The career path of a Jewish academic

After the First World War, when Land­shut began his stud­ies, the al­ready rel­a­tively high num­ber of Ger­man Jew­ish stu­dents once again rose sig­nif­i­cantly. With this flour­ish­ing of Jew­ish aca­d­e­mics in the 1920s also came grow­ing an­ti­semitism at the uni­ver­si­ties. The let­ter of rec­om­men­da­tion for Land­shut re­ports that his first at­tempt to qual­ify for a pro­fes­sor­ship (ha­bil­i­ta­tion) failed be­cause of the anti-​Jewish at­ti­tude of one de­part­ment mem­ber: ac­cord­ing to Heimann, An­dreas Walther spelled "Wal­ter" in the let­ter was the only and in this case cer­tainly a very pow­er­ful mem­ber of the NSDAP at the philo­soph­i­cal fac­ulty in Ham­burg. Around No­vem­ber 11, 1933 he signed the "State­ment of Sup­port of Pro­fes­sors at Ger­man Uni­ver­si­ties and Col­leges for Adolf Hitler" and, as can be seen from this let­ter, ac­tively acted against Jew­ish and/or regime-​critical col­leagues. Be­cause of these "machi­na­tions," Land­shut had to leave his po­si­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Ham­burg. Find­ing em­ploy­ment at an­other Ger­man uni­ver­sity was im­pos­si­ble due to the "Law for the Restora­tion of the Pro­fes­sional Civil Ser­vice."

Get­ting a job at the He­brew Uni­ver­sity was also prob­lem­atic in the 1930s. Dur­ing its ini­tial years, the in­sti­tu­tion was still ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily small. The first grad­u­a­tion class in 1932 con­sisted of 13 grad­u­ates. How­ever, with the open­ing of new in­sti­tutes, the uni­ver­sity man­age­ment sent out in­quiries and re­quests for rec­om­men­da­tions to draw Jew­ish aca­d­e­mics to Jerusalem. This prac­tice was re­versed after 1933, how­ever. Al­though the uni­ver­sity grew dur­ing the 1930s, the in­quiries and rec­om­men­da­tions ad­dressed to the man­age­ment from 1933 on far ex­ceeded the num­ber of po­si­tions avail­able. Since the Na­tional So­cial­ists had come to power and the "Law for the Restora­tion of the Pro­fes­sional Civil Ser­vice" was passed shortly there­after, the num­ber of ap­pli­ca­tions and let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion re­ceived at the He­brew Uni­ver­sity had risen rapidly. At that time, the He­brew Uni­ver­sity had ex­ploited its ca­pac­i­ties al­most com­pletely. Its staff, how­ever, were anx­ious to find a job for as many Jew­ish aca­d­e­mics who fled from Eu­rope and above all from Ger­many as pos­si­ble – at least tem­porar­ily– and some­times they raised money from in­ter­na­tional aid funds in order to do so. This is doc­u­mented by the ap­pli­ca­tions that can be found in the per­son­nel files of the uni­ver­sity archives as well as in the archived fold­ers filled with ap­pli­ca­tion doc­u­ments of per­sons who had to be re­jected. In this sit­u­a­tion, an im­pres­sive let­ter of rec­om­men­da­tion could thus be a de­ci­sive fac­tor for a suc­cess­ful job search.

Migration paths

In 1933, about 60 per­cent of Jews in Ger­many mi­grated. Dur­ing this first wave of mi­gra­tion dur­ing Na­tional So­cial­ism, the roughly 300,000 refugees first fled mostly to neigh­bor­ing Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, as many ini­tially as­sumed that the sit­u­a­tion would im­prove again. This let­ter does not men­tion that Land­shut first moved to France and then to Eng­land. Dur­ing the sec­ond wave of mi­gra­tion from about 1935 on­wards, an in­creas­ing num­ber of Jews sought refuge in other con­ti­nents, in­clud­ing Land­shut, who went to Cairo.

While his move­ments are quite typ­i­cal, their de­scrip­tion and the con­se­quences aris­ing from them are un­usu­ally mov­ing. Let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion from the early 1930s often do not ad­dress the des­per­ate sit­u­a­tion of the in­di­vid­ual they rec­om­mend. For ex­am­ple, Land­shut was en­cour­aged to mi­grate to Cairo after a per­sonal en­counter opened the prospect of being able to work there. In his let­ter Heimann ex­plic­itly de­scribes the plight in which the fam­ily found it­self since no one in Cairo seemed to re­mem­ber the plan of found­ing a col­lege.

