Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

Hans Jensen’s vivid recollections are quite similar. He, too, commented with
much amusement on the rabbi’s ‘interesting’ beard and that he thought that he
looked like ‘Moses or one of the prophets.’ 144
Two other sets of memories that are of particular interest are those associated
with the rabbi’s attitude to his strong German identity and to his own
intellectualism, which drew on the Germanic tradition. These impacted on his
religiosity and also reflect to a large extent the religiosity of the majority of his
congregants. They also provide an insight into the impact he had on his
congregation. The majority of the interviewees were teenagers or young adults for
the time period under discussion, and all acknowledged that those of their parents’
and grandparents’ generation held similar, if not the same, views as the rabbi;
unlike the majority of the congregation’s youth who were in the process of
rejecting the German-Jewish identities so valued by the older generation. The
majority of the interviewees commented on the essentially German character of
the rabbi. Their combined perceptions are well articulated by Hans Jensen, in
recalling a conversation he had with the rabbi:
He was another one of those who was more German than the Germans! I’ll
never forget one statement he made! He said: “I have more in common with a
non-Jewish German than with a Yemenite Jew!” It sounds absolutely ghastly
today that he could still say such a thing! 145
Thus, the rabbi and his congregation represented the typical acculturated German-
Jewish community. Religious practices were essentially a combination of
perceived Germanness and Jewishness. This was interpreted as an important
achievement which hailed from the period of the Enlightenment, but even more so
from the period after German unification in 1871.
144 Jensen, op. cit., 14 June 1999.
145 Ibid and personal interview with Hans Jensen (recorded), Sydney, 11 July 1999.
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