (Behr), who refused the rank of rear admiral in order to remain with the crew of the battleship he commanded and which was included in the squadron sent to the Far East. Among the baptized Jews of Germany who settled in the Baltic states, the grandfather of Nobel laureate in physics Igor Tamm is known thanks to his descendant. N. Kuznetsova. "The destinies of the sea are intertwined..." Youth of Estonia, http://www.moles.ee/05/May/20/12-1.php (N. Kuznetsova, in an interesting journalistic article, mistakenly calls Vladimir Behr a relative of the biologist Karl Behr. They are namesakes).
The most closed group of Russian Germans were German peasant colonists who settled in Russia since the time of the German Catherine II, but they were also of mixed ethnic origin. A noticeable part of them were Dutch who were Germanized in these colonies. The broad masses of Russians learned about these Dutchmen from the popular series about the most famous German pop singer in the USSR, Anna German. Her mother was Dutch. As unexpected as it may seem, on different continents where German peasants moved, Jews were often interspersed among them. It would seem that who stood further from each other than the inhabitants of German villages and the Jews, because Jews were forbidden to own land. Therefore, for every person who is even more or less familiar with the history of Western Europe, when mentioning Jews, images of Jewish ghettos in cities always arise, but in Germany a significant part of Jews lived in rural areas.
Due to restrictive anti-Jewish legislation in the German states, which prohibited Jews from entering “respected” professions, Jews had no choice but to perform the most thankless jobs in the opinion of the Christian Church. They played a vital role in the functioning of the rural economy, acting as an intermediary between their German peasant neighbors and the market. The occupation was risky. Merchants, having purchased goods, could go broke without finding a sale, so the Germans did not engage in this dangerous business, leaving it to the Jews. Living for generations in the villages, some Jews were baptized and mixed with the German peasants. From such a family came the mother of the brilliant chemist and reformer of the organization of scientific research, Justus Liebig, who had no equal among German scientists for his role in transforming backward Germany into one of the leading scientific and industrial powers of the 19th century.
German peasant emigration was not the work of brave individual farmers. German peasants were removed from their homes and moved to distant countries in entire villages, this allowed them to transfer the centuries-old life in their homeland to the places of new settlements and more easily adapt to new conditions, especially since the Germans often received land in the border areas of the states that invited them. The Germans willingly became robbers, depriving the indigenous population of their native lands and means of subsistence. It was easier for the entire village to defend itself from attacks by angry neighbors.
In the Russian Empire, the Germans received most of the lands from Catherine II. She did not spare her fellow tribesmen too much, sending them to the Volga steppes, where the “Kirghiz,” as the Russians called the Kazakhs before the revolution, grazed their herds; it was their land. For a long time, there were bloody skirmishes between the Kazakhs and German colonists in which the pious Christian Germans were far superior in cruelty to the steppe nomads, descendants of the formidable warriors of the Golden Horde. The famous writer of the 20th century, Boris Pilnyak, born Vogau, whose father came from German peasant colonists of the Volga region, writes about this. The “wild” Kazakhs did not kill Germans or even maim them in such a way that the Germans would lose the opportunity to work and feed themselves and their families. The Kazakhs cut the Germans' languages, trying to intimidate the uninvited newcomers and stop them from invading their pastures. The Germans burned Kazakhs alive in haystacks.
The disappearance of entire villages, leaving their homes, left Jewish families who had lived in these villages for generations without a source of income. Due to the fact that the opportunities for Jews to earn a piece of bread in Germany were extremely limited, Jews, along with their fellow villagers, were removed from their homes. In new lands, they continued to do the same work of entering markets to sell German products or also became farmers. They also changed religion. In new countries, it turned out to be impossible for Jews to observe the faith of their fathers. Unlike Germany, there were no Jewish communities in the area and Jewish families, lost among the masses of Germans, had no choice but to accept the only religion that they could profess in the new conditions, the Christianity of their neighbors.
The history of the Jews who assimilated with the German peasant colonists has not been studied; it remains only in the family memory of the descendants of the Jews. When contemporary American historian Brian Mark Rigg, whose ancestors were German farmers who settled on the American frontier in Texas in the 19th century, published a book about the fate of mixed-Jewish-German soldiers in Nazi Germany, it sparked interest in his past among some Americans. descendants of German emigrant farmers. People shared their family stories, mentioning that their ancestors included Jews. Rigs himself, having dug into his family's pedigree, discovered that one of his grandmothers was one of the baptized Jews who moved to Texas along with the German village.
On another continent in South Africa, near the government building of South Africa, a four-meter statue of James Barry Duke (1866-1942) still stands, but the new black authorities of South Africa moved it from the main place near the government building to the backyard, and instead they erected a nine-meter statue of the founder of the new South Africa Nelson Mandela. The change of places for these statues is symbolic. The statue of the Duke is a reminder of white South Africa - the self-liquidated state of Afrikaners-Burrs of white colonists, immigrants from Holland with an admixture of French Huguenots and Germans. Unlike Russia, in South Africa the Germans were a minority compared to the Dutch and assimilated with them.
James Barry Duke, a lawyer by training, became a celebrated guerrilla general in the Burr War of Independence following the British Empire's attack on the small independent Burr republics in the early 20th century. In the years of peace that followed the war, the Duke played the role of the true founding father of the Afrikaner political nation. For 15 years he led the South African government, introducing reforms that benefited white Africans. The Duke came from an old Burre family of German farmers, but the ancestors of this family were Jews who migrated to Africa along with the Germans. As for Russia, Boris Pilnyak writes in his autobiography that Jews were among his father's ancestors.
RUSSIAN GERMANS.
Most Germans in the Russian Empire who had Jewish ancestors belonged to the multi-ethnic community of Russian Germans, but which of them can be defined as Germans? Can the Baudet-French Huguenots and Barons of the Holy Roman Empire, with their colorful and complicated family history, be considered Germans? Initially, the Bodes were French Jews baptized into Catholicism, but they did not live long as Christians in France because they abandoned Catholicism, recognized as the legal religion of the state, became Huguenot Calvinists and were forced to flee government persecution to Protestant Germany. In Germany, four generations of Bodes married local brides, the first of them Flemish, the others German. It would seem that the Bodes were Germanized, but they did not identify themselves with the Germans, never forgetting their French roots. One of their branches was able to return to France. The founder of this branch married a noble and very energetic Englishwoman, she helped him, using her connections, to obtain a city located on the French territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Bode's life in his homeland was short-lived. Soon the Great French Revolution broke out and the Baudet aristocrats had to flee again, this time to Russia.
