German Refugee Rabbis in the United States and the Formation of ‘the Last Generation of the German Rabbinate’

Abstract

This article uses an innovative digital humanities database and generational history in order to analyse the lives and careers of German refugee rabbis in the United States. It identifies the cohort among the refugee rabbis who were part of a communitisation process and defined themselves as ‘the last generation of the German rabbinate’, and illuminates how and why they could continue their careers in the United States better than elsewhere. It also examines their late returns to the country of their birth and analyses how they made sense of their own history by exchanges with the Germans. This was part of the transnational knowledge transfer that presented them as the last rabbis in the German-Jewish tradition, but also allowed them to successfully relaunch the establishment of modern Jewish seminaries for rabbinical training on the European continent and achieve symbolic continuity, eighty years after their destruction by Nazism.