Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies

Tysk-judisk migration till Sverige

Carl Henrik Carlsson — 2023-06-19

Artikeln är en översikt av den tysk-judiska invandringen till Sverige från 1770-talet och framåt. Till en början skedde invandringen till stor del i form av kedjemigration från Mecklenburg. Många i pionjären Aaron Isaacs släktkrets invandrade, likaså i släktkretsen kring hans kompanjon Abraham Aaron. Under 1800-talet fortsatte frivilliginvandringen men nu i mindre form av kedjemigration och med mer differentierad geografisk bakgrund än tidigare. Så småningom kom invandringen från Tyskland numerärt att överflygas av den så kallade östjudiska invandringen; av de judar som bodde i Sverige 1880 var bara åtta procent födda i Tyskland och 1920 mindre än fem procent. Många tysk-judiska invandrare vid denna tid, såsom bankmannen Louis Frænckel, gjorde betydelsefulla insatser i det svenska industriundret. Trots den restriktiva invandringspolitiken på 1930-talet kom ett antal tysk-judiska flyktingar till Sverige, såväl individuellt som genom särskilda kvoter. Många blev betydande aktörer i olika sektorer av samhället, och några blev internationellt kända namn som författaren och Nobelpristagaren Nelly Sachs och kärnfysikern Lise Meitner. Många flyktingar fick dock inte arbete som motsvarade deras utbildningar. Bland ”1945 års räddade” fanns tämligen få från Tyskland.

The faith and actions of Greta Andrén, missionary to the Jews of Vienna, 1938–41

Samuel Wenell — 2023-06-19

In this microhistorical study of the Swedish Mission to the Jews (Svenska Israelsmissionen) in Vienna, I explore the everyday life and work of the deaconess Greta Andrén (1909–71) during the time of the Nazi occupation of Austria. Andrén’s actions are presented and related to the parts of her faith that are revealed in the sources. From this I distil a triad of meaningful categories, namely her work, the children she worked with, and God. These resulted in her sustaining an ongoing state of over-exertion during her wartime refugee work.

Editorial

Lena Roos — 2023-06-19

Editorial for the Volume 34, Issue 1

The medieval roots of antisemitism in Sweden

Cordelia Heß — 2023-06-19

The lack of a local Jewish community did not prevent medieval Swedish clerics and lay people from being interested in Jews and Jewish questions. They bought, translated, read and preached from most of the available textual sources and thus spread the widely available views of the hermeneutical Jew: a cruel, stubborn and ugly person and at the same time a cipher for the entire Jewish people both in biblical times and today. This article gives an overview of the Latin and vernacular manuscripts with anti-Jewish motifs and texts and shows that the main and most common textual models and motifs were available in Swedish libraries and collections, from legends via apocryphal texts to fake disputations – adding up to a relatively complete ‘hermeneutical Jew’. A focus was, as in the rest of Europe, on Passion-related piety, which was the most common form of piety in the late Middle Ages – and usually connected with distinct anti-Jewish features. The fact that we can establish direct and indirect textual and narrative lines of tradition between the medieval codices and modern printed booklets of the nineteenth century proves the long-lasting intelligibility of anti-Jewish stereotypes in Sweden – developed and spread completely independently from the Jewish minority. The medieval perspective thus adds a much-needed nuance to the debate about antisemitism in the North: it did not need any actual Jews; it simply made up its own, based on the general Christian tradition.

Christianity without Christ?

Julius H. Schoeps — 2023-06-19

Ever since the publication of Dohm’s Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civil Improvement of the Jews) in 1781, which argued for Jewish political equality on humanitarian grounds, more and more voices joined those demands. Prominent among them was David Friedländer, a friend and disciple of Moses Mendelssohn. One of the leading figures of the Berlin Haskalah, he worked towards establishing equal legal status for Jews in Prussia. Friedländer did not accept the given view of his times, the antithesis of Jew and German. For him only the antithesis Jew–Christian existed and even that he tried to reconcile by finding common ground in a religion of reason, the groundwork of which he laid out in an Open Letter in 1799. What he proposed at that time may have been illusionary, but it certainly met with approval in enlightened Jewish circles. Friedländer therefore not only stands for those who dared to break with the traditions, but also for the generation of those who consciously aimed at the denationalization of traditional Judaism – and thus decided in favour of the confessionalization and the Germanness of the Jews.