The Russian Bodes considered themselves French, were proud of their English ancestor, and they passed on this Anglomania to the famous biologist Kliment Timiryazev, whose mother was Baroness Bode. Timiryazev wrote about his origin: “I am Russian, although a significant share of English is mixed with my Russian blood.” He loved visiting England and was friends with Darwin and other English scientists. In Russia, the Bodes became Russified, converted to Orthodoxy, did not marry German women on a whim of love or for the sake of marriages of convenience, the only one of their wives who had “German” roots was from the Russian family of baptized Austrian Jews barons Morenheim, but, remembering the four generations of Bodes , who lived in Germany, it is right to mention at least the first of Bode, who settled in Russia, among the Russian Germans.
The fate of Salome, another Protestant French family of Jewish origin, is similar to Bode. The name Salome has only recently attracted some attention in Russia. In German-speaking countries, it is widely known thanks to the legendary Lou Salome, a blonde beauty, intellectual, writer and scientist, who was the inspiration, friend or lover of her great contemporaries Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud. Like Bode, the Salomes initially fled to Germany, but did so later, after the French Revolution. They did not stay in Germany, but found refuge in Russia, which joyfully received the French royalists. For Protestants, it was natural for the Salomes in Russia to join the German Protestant community, but, like Bode, the Salomes did not identify themselves with the Germans, although Lou Salome’s father chose a wife from a family of German-Danish origin who had settled in Russia, and their brilliant daughter moved to Germany and wrote their books in German.
She called herself Russian, not German, and remembered her ancestors from France. It is no coincidence that all three of her great “German” friends were far from Germans in their human qualities. Nietzsche, although German by birth, despised the Germans for their moral baseness. He even invented Slavic Polish ancestors for himself, just so as not to have anything in common with the Germans by blood. Rilke's mother came from baptized Jews, and Germany's greatest poet since Heinrich Heine was acutely aware of his difference from the Germans and German anti-Semitism, which turned into racism. Freud was a Jew. Despite the reluctance of the Salomes themselves to classify themselves as Germans, they, like the Bodes who first settled in Russia, can also be classified as Russian Germans, based on religious and cultural criteria.
As for the German Jews who converted to Protestantism and their offspring, they are perhaps the only non-Germans among the Russian Germans who hid their real ethnic origin and called themselves Germans. In the end, they merged with the Germans. They were registered by the Germans in official documents even in the early years of the USSR, when the Soviet authorities did not discriminate against Jews. Some of them even became victims of government repression that affected the Germans: the Germans aroused suspicion of their loyalty to the USSR on the eve of the German attack on the USSR. This is how the leading radio engineer in the USSR, the creator of Soviet radio broadcasting, Maxim Mark (1897-1937), died. Irony of fate. In contrast, the descendant of a Germanized Jewish family, the famous pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, a German on his father's side, escaped anti-German persecution by reporting to the authorities that his mother was Jewish. In fact, she came from a mixed family of other famous musicians: the Jews Blumenfeld and the Poles Szymanowski, but being a Pole in the USSR in those years was also dangerous.
Moreover. Baptized Jews were more successful than the Germans in spreading German nationality among the Russian nobility. In the Russian Empire, only two Russian noble families are known that underwent Germanization, since the Russian government, with all its favor towards the Germans, did not want the Russians to be absorbed by the Germans. Both of these Russian families became Germanized by marrying not with German women, but with the daughters of Jews who were baptized into Lutheranism and Germanized. The first of these marriages was between a representative of the old Russian family of the Matyushkins and the daughter of Fyodor Asch, a native of Silesia, a brilliant intelligence officer promoted to baron by Peter the Great.
Their son, despite his loud Russian surname, was a Lutheran with the name Friedrich, who, according to the custom in the Russian Empire of changing German names into Russian ones, was called Fedor. He is the father of the outstanding polar explorer and combat admiral Fyodor Fedorovich Matyushkin, who discovered Wrangel Island and thwarted the English fleet’s attempt to break through to St. Petersburg during the Crimean War. Unfortunately, his merits have been forgotten and he is known to descendants only as a friend of Pushkin. Yu. Orlov. "Fyodor Fedorovich Matyushkin - battle admiral, traveler, hunter"
Another marriage does not relate to the events that took place in Russia. The Russian nobleman Platon Ustinov, who lived in Palestine, converted to Protestantism and married the daughter of a native of the Polish city of Krakow in the then Austrian Empire, converted Moritz Hall, who became an ardent Protestant missionary. Their son Jonah Ustinov grew up in Germany and fought with distinction for the Germans in World War I as a fighter pilot. After the war, he visited Russia, where he found a Russified French wife, Benoit, who, by a play of fate, came from a family of baptized Jews, famous for a whole galaxy of brilliant architects and artists.
In post-war Germany, Jonah Ustinov became Germany's leading international journalist. The Foreign Office appointed him press officer at the embassy in London. Defeated Germany needed his help to improve relations with England, but after the Germans brought the Nazis to power, he was forced by his Jewish ancestors to remain in England. The Ustinov family broke with the Germans and became Angloized. (Some of the few ethnic Germans who retained their humanity also broke with the Germans because of their crimes against humanity. An example is the famous economist and social thinker Friedrich August Hayek, whose family even stopped using the German language).
In the service of England, the former German hero pilot Jonah Ustinov showed talent as a scout. He is the English Sorge, who unsuccessfully warned the stupid Chamberlain about Hitler's true plans in the Munich Agreement. His son is one of the most famous actors of the 20th century, Peter Ustinov.
For many Jews, the adoption of German Protestantism was only the first step towards Russification. An interesting process was taking place in Russia. Foreign and Baltic Jews, having moved to Russia, were associated with Russian Germans, and then, having settled into Russian society, assimilated with the Russians. However, the “native” Germans who also converted to Orthodoxy merged with the Russians. It is even more difficult to determine how Germanized the Russian Jews who converted to Lutheranism were.
