The Everyday Life of German non-Jewish 'full Jews' in Nazi Germany, 1933-45

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The proposed project is a macro-level analysis of primary sources relating to the everyday life of non-Jewish 'Jews' in Nazi Germany, from 1933-1945. Non-Jewish 'Jews' were those who, despite not viewing themselves as either religious or secular Jews, were labelled as individuals of 'Jewish' blood by Nazi laws. These laws legislated that an individual was a 'Jew' if they were descended from a minimum of three grandparents who had been members of the Jewish religious community. In other words, the self-identity of the descendants was ignored. Most of the approximately 40,000 non-Jewish 'Jews' in Germany in 1933 had long since lived lives distinctly separate from the Jewish community and were Christian by religion. This meant that, in comparison to self-identifying Jews, they had far fewer Jewish friends and relied socially upon non-Jews. Where self-identifying Jews could turn to one another for emotional support after 1933, the current evidence suggests that non-Jewish 'Jews' lost the majority of their non-Jewish friends and often did not want, nor were welcome, to participate in Jewish community life. This PhD seeks to conduct a wide-scale qualitative analysis of the extent to which the lives of non-Jewish 'Jews' differed from those of self-identifying Jews. Primary source accounts (memoirs, interviews) by or related to non-Jewish 'Jews' are available in a number of locations. In terms of archives, access is available through the USC Shoah archives, the Wiener Holocaust Library, the British Library, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Leo Baeck Institute Archives, various German Bundesarchive and Staatsarchive. I have already identified several non-Jewish 'Jews' from among these archives. In addition to archival sources, primary accounts by non-Jewish 'Jews' are also found in autobiographical works, memorial books, and historical scholarly works. To complement the main qualitative component, a quantitative micro-study assessing whether it was harder for non-Jewish 'Jews' than self-identifying Jews to access emigratory organisations could easily be undertaken. This is achievable because the typical sources found within the aforementioned archives nearly always contain information about emigration, even when longer textual sources are absent. A quantitative micro-study into the social experience of non-Jewish 'Jews' is another possibility. This is achievable by comparing various organisations' membership lists (commonly available in state archives) with available lists of non-Jewish 'Jews'. Up until the present, research into the lives of German non-Jewish 'Jews' has been extremely limited. In research designed to cover the entire group labelled as 'Jewish' by the Nazis, we find such statements as those made by Ascher in his 2007 study: '[under Nazism] the Jews of Breslau sought to carry on with their lives and adjust to the restrictions on them by relying more than ever for their socializing and entertainment on the facilities of the Jewish community' (Ascher, 2007, 124). Obviously, for those who had never been members of the Jewish community, it was impossible to rely 'more than ever' on something they had never partaken of or had long since left. The Ascher example exemplifies the inapplicability of the vast majority of the field's studies to the lives of non-Jewish 'Jews'. In order to redress this imbalance, this PhD will analyse such factors and themes as spatial loss, interpersonal relations, emigration trajectories, tensions between Nazi policy and everyday reality, the breakdown of gender roles, the impact of class, the emotional significance of losing personal items, and attempts to create normality. In brief, the PhD would build heavily on such seminal works in the 'everyday life' field as Kaplan's book 'Between Dignity and Despair' (1996), Hájková and von der Heydt's book 'The Last Veit Simons' (2019), and Miron's paper (2019).