Heimann fur­ther re­ports that while in Cairo, Land­shut ap­plied for a stipend from the Not­ge­mein­schaft der deutschen Wis­senschaft Prob­a­bly rather the Not­ge­mein­schaft der deutschen Wis­senschaftler im Aus­land/ Emer­gency Aid Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Ger­man Schol­ars Abroad in order to be able to go to Eng­land. Due to some mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion it was awarded to some­one else, how­ever. Aid or­ga­ni­za­tions and stipends en­abled many Ger­man Jews to mi­grate, some­times by cre­at­ing jobs for aca­d­e­mics to se­cure them an entry visa and res­i­dence per­mit abroad. This let­ter rep­re­sents a snap­shot from such an ini­ti­ated sup­port process – yet mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and ru­mors due to a lack of in­fra­struc­ture could hin­der the sup­port process, if not pre­vent it, as in this case.

Historical networks

Rec­om­men­da­tions allow us to re­con­struct so­cial and pro­fes­sional net­works. In Land­shut's case, the let­ter con­tains a small net­work of peo­ple who in­flu­enced his life in one way or an­other. And it shows very clearly what a de­ci­sive turn­ing point 1933 rep­re­sented for in­di­vid­ual so­cial net­works. On the one hand, the Na­tional So­cial­ist aca­d­e­mic Walther gains a mea­sure of in­flu­ence he did not pre­vi­ously have. On the other hand, Land­shut's net­work was ex­tended by sev­eral ac­tors such as the un­named Cairoans, Nor­man Ben­twich and now in­di­rectly Hans Kohn in this let­ter.

In­ter­ces­sion through let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion took on a new char­ac­ter dur­ing the pe­riod of Nazi per­se­cu­tion. Now it could ac­tu­ally be life-​saving. A sta­ble and re­li­able pro­fes­sional net­work be­came a so­cial and cul­tural cap­i­tal not to be un­der­es­ti­mated if it in­cluded peo­ple who knew or rec­og­nized the need of the per­son to be rec­om­mended and at the same time knew how to act within the frame­work of pro­fes­sional prac­tice.

With re­gard to pro­fes­sional net­works, two com­pet­ing ap­proaches are dis­cussed in his­tor­i­cal re­search. In his essay on the topic, Mark Gra­novet­ter ar­gues that es­pe­cially in pro­fes­sional so­cial net­works, it is the weak, more dis­tant so­cial con­nec­tions that help you fur­ther, be­cause that is where new in­for­ma­tion reaches so­cial net­works, which then con­tribute to fur­ther de­vel­op­ment. In con­trast, Cole­man's "clo­sure" ar­gu­ment, ac­cord­ing to which closed net­works with strong con­nec­tions, such as fam­ily or com­mu­nity net­works, can en­sure that po­ten­tial re­sources are ac­tu­ally made avail­able. The let­ter for Land­shut iden­ti­fies both weak and strong links and makes it clear that in this case the strong link be­tween Land­shut and Heimann was more suc­cess­ful.

Jewishness as a factor in letters of recommendation

The ad­vent of German-​Jewish mod­ernism, the legal eman­ci­pa­tion of the Jews, the Jew­ish En­light­en­ment – Haskalah – and Re­form Ju­daism al­lowed for new ways of liv­ing and the entry into new pro­fes­sional fields. The his­tor­i­cal and cul­tural in­flu­ence of the di­as­pora on the one hand and a grow­ing pa­tri­o­tism among the Jew­ish mid­dle class that had es­tab­lished it­self since Eman­ci­pa­tion on the other hand, in con­junc­tion with in­creas­ing an­ti­semitism, cre­ated cir­cum­stances in German-​Jewish his­tory that seem ex­cep­tional. At the same time, it of­fers an an­a­lyt­i­cal ap­proach to the un­der­stand­ing of moder­nity in gen­eral.

In aca­d­e­mic let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion be­fore 1933, the faith of the in­di­vid­ual rec­om­mended is rarely ad­dressed ex­plic­itly. In the case of Jew­ish aca­d­e­mics, the net­work of rec­om­men­da­tions often also con­sisted of Jew­ish aca­d­e­mics, as was the case with Siegfried Land­shut. Fur­ther­more, let­ters to the He­brew Uni­ver­sity often in­clude a para­graph con­firm­ing the Zion­ist men­tal­ity of the rec­om­mended. Fol­low­ing the "Law for the Restora­tion of the Pro­fes­sional Civil Ser­vice," which ex­pelled Jew­ish aca­d­e­mics from uni­ver­si­ties, Heimann con­sid­ered it im­por­tant to em­pha­size that Land­shut "did not dis­cover his Jew­ish heart only in 1933."