The life story of the famous Jewish public figure and entrepreneur Abram Peretz serves as an example of the assimilation of Russian Jews with the Germans. Having been widowed, the Jew Peretz, disillusioned with the attempts to soften the anti-Jewish policy of the Romanovs, committed betrayal: he converted to Protestantism. Lutheran Peretz married a hereditary Russian noblewoman, a German from French Huguenots. His daughters married Lutheran Germans, Baltic barons. The majority of Russian Jews who converted to Lutheranism did not marry German women, and even if they took German wives, they did not become Germans. Suffice it to recall the Jewish grandfather Vladimir Lenin. Although his wife was German on her father’s side and a German Swedish on her mother’s side, neither he nor his descendants became Germans, but became related to Russians.
It is also unreasonable to classify, as German and Russian authors now do, among the Germans the Baltic Jews and Jews with German surnames who were baptized into Orthodoxy, among them the Riga Eisenstein family. Jews who converted to Orthodoxy identified themselves with Russians. Among the most striking examples of deliberate misinformation is P. A. Golovnin’s essay about the Wulf family, famous for its relationship with Alexander Pushkin and the fact that the Wulfs’ granddaughter was Anna Kern, the most famous muse of Russian poetry. "I remember a wonderful moment." Although the document stating the baptism of the founder of the family from the Jewish faith to Orthodoxy is well known, Golovnin declares him a German. P.A. Golovnin. "Wulf's Nobles in Russia", Germans in Russia. Vol. 7, pp. 153-175, D
Is there a place in this chapter for Denis Fonvizin, whose ancestor was a Baltic German? By his generation, the Fonvizins had long been a Russified family and received a share of Jewish blood from their Russian ancestors. The family was of German origin, but nothing more. Is it possible to count the classic of the Russian avant-garde prose writer Konstantin Vaginov, born Wagenheim, among the Germans? German Jews who moved to St. Petersburg, the Wagenheims, were forced to convert to Lutheranism because Nicholas I decided to expel the Jews from the capital. The writer Vaginov had no German ancestors. The converted Wagenheims took wives from the same families of German Jews who converted to Lutheranism. The exception was the mother of Konstantin Vaginov, who came from a family of Russian Jews who converted to Orthodoxy and became related to Russian Siberians.
Are the owners of a colonial goods shop in “northern Palmyra”, the Hamburg-born Lutherans Bergmans, who became famous for their brilliant grandson Valentin Serov, different from the Wagenheims? They converted to Christianity before moving to the eastern shore of the Baltic. In Russia, the Bergmans belonged to the German Lutheran community, but quickly became Russified, without breaking family ties with the Jews. Two of the three daughters of the Lutheran Bergmans married Orthodox Christians. One of the Bergmans' sons-in-law, the famous doctor and teacher Yakov Simonovich, was a baptized Jew, the mother of another son-in-law, Russian Alexander Serov, a famous composer, came from a family of German Jews who converted to Lutheranism. Only the Bergmans' third daughter married a German, who was one of the leaders of the Moscow German community. The Germans elected the husband of a baptized Jewish woman as the foreman of the Moscow German Club. This marriage once again emphasizes the multi-ethnicity of Russian Germans and shows the place of Jews among them. Is it possible to classify the Orthodox Bergmans as Russian Germans, knowing that they are Jews and became Russified already in the second generation?
Does the Holstein dynasty, which took the surname of the Romanovs, their ancestors on the female line, belong to the Germans? The founders of the family, Peter III and Catherine II, were German princes, their descendants married German princesses, Peter III was the only son of a Russian mother among the emperors, but the Romanovs were not Protestants and, except for Peter III and Alexander I, who did not love Russia and the Russians, they all sincerely called themselves as Russians. Determining the national origin of the Wagenheim Bergmans and the Holstein Romanovs, we are faced with a paradox. The Wagenheims, including father Konstantin Vaginov and the first generation of Bergmans, are ethnic Jews. The Holstein Romanovs, despite their Orthodoxy and Russian culture, due to the German origin of their family and their marriages almost exclusively with German women, were ethnic Germans, but the Lutherans Wagenheims and Bergmans were part of the cultural and religious community of Russian Germans, but the Orthodox Holstein Romanovs were not.
The Catholic Germans stand apart from the Protestant Germans. Unlike the Protestant Germans, they did not dominate numerically among their coreligionists. Moreover, Catholic Germans often assimilated with the Poles, the largest Catholic ethnic group in Russia. Among the wives of Catholic Jews I know who emigrated to Russia from German-speaking countries, there are Polish and French women, not Germans. Nevertheless, based on the fact that in their native countries these Jews or their ancestors, having converted to Catholicism, left Jewish communities and assimilated with the Germans, I classify them as Russian Germans.
INDIFFERABILITY OF GERMANIZED JEWS FROM THE GERMANS.
Main note. Although the gallery I presented is impressive in the number of big names, the majority of baptized German and Baltic Jews who moved to Russia are undoubtedly unknown to us. In Russia they called themselves Germans and hid their Jewish origin. After all, they betrayed the faith of their ancestors and their people, left their countries to avoid the anti-Semitism of their German neighbors. Russia was not inferior to Germany in ardent anti-Semitism, but in a new country where they were not known, German and Baltic Jews, posing as Germans, could start their lives with a clean slate, get rid of belonging to the persecuted Jews.
There are practically no research works on this topic. An exception, an interesting article from 1990 by the outstanding German historian Eric Amburger about some Protestant and Catholic “German” families in Russia, descended from baptized Jews. The family of Eric Amburger himself is an example of the assimilation of Jews with Russian Germans. The Amburgers are German, but Eric Amburger's grandfather and father chose wives from families of mixed Jewish-German descent. Because of his Jewish ancestry, Eric Amburger was discriminated against in Nazi Germany. Amburger's work has not been translated into Russian, so Russian publications, in complete ignorance, call many famous people who were of Jewish origin Germans. It is enough to point out the controversy in the Russian press about the father of the poetess Olga Berggolts, the heroine of besieged Leningrad, whom Russian authors call either a German or a Latvian.
As for the Jews and German-speaking countries, we know about their real origin only when they were famous people, and even then in most cases they successfully passed for Germans. Peter the Great's intelligence officer Fyodor Asch is called a German by his contemporaries. Only his last name tells experts that he was a Jew. Unfortunately, purely Jewish surnames were few in number in German-speaking countries.
