page_title: History of the Jews in Germany
section_title: Intellectuals
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Jews in Germany / Weimar years, 1919–33 / Intellectuals
caption_attribution_description: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
context_page_description: The history of the Jews in Germany goes back to the Early Middle Ages and High Middle Ages when Jewish settlers founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The community survived under Charlemagne, but suffered during the Crusades. Accusations of well poisoning during the Black Death led to mass slaughter of German Jews and they fled in large numbers to Poland. The Jewish communities of the cities of Mainz, Speyer and Worms became the center of Jewish life during medieval times. "This was a golden age as area bishops protected the Jews resulting in increased trade and prosperity."
  The First Crusade began an era of persecution of Jews in Germany. Entire communities, like those of Trier, Worms, Mainz and Cologne, were slaughtered. The war upon the Hussite heretics became the signal for renewed persecution of Jews. The end of the 15th century was a period of religious hatred that ascribed to Jews all possible evils. The atrocities during the Khmelnytsky Uprising committed by Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks drove the Polish Jews back into western Germany. With Napoleon's fall in 1815, growing nationalism resulted in increasing repression.
context_section_description: Jewish intellectuals and creative professionals were among the leading figures in many areas of Weimar culture. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918. Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included physicist Albert Einstein; sociologists Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl; communist political theorist Arthur Rosenberg; sexologist and pioneering LGBT advocate Magnus Hirschfeld, and many others. Seventeen German citizens were awarded Nobel prizes during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), five of whom were Jewish scientists. The German-Jewish literary magazine, Der Morgen, was established in 1925. It published essays and stories by prominent Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka and Leo Hirsch until its liquidation by the Nazi government in 1938.
caption: Heidelberg University was considered to be one of the most eminent institutions of Jewish-German learning.
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