‘Only the murder accusations are missing’

Jens Carlesson Magalhães — 2023-06-19

In 1848, the Götheborgs Dagblad newspaper was revived after a ten-year gap, and launched the anonymous submission column entitled ‘Anonyma Lådan’ (the Anonymous Box). In January and February 1849, many antisemitic letters and articles were published in the Swedish newspapers. Some letters defending Jews and Judaism were published in both ‘Anonyma Lådan’ and Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning. Short of blood libel, the antisemitic side accused Jews of typical anti-Jewish stereotypes: for example, greed, hypocrisy and Jewish hatred of Christianity. Anti-antisemitic writers proclaimed a Christian identity that was based on humanism, stating that one could not be a true Christian if one attacked and hated Jews and Judaism. The Jewish congregation in Gothenburg and the society Judiska Intresset (The Jewish Cause) both chose a non-engaged approach to the antisemitic attacks in the newspaper, since it was not respectable to engage in such debates and, in their view, it would only cause more anti-Jewish sentiments if they did so. In this article, it is argued that the reasons behind the attacks were societal changes, but also, more importantly, that with ‘Anonyma Lådan’, antisemitic sentiments found a platform where such sentiments could be freely expressed.

Hugo Valentin's scholarly campaign against antisemitism

Olof Bortz — 2023-06-19

The Swedish Jewish historian Hugo Valentin (1888–1963) founded the field of Swedish Jewish history in the 1920s. Valentin was also a prominent and public figure in Swedish Jewish affairs, as a writer, Zionist and refugee activist. This article focuses on Valentin’s analysis of antisemitism, from the 1920s to the early 1950s. It pays equal attention to the continuity and change of his writings on the topic, analysed in relation to such political contexts as the ‘Jewish question’, Zionism and anti-Nazi responses, and advances within scholarly research on antisemitism. It shows that Valentin staked out a new approach to the topic of antisemitism, in which Jewish characteristics and the so-called Jewish question, while not completely absent, were placed within parentheses. Instead, he presented antisemitism and individual antisemites as problems in their own right, which, given Nazi German expansionism and the outbreak of the Second World War, seemed to be a greater and more urgent issue than whatever questions might have pertained to Jews and their place in modern society.

Cultural transfer in Swedish exile

Irene Nawrocka — 2023-06-19

After the death in 1934 of his father-in-law Samuel Fischer, founder of the well-known publishing house S. Fischer in Berlin, Gottfried Bermann Fischer moved to Vienna with the aim of publishing the works of prominent German-speaking Jewish and non-Jewish authors who could no longer publish in National Socialist Germany. After the ‘Anschluss’ to Nazi Germany in March 1938 he fled to Sweden with help from Karl Otto and Tor Bonnier, heads of Albert Bonniers Förlag. Eagerly observed by the Nazi authorities, Gottfried Bermann Fischer published books of well-known German, Austrian, and Swedish writers. What did this German-language publishing work look like in a foreign-language environment? Who were the employees? Where were the sales markets? Why did this cooperation between Bermann Fischer and Bonnier fail in the end? The main focus of this article is on Bermann Fischer’s efforts on behalf of German-speaking authors outside Nazi Germany, and on the resentments against a (foreign) Jewish entrepreneur and Bonniers’ engagement in this last remaining large German publishing house in exile after May 1940, even after Gottfried Bermann Fischer’s expulsion from Sweden.

The ‘Old Testament’ as the origin of the patriarchy

Hanna Liljefors — 2023-06-19

This article explores and compares two similar debates in Germany and Sweden during the 1980s, in which feminists blamed the Hebrew Bible, or ‘Old Testament’, for being the origin of the patriarchy. In Germany, the psychologist and pedagogue Gerda Weiler articulated the discourse in several writings, which led to a scholarly debate on anti-Jewish tendencies within Christian feminist theology. In Sweden, the debate mainly became a media event, initiated by the author Birgitta Onsell. Instead of criticising the discourse, as in the German debate, other actors reinforced it, for example by highlighting Jesus as a feminist and a contrast to the Old Testament religion. The article further examines ideological consequences of the discourse, including the interdiscursive link to the notion of Judaism as responsible for the patriarchal moral that enabled the Holocaust, also expressed in the public sphere in Germany and Sweden.

En resa genom judiska bibliografier och bibliotek

Sofia Sjö — 2023-06-19

Bokrecension av Joacim Hanssons De ordnade böckernas folk: om klassifikation i judiska bibliografier och bibliotek (Stockholm: Hilleförlaget, 2022)

Ett judiskt kristet arv

Tage Kurtén — 2023-06-19

Recension av Caterina Stenius, ”Sanningen är alltid större. En essä på sju famnars djup” (Vasa: Förlaget Scriptum, 2022).