The difficulty of studying Germanized Jewish clans lies in the fact that they often did not pass on to their descendants the memory of their Jewish ancestors. This is the case with Konstantin Vaginov; he sincerely believed that his father, a gendarmerie officer, was German. A similar case is with the descendants of a military doctor who rose to the rank of court physician Johann Conrad (Ivan Kondratievich) Messing. His descendants and their relatives preserved the memory of him as a German. Following them, from their words, the authors of the works write about the German Messing, reporting on the genealogy of Messing’s descendants, art historian Dmitry Rovinsky and the three Lyapunov brothers - composer Sergei and academicians mathematician Alexander and philologist Boris. A rare exception of Germanized Jews who did not hide the Jewish roots of their families were the greatest researcher of the Russian language, Vladimir Dal, and the writer Georgy Blok, nephew of Alexander Blok.
The same thing applies to families of German origin who had Jewish ancestors along the female lines. Their Jewish ancestors had to be people of incredible fame for us to know about them. Among them is the Prussian Jew Esther Manue. Her great-great-granddaughter is the brilliant actress Tatyana Piletskaya, whose father is Russian-German, née Urlaub. The events that left the name of Esther Manue in history began with the fact that she and a German guy fell passionately in love with each other. Esther had no choice but to accept Christianity. The marriage was happy, children were born, but events of world significance intervened in the fate of the lovers. The Russian army, having expelled Napoleon from Russia, entered Europe. Prussia did not fight with Napoleon at that time, waiting to see who would be more profitable for it to join. Esther's husband is a German patriot and enlisted in the Russian army. Wanting to be close to her lover, Esther Manue disguised herself as a man, like Nadezhda Durova in Russia, who coincidentally also had Jewish ancestors, and enlisted in the Prussian Lancers after Prussia entered the war on the side of Russia.
The Jewish woman fought for the freedom of anti-Semitic Germany, was much more courageous than most of her German male comrades, was wounded, received Prussia's high military award, the Iron Cross, and won the glory of a German heroine. Her husband died in the last days of the war. The widow, leaving her children in Germany, moved to Russia, where she found new family happiness with another Lutheran German. Tatyana Piletskaya is their great-great-great-granddaughter. If it were not for the big name of Esther Manue, we would never have known about the Jewish ancestors of the German Urlaubs, and the Urlaubs themselves and their descendants would never have mentioned them. Other descendants of the German heroine include prominent scientists: geologist Maria Blorodaevskaya (nee Kessenich), who created a scientific school of researchers in the geology of ore fields and copper deposits, and her brother radiophysicist Vladimir Kessenich.
THE GENIUS OF BALLET LUDWIG MINKUS AND WHITE SPOTS IN PEDIGREES.
Often we simply do not know about the Jewish origin of even famous people if their parents were baptized Jews. A striking example of this is the world-famous Austrian ballet luminary composer Ludwig Minkus. For a long time, biographers argued about his ethnic roots, attributing to him origins from several nations, but not from Jews. Only recently have European researchers found evidence that his parents are Jews who converted to Catholicism. For so long, the origins of Minkus, a native of Vienna, remained unknown. In Russia, especially in many cases, the ethnicity of prominent people from German-speaking countries was unknown.
How little we know about the Jews who are called Germans in Russia is evidenced by the fact that only in recent years after the fall of the anti-Semitic USSR, Russian researchers, studying the lives of some celebrities, found that the Jews, besides Vaginov, were previously considered Germans Ivan Khemnitser , one of the creators of new Russian literature in the 18th century, the founder of the fable genre in it, Dmitry Ivanovich Meyer, lawyer and teacher, father of Russian civil law and Alexander Lakier, founder of Russian heraldry.
Even having information about the Jewish ancestors of certain Germans, we do not always know on what line these ancestors were. Pilnyak does not talk about this. About the Totlebens, their fellow Baltic Germans remembered that they were of Jewish origin, although the Totlebens bore a surname well-known among the German nobility. Most likely, the Totleben family was of German origin, in one of their marriages they chose a wife who had Jewish ancestors, which gave rise to their German neighbors, the Totlebens, being Jews.
How many such Jewish wives disappeared without a trace among the Russian Germans? We only know a few names. The Nobel Prize laureate in physics, Russian German Andrei Geim, speaking about his origins, mentioned that his mother had a Jewish great-grandmother. If it were not for the honesty of Boris Pilnyak and Andrei Geim, we would never have known about the Jews in their families. How many ordinary, not famous baptized Jews moved to Russia, called themselves Germans and disappeared without a trace among the Russian Germans, and then among the Russians? After all, Jews were already among the population of the Moscow German Settlement in the 17th century. How many Germans who came out of this settlement to serve Russia were Jews by origin or descendants of mixed marriages? We do not see any hostility of the Germans of the Russian Empire towards the baptized Jews. Just the opposite. Among the baptized Jews known to us, there are many mixed marriages with Germans. Having adopted Christianity, the Jews quickly merged with the Germans because they accepted them.
A large number of Russian Germans received Jewish ancestors by intermarrying with Russian noble families, descendants of Jews. Denis Fonvizin is mentioned above. On the pages of my essay about the descendants of the Jewish clan in Moscow, the Shafirovs and five other noble families from Jews baptized into Orthodoxy who were related to them, there are many names of Russian Germans. Blanks (from the Germanized French Huguenots, and not the ancestors of Lenin), Borchs, Buddhas, Wittes, Hans, Grottos, Gul, Delvigs, Kellers, Kleinmichels, Kronebergs, Launitz, Medems, Meller-Zakomelskys, Mengdens, Mestmachers, Nirods, Nolkens, Oppels , Rausch von Traubenberg, Sievers, Thieme, Fersen, Freigang, Engelhardt, etc.
BAPTIZED GERMAN JEWS IN ENGLAND AND POLAND.
Were there any analogies with Russia in other countries? We know something about England. Unlike Russia, a community similar to the Russian Germans did not form in England. The emigration of German natives to England was insignificant in comparison with Russia. The British were superior to the Germans in all areas of activity, so England did not need German specialists or artisans. Like Russia, we know of the Jewish origin of Christian emigrants from Germany if they or their British descendants were famous people. Otherwise, they disappeared as Jews and were considered Germans.