Heimann’s com­ments on Land­shut's "Jew­ish heart" show that he does not de­fine being Jew­ish in a strictly re­li­gious sense. Rather, he ex­plains that Land­shut was not ed­u­cated in a specif­i­cally Jew­ish tra­di­tion, but had pur­sued reg­u­lar stud­ies. Ac­cord­ing to Heimann, Land­shut felt the par­tic­u­lar bur­den and the spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance of being Jew­ish to be cen­tral to his life though, which is why he in­tended "to an­a­lyze the po­si­tion of the Jew and the sig­nif­i­cance of being Jew­ish in his­tory and the present state of the mod­ern world." In his let­ter, Heimann also jus­ti­fies Land­shut's right to a place in the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and thus in Pales­tine pre­cisely with this "spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance" of being Jew­ish in the mod­ern world. There Land­shut would fi­nally be among like-​minded peo­ple again and could pur­sue his stud­ies far from mis­ery and hu­mil­i­a­tion. Jew­ish iden­tity is de­scribed here as both a priv­i­lege and – in the “wrong” en­vi­ron­ment – a bur­den.

This part of the let­ter ac­knowl­edges that the lives of Jews in non-​Jewish and/or anti-​Jewish ma­jor­ity so­ci­eties are sub­ject to spe­cial chal­lenges. At the same time, both Heimann in his writ­ing and Land­shut in his work in­te­grate Jew­ish his­tory into larger nar­ra­tives, such as that of "the mod­ern world." Cur­rent his­tor­i­cal re­search also ap­plies this ap­proach, ac­cord­ing to which the per­spec­tive of Jew­ish his­tory is par­tic­u­larly suited for re­search­ing the de­vel­op­ment of trans­for­ma­tion processes and es­pe­cially mod­ern­iza­tion with all its achieve­ments and crises. In the case of Land­shut's re­search and Heimann's writ­ing about it, it is above all the aware­ness that being Jew­ish was not only de­fined by re­li­gious cus­toms, but that it de­ter­mined the so­cial po­si­tion of every Jew­ish per­son and that being Jew­ish should there­fore be an­a­lyzed as a so­cial fac­tor.

Friendship and Responsibility

The se­man­tics of friend­ship as well as re­spon­si­bil­ity and loy­alty ap­pear in many let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion. Ed­uard Heimann also in­tro­duces Land­shut as his "close friend" right at the be­gin­ning of the let­ter.

The fact that friend­ship is not a su­pertem­po­ral phe­nom­e­non, but de­scribes dif­fer­ent re­la­tion­ships at dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions is ev­i­dent in this case too. Friend­ship here serves as a sig­nal word for hi­er­ar­chiz­ing the re­la­tion­ship. In using it, Heimann sug­gests to Kohn that Land­shut is not "just" a col­league or an em­ployee, but that his re­la­tion­ship to him is closer than that. It is a – per­haps un­con­scious – styl­is­tic de­vice to give spe­cial em­pha­sis to his rec­om­men­da­tion. We do not know whether Land­shut and Heimann ac­tu­ally were friends and if so how close they were.

Fur­ther­more, the let­ter con­tains se­man­tics of re­spon­si­bil­ity and loy­alty. These occur not only in writ­ten form when Nor­man Ben­twich "con­firmed orally and in writ­ing with the great­est loy­alty that it is nec­es­sary to do some­thing for Land­shut." That Heimann feels to some ex­tent re­spon­si­ble for im­prov­ing the fate of his for­mer as­sis­tant also be­comes ev­i­dent in the de­scrip­tion of his ac­tions or when he points out that "I have tried count­less things to help him out, noth­ing has suc­ceeded so far." While the ref­er­ence to their friend­ship lends his words the nec­es­sary em­pha­sis, the de­scrip­tion of his failed at­tempts to help in­creases the let­ter’s ur­gency. Re­ports of fail­ure were rather un­usual in let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion until 1933. In this case, how­ever, it serves to make Kohn feel some re­spon­si­bil­ity to help since it makes it clear to him that other ways out of ex­is­ten­tial dis­tress have al­ready been tried and failed and that this might be a last chance.

After care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, Siegfried Land­shut re­turned to Ham­burg Uni­ver­sity in 1950 / 1951. Let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion such as the one pre­sented here can­not only pro­vide his­to­ri­ans with in­for­ma­tion about their sub­ject’s ca­reers. They con­tain in­for­ma­tion about con­di­tions at the time of mi­gra­tion as well as about per­sonal con­nec­tions and sup­port net­works that arose from these pro­fes­sional con­tacts.

Select Bibliography

Selected English Titles