Weimar Republic Books: -The Jews in Wiemar Germany -Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish question" by Sarah Ann Gordon (Jews in Germany 1910-1933) (jan 1, 1918 – jan 1, 1933)

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The Jews in Wiemar Germany pg. 94

"Special efforts were made to reach out to Christian church groups and school children. The Essen Jewish Community, with the help of the local Centralverein organization, led the way in 1919, and dozens of synagogues followed suit in subsequent years. Unhappily, some localities built bridges halfheartedly, or not at all. In 1930 the Representative Assembly of the Berlin Jewish Community unanimously adopted a resolution endorsing educational talks in the synagogues for non-Jewish audiences as an effective means of combating prejudice and antagonism, but a year later the idea was still in the planning stage. At least one synagogue canceled the visits of school children because of complaints that they disturbed its peace and quiet. And yet, judging from Nazi protests against such visits, they may have done some good.” According to the minority of German Jews that adhered to Zionism, most of these self-defense efforts did little good at all. They were demeaning in their repetitious apologetics and their double standard of self-discipline. Moreover, they did harm by spreading false hopes and deflecting attention from what the Zionists believed was the one effective antidote to anti-Semitism: Jewish nationalism. Racial prejudice was the inevitable and justifiable response of one people to attempts by another to make it share in the formation of its destiny. It was an instinctive response independent of reason and will, and hence common to all peoples, the Jews included. The one way to fight it was for the races to go their separate ways. For the Jews, that meant self-imposed isolation in Germany as a prelude to emigration to Palestine."

Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish question"
by Sarah Ann Gordon pg. 10-13

"Though Jews were a small and declining minority, they had specific occupational characteristics that distinguished them from the population at large. They were over-represented in business, commerce, and public and private service; they were underrepresented in agriculture, industry, and domestic service. These characteristics were already evident in the Middle Ages and appeared in the census data as early as 1843.2* In 1933 business and commerce occupied 61 percent of all Jews in the labor force, as compared to 18 percent of all working Germans; and whereas 22 percent of Jews were employed in industry, 40 percent of Germans were similarly employed. Most striking, however, was the fact that only 2 percent of Jews were engaged in agriculture, in contrast to 29 percent among their German counterparts; this was true for both German and immigrant Jews. Immigrant Jews tended to enter the industrial labor market more than did German Jews, and this reflected their weaker financial position and lesser assimilation. In Prussia, where three-fourths of the Jews lived, by 1925 the percentage of Jewish executives in commerce and trade was over eight times that of non-Jews, and in industry it was over two times higher. These characteristics also held true at middle levels of management. Some cities, particularly Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, and Breslau, had even higher percentages of Jews in high and middle-level positions.
Within the fields of business and commerce, Jews were very active in the retail and wholesale trade. For example, between 1928 and 1932 Jews represented 25 percent of all individuals employed in retail businesses and handled 25 percent of total sales, although they comprised only 0.74 percent of the labor force. This high percentage of Jewish retailers was not evenly distributed among all retail trades, but it was concentrated in certain areas such as textiles and clothing, the grain trade, and in warehouses and department stores.Jews were also very active as wholesale traders in specific industries; for example, they owned 41 percent of iron and scrap iron firms and 57 percent of other metal businesses.
In addition to being active as middlemen, Jews were prominent in private banking under both Jewish and non-Jewish ownership or control. They were especially visible in private banking in Berlin, which in 1923 had 150 private (versus state) Jewish banks, as opposed to only 11 private non-Jewish banks.It should be noted, however, that the percentage of private banks under Jewish control was declining. Whereas private Jewish banks represented 23 percent of all banks in 1923, this number had dropped to 18 percent by 1930. Still, the influence of Jews in banking is not completely illustrated by these figures. In 1930, 43 percent of the leading positions in private Jewish banks were occupied by Jews, which is not surprising.^"* What is interesting, however, is that Jews also occupied 5.8 percent of the leading positions in non- Jewish banks.This represented almost eight times the percentage of Jews in the labor force.In 1913, fifteen prominent Jews held 211 seats on boards of directors of banks, and by 1928 this number had risen to 718.
Jews were also influential in joint-stock corporations, the stock market, the insurance industry, and legal and economic consulting firms.Before the First World War, for example, Jews occupied 13 percent of the directorships of joint-stock corporations and 24 percent of the supervisory positions within these corporations. Even by 1932, when anti-Semitism was supposed to have reached a new high, Jews represented almost 3 percent of the German Economic Council, which advised the government during the depression.Jews were very active in the stock market, particularly in Berlin, where in 1928 they comprised 80 percent of the leading members of the stock exchange. By 1933, when the Nazis began eliminating Jews from prominent positions, 85 percent of the brokers on the Berlin Stock Exchange were dismissed because of their “race."
If one considers all of the branches of the economy, it is clear that Jews were significantly over-represented as “independents,” that is, a larger percentage of Jews than non-Jews was self-employed. This reflected not only self-employment of Jews in business and commerce, but also their very considerable numbers in free professions. They were also more highly represented as white- collar workers than the German population as a whole, and correspondingly underrepresented as blue-collar workers and domestic servants."*^ These occupational characteristics were true for both German and immigrant Jews. There was, however, only a small percentage of immigrant Jews in leading positions; they were more likely than German Jews to secure positions as blue- collar workers and comprised 36 percent of all Jews engaged in blue-collar work, although they represented only 23 percent of the Jewish labor force.
During the years 1873 to 1929, between 1 and 3 percent of civil servants were Jewish. They could be found at all levels of civil service during the Weimar years, especially in states where the SPD was influential. Even though, as already mentioned, Jews represented only 0.74 percent of the labor force, in Prussia during 1904 they comprised 27 percent of all lawyers, 10 percent of all apprenticed lawyers, 5 percent of court clerks, 4 percent of magistrates, and up to 30 percent of all higher ranks of the judiciary. Clearly, then, Jews were overrepresented as civil servants and as high-level white-collar workers, especially within the judicial system. Strauss indicates that between 1933 and 1939, 17,375 lawyers, junior barristers, and civil servants were dis¬ missed because they were Jewish.
German universities admitted Jews on an equal footing as early as 1790, and Jews were overrepresented among university professors and students between 1870 and 1933. For example, in 1909-1910, although Jews represented less than 1 percent of the German population, almost 12 percent of the instructors at German universities were Jewish, and an additional 7 percent were Jewish converts to Christianity, so that almost 19 percent of the instructors in Germany were of Jewish origin. At higher academic levels, their over-representation was smaller but nonetheless highly significant. Among full professors, 3 percent were Jewish, and an additional 4 percent were converts. Thus at least one-fourth of full professors and instructors combined had Jewish origins. Ringer interprets these figures as indicating that there was evidence of discrimination against Jews at the higher academic levels. How¬ ever, he also points out that these figures are open to the interpretation that Jews were not excluded from the academic world and that they fared quite well even in Wilhelminian Germany— in fact, they probably were even better off between 1918 and 1933 than earlier. Jews also represented an extremely high number of university students; for example, in 1905-1906 Jewish students comprised 25 percent of the law and medical students and 34 percent of the graduate students in philosophy. The percentage of Jewish doctors was also quite high, especially in large cities, where they sometimes were a majority.

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