Brilliant families of immigrants from Germany, whose Jewish roots are known due to their fame, were the Gideons, Herschels, Arnolds and Beerbohms. Russia was no exception in the prominent role of Jewish converts from German-speaking countries in its development, nor in the fact that their biographers are called Germans and in the fact that these Jews often hid their origin.
Samson Gideon (1699-1772) came from a family of Portuguese Jews who settled in the German port city of Hamburg. His father, a successful merchant, emigrated to the British West Indies, then became the second Jew to be allowed to settle by London's city center since the medieval expulsion of the Jews. Samson Gideon, although he participated in his father's trading affairs, became not a merchant, but a banker. He was the de facto financial advisor to the royal court and government. His financial genius played a decisive role in maintaining England's financial stability during the 1745 rebellion in Scotland to restore the Stuart dynasty and in the disastrous Seven Years' War. Although Gideon was respected at court and in society for his merits, and acquired large land estates, he still felt socially limited: because of the Jewish religion, he was not accepted into the English aristocracy.
In his desire to become a full member of high English society, Gideon stopped halfway. He married an English Anglican and, although he himself remained a Jew, ceased his membership in the synagogue. However, he donated the amount of his annual membership fees to his former synagogue each year. He baptized his children. All his attempts to separate himself from the Jewish community did not achieve their goal: Gideon petitioned the government to elevate him to the nobility with the title of baronet. Despite his court and government connections, Gideon was refused. In England, no one could break the existing laws, which continued to discriminate against the Jews.
Having rejected the claims of Samson Gideon, giving him a fly in the ointment, the government at the same time gave him a barrel of honey. Everything that the Jew Sampson Gideon could not receive was given to his only 13-year-old Christian son, who also bore the name Samson. The teenager was elevated to the nobility with the title of baronet. Having reached manhood, the younger Samson Gideon received the higher title of baron and a seat in Parliament. He married an English aristocrat from the Eardley Wilmot family, her father was the third highest ranking judge in the country, and changed his surname Gideon to the more “euphonious” surname of his wife Eardley for the English. He led the comfortable life of a typical English aristocrat, enjoying the huge inheritance he received from his father, his life would have been happy if both his sons had not died as children. The line of the Gideons, the newly-minted barons of Eardley, ceased, but numerous offspring came from his daughters, wives of aristocrats.
The Gideon offspring were members of parliament, warriors (one of them died near Sevastopol in the Crimean War), priests, judges, some of them occupied prominent government positions, but the impression remains that most of them did not strive for great careers: they were noble and rich, and the fact that many of them served with distinction in the army is the duty of an aristocrat. Nevertheless, the descendants of the Gideons gave Great Britain one of its largest political and statesmen of the second half of the 19th century, Hugh Childers (1827-1896). Distinguished by his outstanding administrative abilities and by his nature prone to improvement and reform, during his long career Childers headed key ministries: the Navy, the War, the Treasury, and the Interior. The only top office he did not reach was the post of prime minister. Hugh Childers' father and mother were descendants of the Gideons, but the close relationship of his parents did not adversely affect his mental abilities. His daughter Emily (Millie) Childers (1866-1922) is the only Gideon offspring to have distinguished himself in the world of muses and is a renowned painter renowned for his portraits, landscapes and paintings of the interior architecture and decoration of Christian cathedrals.
Apart from Hugh Childers, the most notable among the offspring of Gideon MPs is Francis Freemantle (1872-1943). A brave doctor who went through all the wars of England of his generation in various parts of the world, he gained the authority of the country's largest specialist in the field of organizing and choosing directions for the development of healthcare and the medical profession. "Fremantle, Sir Francis Edward (1872 - 1943)". Plarr's Lives of the Fellows Online, http://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/biogs/E004111b.htm A world-class religious public figure was the grandson of the younger Samson Gideon, Culling Yeardley Smith (1805-1863), a leading advocate of religious freedom and evangelical Christianity in Western countries.
For three generations, the Herschels have produced scientists of world significance. Among them stands the gigantic figure of William Herschel (1738-1822), the father of modern astronomy. Outstanding astronomers were his sister Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) and his son John Herschel (1792-1871), one of the last great encyclopedists in history. In addition to astronomy, he made enormous contributions to mathematics, chemistry, biology, photography, philosophy and the popularization of science, was an excellent lecturer and speaker, and translated Homer’s Iliad into English. His son Alexander Stuart Herschel (1836-1907) was a major researcher in the astronomy of meteorites and one of the pioneers of a new branch of physics, spectrology, the study of the spectra of electromagnetic radiation. The Jewish origin of the Herschels was already known during the lifetime of William Herschel and did not attract attention in England: he was a Protestant.
For four generations, the Arnolds gave England leading intellectuals and masters of words, and one of them, carried away by politics, became Britain's Minister of War at the beginning of the 20th century. The family’s first glory was brought to them by two “great Victorians” (as historians respectfully call them), father and son Thomas and Matthew Arnold.
Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) lived only 46 years, of which only five years under Queen Victoria, but he won the name of one of the creators of ideas that had a huge influence on the life of the British in the Victorian era, the time of the highest prosperity of England. As a young man at the age of 33, he took charge of a run-down school in the town of Rugby and turned it into a model for all secondary schools in England. Later, the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, inspired by Arnold's ideas, founded the modern Olympic Games. The most popular preacher, the author of several thousand sermons, Arnold began a movement for the reform of the Anglican Church, turning it towards the masses. At the same time, he found time to study modern and Roman history.
His work earned him the reputation of being one of the leading historians of his generation and the most respected professorship for a historian in England at the University of Oxford. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a poet, essayist and cultural critic, during his lifetime won recognition as a classic of English poetry and, together with Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, the laurels of one of the three great poets of the Victorian era. Not inferior to them in achievements and fame were the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the incredibly popular novelist and head of the British suffragette movement Mary Ward (nee Arnold) and the sons of her sister, the world famous brothers Huxley, the writer Aldous and the biologist Julian.
G. W. E. Russell. Mathew Arnold. London. 1904, pp. 162-3; H. Belloc. The Jews London. 1922, pp. 47, 49; D. S. Katz. God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to fundamentalism. New Haven. 2004 p. 264. See Notes.
