Also, I had read that Jews from eastern europe that immigrated to the US were almost universally literate even if they weren't wealthy in Poland or whatnot.
Was the status of Jews say from 1860-1920 pretty similar in Germany to the rest of Eastern Europe, or were they more disadvantaged in Eastern Europe?
This may just be because Poland was more poor than Germany.
The German Jews were a highly urbanized, bourgeois, middle-class community and highly integrated in German society. According to the population census of 1925, around 564 000 Jewish Germans lived in the Reich. As you said, that's close to 1% of the total population. In the first half of the 20th century the Jewish community of Germany was not a growing, but a stagnating, even slightly shrinking one. -- Contrary to the frequent depictions of a strong Jewish influx in right-wing propaganda of the time. This perception was probably based on the more recent immigration of 108 000 Eastern European Jews in the 1920s (called Ostjuden in German at the time). These Jews were on the average poorer and more openly religious than the indigenous Jews of Germany. Compared to them the Eastern European Jews were a more "visible minority".
The Jewish population was concentrated in the largest cities of the Reich, around a third in Berlin alone. Their occupational pattern was relatively stable and -- as in many places -- the product of historic pre-modern practices of exclusion from certain professions. In relation to the total population, the Jews were overrepresented in the areas of small business like retail (often self-employed), in trade, and in banking (although not by a large degree). They were traditionally underrepresented in agriculture (as a result of their concentration in urban areas) and in the industry (as a result of their middle-class/self-employed traditions). The Jews of Germany were in no way disproportionally wealthy or powerful. If you want, the "most powerful" Jews of Germany, if it even merits the term, were the founders and owners of large department store chains like the Tietz or the Alsberg family. That didn't protect them from dispossession and eventually murder at the hands of the National Socialist regime.