The University of Wisconsin Press


European HIstory / Jewish Studies

Brothers and Strangers
The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923
Steven E. Aschheim
With a New Introduction


A paperback edition with a substantial new introduction

"A major contribution to the understanding of modern European Jewry [that] will establish itself as a . . . standard work on its subject."—Peter Pulzer, Slavonic Review

"It is rare when one can read a work of scholarship as well conceived and written as this book. The author has addressed an important topic for students of the Holocaust and modern Germany."—Michael W. Rubinoff, German Studies Review

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart.

Steven E. Aschheim is professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His books include The Nietzsche Legacy, 1890–1990 and Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises.

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  The cover of Brothers and Strangers is green, with an image of a bearded man wearing a kippah, repeated six times.

August 1999
368 pp.  6 x 9 
18 b/w illus.

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ISBN 978-0-299-09114-9
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