The fate of information about the Jewish ancestors of the most significant poet of the Victorian era, Robert Browning, is interesting. The Brownings are an English family, but the poet had Jewish ancestors on both his father’s and mother’s sides. For the purpose of this chapter, only Browning's maternal ancestors are of interest. Most authors of standard biographies of Browning usually write that her sugar-industrial family, the Weldemans, who settled in Scotland in the 18th century, were German emigrants. These biographies confuse country of origin with nationality. In fact, the first Wildeman to emigrate from Germany was a cross-Jew. He married a Scot. His daughter Sarah became the poet's mother. "Sarah Weideman, Mother of Robert Browning, Born in Dundee on 13 June 1772", Scotlands People. Connecting Generations. J. L. Borges. Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature. New York. 2013, p. 164. On Browning's Jewish descent without specifying which line, see Belloc, The Jews, pp. 47, 49; D. S. Katz. God's Last Words, page 365. See Note.
A poet of worldwide fame during his lifetime, whose influence in the English-speaking world was similar to that which Leo Tolstoy conquered in Russia: not only a master of words, but a teacher of life and moral authority, Robert Browning did not hide his Jewish ancestors. He publicly emphasized his Jewish origin, highlighting it in the hope that the enormous respect he had won in society would extend to Jews, weakening the anti-Jewish prejudices that had been instilled in England since the times of medieval obscurantism. In this he differed from most other descendants of Jewish converts. The same “great Victorians” father and son Arnold forgot about their liberalism and not only kept silent about their Jewish origin, but are also known for public anti-Semitic statements. The most vile thing about their position was that in their anti-Semitism these Arnolds went against the growing and ultimately victorious movement among the British to grant equal rights to Jews. Matthew Arnold, despite his anti-Semitism, sought friendship with Jews who stood out in the world of literature and philosophy. His epistolary legacy is a mixture of anti-Semitic rhetoric and admiration for the talents and understanding of art of his Jewish friends.
In the Beerbohm family, the desire of Jewish converts from Germany to hide their Jewish origins reached caricature expression. The Beerbohms' fame also began in the Victorian era with two brothers, Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917) and Max Beerbohm (1972-1956). The eldest of the brothers, in terms of the totality of his activities, had no equal in the history of English theater; he is the best character actor, theater director and organizer in England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The younger brother is a famous satirist writer and cartoonist, who became a recognized classic in literature and art during his lifetime.
The founder of the English Beerbohm family was a baptized Jew from Memel in East Prussia. As a young man, he moved to England at the turn of the second and third decades of the 19th century, married an Englishwoman, and succeeded in the grain trade. Although he was born in Germany, for some reason his famous sons passed him off as a Dutchman rather than a German. Either the Beerbohm family suffered from the Germans in Memel, or they were too unlike the Germans in relation to life and they liked the Dutch, who were more humane than the Germans, like the English.
However, the Jewish origin of the famous Beerbohm brothers was well known to their contemporaries and did not cause any anti-Semitism on the part of the British. See pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia; C. Lubinski. "The Jew in drama, theater and film", Runes, The Hebrew Impact, pp. 593-594. The British of that time were neither the Germans with their envious animal anti-Semitism. Historians note that the behavior of the famous and successful brothers was typical of the “hidden” Jews of that time. The irony of the situation is that the son of the “Dutchman” Max Beerbohm, who married twice, not only chose a Jewish wife both times. In conversations with friends, he praised the wonderful human traits of the Jews and was sad that fate had deprived him: he himself had no Jewish ancestors. At least the Beerbohms did not descend into the anti-Semitism of the Arnolds. A. Gornik. "The Comparable Max. Max Beerbohm's cult of the diminutive." The New Yorker. August 3, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/03/the-comparable-max; "Theater. The contribution of Jews to the world theater", Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www.eleven.co.il/article/15428#02
The most striking thing is that, as the examples of Robert Browning, who remained a popular poet despite emphasizing his Jewish ancestors and the careers of the younger Samson Gideon and his descendants, show, in England, unlike in Germany or Russia, there was no public anti-Semitism that forced Jews to hide their origin, as the Beerbohms did, or you nurture anti-Semites within yourself, as was the case with the Arnolds.
The Gideons, Herschels, Arnolds, Veldemans and Beerbohms were comparatively late immigrants from Germany. We know little about the earlier pre-18th century baptized Jews from German-speaking countries in Britain. It is hardly possible that German Jews did not emigrate to England before the 18th century. There is no doubt that they were and disappeared among those who are considered Germans. In the depths of centuries, the Jewish origin of their ancestors was forgotten and these descendants of Jews brought glory undeserved by the Germans with their labors in the name of England.
It would seem that in Poland, Germany’s neighbor, there should have been a lot of baptized German Jews, but in Mateusz Mises’s major study of Poles of Jewish origin we find mention of only two or three clans, and again, just like in Russia and England, the Jewish roots of these clans are known only thanks to their outstanding descendants. The most interesting story is about the ancestors of Joachim Lelewel, the greatest Polish historian and ideologist of the national movement of the first half of the 19th century, who earned the nickname “patriarch of Polish democracy.”
After the suppression of the anti-Russian uprising of 1830-1831, Lelewel emigrated to the center of Polish emigration Paris, where he became friends with a young like-minded man, Jan Czynski (1801-1867). During the uprising, Chinsky was the chief of staff of a large military unit; in exile, he quickly gained fame as a leading patriotic journalist and publicist. Lelevel and Chinsky became friends, Chinsky became Lelevel's assistant in his political activities.
Then they quarreled. Jan Czynski was born into a family of Jews who were baptized into Catholicism, but did not renounce his Jewish origin, as was usually the case with converts. He vigorously advocated giving Jews full equality with Christian Poles. Czynski hoped that he could convince the Polish elite of the need for Jewish emancipation, among whom he was respected for his loyalty to Poland. Unexpectedly for Chinsky, a very influential voice was heard against supporters of equal rights for Jews. The leader of the thoughts of Polish society, Lelewel, despite his calls for universal equality, declared that Jewish emancipation in Poland was impossible.
