The Expulsion of Jewish Chemists and Biochemists from Academia in Nazi Germany
Ute Deichmann bgu.academia.edu
The Expulsion of Jewish Chemists and Biochemists from Academia in Nazi Germany
The scientific collaboration between Israel and Germany was not initiated, as commonly believed, by the Max Planck Society or by German scientists who wanted to revive collaboration with their former Jewish colleagues. Rather, it was initiated in the mid-1950s by two Israeli scientists from the Weizmann Institute and a German scientist at the time at CERN in violation of the widely accepted cultural boycott by Israel against Germany. The initiators succeeded in procuring political support; large-scale collaboration between the Weizmann Institute, German universities, and the Max Planck Society was developed. In the aftermath of the Second World War, German science suffered from the Nazi expulsion of Jewish scientists and partial international isolation; the collaboration with Israel enabled young German scientists to overcome this isolation and benefit from stimulating Israeli research environments. In times of economic hardship, the collaboration helped Israeli science materially, provided contacts to chemical industry, and strengthened the cooperation between Israeli and European science. The collaboration was built, in part, on postwar myths created by German scientists and the Max Planck Society about their former anti-Nazi attitudes. Despite the difficult beginnings and some hidden political agendas, the collaboration developed very successfully. Germany became Israel’s second most important partner in the scientific field, after the USA. Today, normalcy prevails in many – though not all – of the Israeli-German collaborative projects; the past is not forgotten, but science is at the fore.

It is well-known that Jews have contributed remarkably to the development of modern science. In this context, a narrative has developed which identifies the roots for this special success as being mainly in a long tradition of Jewish learning. But there are also various social and epigenetic approaches or the relation to special Jewish values which have been claimed for this phenomenon. We looked for an explanation in a special case: teachers of physics at German and Austrian universities up to 1933. This provided us with a sample of nearly 100 individuals. While the designation «Jewish» is often used in a diffuse way and also includes those who are of «Jewish descent», our criterion was stricter: we required Jewishness on both parental sides, independent of any affiliation to a Jewish community. Thus we were able to draw conclusions about a religious, cultural or social «Jewish imprint». The social background of the physicists’ fathers differs characteristically from their gentile counterparts. It may be no surprise that because of social conditions and professional restrictions, these Jewish fathers were mostly members of the business and financial class. However, when we went into more detail we found that the members of our sample not only belonged to the upper class; a considerable number were also entrepreneurs in new and expanding fields. In this respect the Jewish upper class showed a drive for innovations and also, implicitly, for science. Moreover, when this class was seeking professions with high reputations, probably amplified by Jewish marriage strategies and their high esteem of academics, a career in science became a desirable option. Due to the comparatively small number of scientists, this led to an overrepresentation of Jews in this field. Insofar, the main source for the Jewish success in science had been the economic success of previous generations. Subsequently, a look at the overrepresentation of scientists with a «mixed» background, i.e. where one parental side was non-Jewish, underlines that both groups had something in common which was not a «Jewish» imprint in a religious sense, but involved elements of Judaism which were connected with high social and educational standards.