No puns on this one, guys. I'm sure you're missing them already.
I've been reading through the FAQ on, you guessed it, the Holocaust and WWII, when this question occurred to me. I know very little about active Judaism, but I do know that it was a quite separate culture that often existed parallel to other cultures. There would surely have been liberals and progressive thinkers targeted by the NSDAP during its rise to power (and the time it was in power, too), and while it's dangerously close to alternate history I do wonder just what they would have produced had the Nazi Party not been around.
I guess another way to phrase this question is: how much cultural capital was lost to the Holocaust? WWII was a horrific waste of material resources, but what did we lose in terms of art and culture?
Compared to the situation in the rest of continental Europe, German Jews were relatively well-integrated into the surrounding German-speaking culture. Jews in Germany were a small proportion of the population: The German census of 1933 found a total population of 65.3 million persons, of which less than 550,00 self-identified as Jews. Unlike many Jews in Poland and the Soviet union, Jews in Germany generally spoke "proper" modern german dialects that were essentially indistinguishable from the standardized Hochdeutsche dialects spoken by most urban Germans of the early 20th century. Over 70% of Jews lived in urban areas, and of that 70%, over 80% lived in the largest 10 cities in Germany: Berlin (about 160,000), Frankfurt am Main (about 26,000), Breslau (about 20,000), Hamburg (about 17,000), Cologne (about 15,000), Hannover (about 13,000), and Leipzig (about 12,000). SOURCE
The situation was very different in Poland, the Soviet Union, and rest of Eastern Europe. There, many Jews continued to speak Yiddish, rather than proper German, although in urban areas the younger generation often was in the process of shifting into the use of Polish or Russian as a language of daily life. Unlike in Germany proper, the Jews of Poland (and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union) continued to write mostly in Hebrew characters, and sometimes had limited competency in Latin or Cyrillic characters -- a reflection of a continuing segregation of the eduction system along religious lines in a way that had vanished from Germany-proper by the later 19th century. Unlike the small Jewish population of Germany itself, the lands that would be occupied by Germany during the war had substantial Jewish minorities: Close to nine million Jews lived in pre-war Eastern Europe. In the Second Polish Republic, ~2.82 million persons, out of a total population of about 32 million, self-identifed as Jewish -- this almost 9% of the total population, with some Voivodeships having over 30% Jewish population in urban areas. All this is from the 1931 Polish Census.
In conclusion, ironically, the Jews of German were the least numerous and most-assimilated population of Jews in any of the nations east of the Rhine.
Well, it's worth noting that most German Jews survived the Holocaust. Hitler didn't come to power in 1933 & start killing Jews; it was more gradual. The Jewish population within Germany in 1933 was a bit over 520,000 people. Most fled early on, but almost all that stayed were killed. The Jews in Eastern Europe suffered far higher casualty rates.
German Jews were highly urbanized and more integrated into Germany than than Jews in the Soviet Union. Jews were a bit under 1% of the population but were very overrepresented in a variety of professions (source):
| Column 1 | Column 2 |
|---|---|
| Lawyers / Public Notaries | 16.6% |
| Brokers / Commission Agents | 15.1% |
| Patent Lawyers | 13.3% |
| Doctors | 10.9% |
| Dentists | 8.6% |
| Theater and Film Directors | 5.6% |
| Editors and Writers | 5.1% |
The source also indicates that the Nazis estimated that about 30% of college professors were Jewish. By my count, there were eleven German Jews who won a Nobel Prize through 1945.
It's of course worth noting that as you might expect, more successful Germans were more capable of leaving Germany in the mid-1930s. Many of the successful German Jewish academics came to the United States to teach here.
German Jews are called "Yekke" amongst Eastern European Jews. There are several attempts at etymology:
It may come from the short jackets they wore in contrast to the caftans worn in the East.
Jacob is contracted to "Yash(k)a" in the East. In the West it's "Yekke".
In his Rabbi von Bacherach Heinrich Heine introduced a Frankfurt Jew called like that. He implies a connection to the Frankfurt dialect word "Jeck" which is how they call their merrymakers.
There are Yekke jokes in Israel. The stereotypical German Jew seems to be somewhat proud of Adolf Hitler and harbours other typical German characteristics: he is a workaholic, he loves order and shouts in German.
Cultural capital lost in the Holocaust is very difficult to ascertain. Of course many artists and scholars have been killed. But musing about what Europe has lost is rude because it reduces the victims to how they could have been useful to their non-Jewish neighbors.