Lelewel declared that because Judaism, the opposite of Christianity, was deeply rooted in the Jews, the descendants of baptized Jews, even in the sixth generation, did not become faithful Catholics and Poles. Lelewel's anti-Judeophobia degenerated into outright racism. In his irreconcilable Judeophobia, Lelewel even diverged from the position of the Catholic Church, which advocated complete equality of crosses with the “old” Christians and with the majority of Polish society. Lelevel himself, in his everyday attitude towards people from baptized Jews, and Chinsky, for example, completely refuted his anti-Jewish theories.
Angered by Lelewel's anti-Semitism, Chinsky publicly exposed the secret of the Lelewel family. The German ancestors of Joachim Lelewel, the Prussian nobles Loelhoeffel von Lowensprung, came from Jewish crosses. It was the fact that a descendant of the Jews became their enemy that angered Czynski about Lelewel's anti-Semitism. An anti-Jewish psychological attitude was indeed often characteristic of converts and their descendants; it is enough to mention the same Victorian liberals Thomas and Matthew Arnold. In this, the brilliant intellectual Joachim Lelewel was completely unoriginal.
There was nothing new in Czynski's publication about Lelewel's Jewish ancestors. Chinsky said publicly what others only mentioned in private. Rumors about Loelhoeffel von Lowensprung's Jewish origins were common among Poles. The East Prussian city of Elbing, where Joachim Lelewel's ancestors came from and where they lived for generations, was located not far from the Polish border, had close relations with Poland, and the Poles knew a lot about their German neighbors.
Let us note the most important fact confirming the Jewish origin of Lelevel. A baptized Jew from Prussia could only come from Elbing. The German crusaders who conquered Prussian lands prohibited Jews from settling in their domains, but from the 15th century East Prussia was under the influence of Jewish-friendly Poland. Jews formed an important part of the merchant class in Poland; the Germans had to agree to the presence of Jewish merchants in East Prussia, but Jews were forbidden to settle in the country. The only exception was Elbing, which was located not far from the border with Poland. Already in 1440 there was a Jewish community there. S. W. Baron. Social and Religious History of Jews: Late Middle Ages and Era, p. 401.
Chinsky was not a rabid polemicist, but a man of facts. His high reputation as a political writer, which he earned not only among Poles but also in the European press, was based on his honesty. He would not have asserted the Jewish origin of Lelevel’s ancestors as the reason for his Judeophobia if he had not been confident in the veracity of his accusations. Otherwise, there would have been a crushing reaction from Polish society in defense of the Polish idol Lelewel and Czynski would have irrevocably lost the trust of his readers. It is one thing to mention Lelewel’s Jewish roots in a close circle of acquaintances, as was the case among the Poles, but another thing to declare this publicly, pointing to Lelewel’s origins from the crosses as the reason for his opposition to the equality of Jews.
Lelewel did not refute Chinsky’s message about the origin of his family, although usually the descendants of Jewish converts publicly denied their Jewish roots. Perhaps Lelevel did not want to draw even more attention to his origins than before. This could turn him into a parable among the military. There is no doubt about Lelevel’s sense of dignity: he would not lie in order to hide the Jewish origin of his family. In the future, he would sincerely change his anti-Jewish position and become a strong supporter of Jewish emancipation. Mieses, Z rodu, pp. 153-154. I will also note that after the publication of Mises’s book in 1938, not one of the numerous descendants of the Lelewel family came out with a refutation of Mises, despite the anti-Semitism in Poland that had regained its independence. By that time, the family made famous by the name of Joachim Lelewel had become even more famous in Poland. His descendant was the most widely read Polish writer in Poland and the world, who glorified the heroic past of the Poles, Henryk Sienkiewicz.
So, the situation with information about childbirth of Jewish origin in Europe did not differ from what was happening in Russia.
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For a list of Germanized Jews and Germans with Jewish ancestors, see Smbat Bagratuni. "List. Germans of Russia-Jews and descendants of Jews." Part 2. Proza.ru
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NOTES
The Eberler family died out a hundred years after the baptism, but its descendants through the female lines are enormous and have spread throughout the world. Most of them are natives of German-speaking countries. The human qualities of the Germans are such that when following the branches of the family tree of German clans, you much more often encounter the most disgusting personalities than when studying the genealogy of representatives of other nations. Among the German descendants of the Eberlers was the second person after the Fuhrer in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering.
There is no consensus among biographers about the time of the Herschels' baptism. The first known representative of the family, Hans Herschel, was born in Moravia and moved to Dresden in Saxony, where he opened a brewery. Some authors believe that he was baptized into Protestantism, others insist that his grandson Isaac Herschel, the father of the great astronomer, was baptized. The Christian name Hans does not indicate the Protestantism of the first of the Herschels. In German documents, Jews often used Christian names, since Jewish names were unfamiliar to the Germans.
The origin of Isaac Herschel's wife Anna Ilse Moritzen (Anna Ilse Moritzen or Moritz) is unclear. Previously, she was considered a German Protestant. Now researchers of her biography point out that her surname is characteristic of Germanized Jews who created their German surnames using German names somewhat similar to the Hebrew names of their fathers. The surname Moritzen (simplified Moritz) comes from a Hebrew nickname meaning "Child of Moses" in Russian. G. Gilbert. "Jews in Photography A Significant Contribution to Civilization", Hebrew History Federation, http://www. hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp007_photo.htm; The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Herschels, by Anonymous. 2004,
Among the descendants of the Herschels along the female lines, Lieutenant General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon (1859-1939) from a noble Scottish family, who was an excellent corps commander in the First World War, stands out.
Biographers of numerous famous descendants of the Beerbohms unanimously repeated this genealogical tale or “corrected” it, declaring that the Beerbohms came not only from the Dutch, but since they were natives of Prussia, they came from a Dutch-German family; other authors showed even greater knowledge of geography. Since after the First World War Memel went to Lithuania, these authors write about the Dutch-German-Lithuanian origin of the first Beerbohm in England. All these fantasies are not based on anything, but testify to a sad fact - the desire of crosses to hide their Jewish origin even in liberal England and the dishonesty of the authors of their biographies.
Matthew Huxley, son of Aldous Huxley, is a prominent American epidemiologist and anthropologist.
Due to the similarity of the languages of Holland and Germany, Jews often moved from one of these countries to the other.
Sources.
I. Steimanis. History of Latvian Jews. New York. 202, p. 10-
For more information about the settlement of German colonists, see A. A. German. History of the Volga Germans. Study guide. 2002, pp. 10-11.
G. I. Sinkevich. Georg Cantor and the Polish school of set theory. Saint Petersburg. 2012. This interesting work contains an error, which is not the author’s fault and which once again shows the deplorable state of Russian knowledge about Jewish conversions. The family of Georg Cantor's mother, the famous musicians Bema, is called Hungarian because she professed Catholicism. In fact, the Bems were Jews who converted to Catholicism.
Hers. Dmitry Meyer is the son of a court musician.
Sources for each person mentioned in this chapter are given in the chapters of biographical sketches.
(Esther Manue). V. Kogan. "Memory of Iron Time - 4", Kiev Telegraph, socio-political weekly, telegrafua.com/social/14215/print/
(Knippers). B. Klein."Knippers - Chekhovs", Jewish World
Newspaper of Russian-speaking America, http://evreimir.com/114431/knippery-chehovy/
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Note. On the baptism of Jews in Germany S. M. Clarc. The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1741. Oxford. 1995, pp. 20-21 in Hamburg, at least 154 Jews converted to Protestantism from 1656 to 1708.
On the attitude of German churches to the baptism of Jews. MARTIN FRIEDRICH
Zwischen Abwehr und Bekehrung
Die Stellung der deutschen evangelischen Theologie zum Judentum im 17. Jahrhundert. Tubingen/
1988. VI,
Beitrage zur historischen Theologie 72
Part of the bibliography about Jews who converted to Christianity and merged with the Germans is given in G. Carl, A. Schaser. "Konversionsberichte des 17. bis 19. Jahrhunderts als Selbstzeugnisse gelesen: Ergebnisse und Forschungsperspektiven", pp. 7-8.
One should not expect much from Iskul and Schottländer: they were loyal subjects of the anti-Semitic regime that prevailed in Russia. A man of a different political camp, Joachim Lelewel, a Polish descendant of the German Junkers Loelhoeffel von Lowensprung, a democrat who advocated the brotherhood of nations, the author of the noble slogan “For our freedom and yours,” expressed anti-Semitic views until he was pulled back.
Watch Smbat Bagratuni on proza.ru
"1. Ancestors from the Jewish ghetto. Catherine II and the rulers of Europe.
"4. Ancestors from the Jewish ghetto. Russia"
"Pushkin's German ancestors with Jewish roots"
Alexander II, having actually left his legal German wife, chose the Russian princess Dolgorukova as his morganic wife, her roots also went to Cologne. Her ancestor was the famous dignitary of the Ekaterininsky century, the organizer of Russian enlightenment, Ivan Betskoy. His mother was a Swedish baroness from the Cologne Germans.
The Eberlers converted to Christianity at a tragic time for the Jews of Basel. Enraged by envy of their more hardworking, capable and simply more clean in personal hygiene Jewish neighbors, who, in modern terms, had done disproportionately for the well-being of the entire population of the city, the Germans destroyed the Jewish community. In 1439, during the plague epidemic that swept across Europe, a horde of brutal peasants came to the city in order to kill the Jews, accusing them of poisoning Christians with the plague. Because of compliance with the rules of hygiene prescribed by the Jewish religion? Jews suffered much less from the plague than Germans who lived in the mud. The city authorities, aware of the Jewish contribution to the prosperity of Basel, tried to protect the Jews, but the craft guilds, for the sake of profit, supported the peasant robbers and demanded reprisals against their Jewish neighbors. The city fathers did not have the strength to stop the enraged crowd. They handed over the Jews to the murderers. The Germans herded 600 Jews, including children, into a stable and burned them alive. Just as centuries later, German colonists of the Volga region burned Kazakhs in stacks of straw. 140 Jewish children were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Their subsequent history is unknown, but if one Eberler family has a huge descendant in German-speaking countries, then how many Germans were descendants of these 140 Jewish children.
https://dbs.bh.org.il/place/basel
An example is the Flemish-born Bernoulli family of great mathematicians, who settled in German Switzerland and have no equal among other German families in their contribution to science. Historians of mathematics have calculated that Bernoulli produced 8 (!) great mathematicians. Three of them worked in Russia for some time. Jewish ancestors are lucky to be seen in Bernoulli's genealogy because they have a big name. They are the Eberlers from Basel, one of the most famous patrician families of the high bourgeoisie in Switzerland, who crossed the borders of Switzerland and achieved a status equal to the English lords in the neighboring German state of Hesse. The Eberlers have a huge female line of offspring in many countries around the world. If, instead of the Eberlers, Bernoulli had had another, inconspicuous Jewish family among his ancestors, we would never have known about it.
After the genocide, the city of Basel passed a law banning Jews from settling there for 200 years, but without the Jews, Basel’s income fell catastrophically and impoverished Basel began to ask for the return of Jews who had managed to leave the city. Among the Jews who returned to Basel, the most significant were the brilliant financiers Eberler, originally from neighboring Alsace. Before they had time to get comfortable in Basel again, German envy flared up again. The scoundrels, who decided to profit, accused the head of the family of insulting Christianity. The Eberlers again had to leave the city and settle in Alsace. The city fathers nevertheless continued contacts with the Eberlers. The head of the family died, the people of Basel promised his son all sorts of benefits if he was baptized and returned to the city as a Christian. The tragedy broke the younger Eberler. He was baptized, married a noblewoman and quickly entered the ruling elite of Basel. Moreover, the Eberlers were elevated to the feudal aristocracy of neighboring Germany, an extremely rare elevation for the Swiss bourgeoisie.
A. Steinberg. Studien zur geschichte der Juden in der Schweiz wahrend des mittelalters. 1902.
Similar to the case of Minkus, the metallurgist Georg Gennin, the creator of the mining and metallurgical industry in Peter's empire, bequeathed to his biographers the secret of his origin. They considered him either Dutch or German, and he was a baptized Jew. It is safe to say that a much larger number of those whom we know in Russian history as Germans were in fact Jews who hid their ethnic origin, or Germans with Jewish ancestors.
https://rbvekpros.livejournal.com/273257.html
Plehve Kankrin
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