Lax Lecture to Deal with Strategies of Assimilation Adopted by Jews in Pre-World War I Germany

This year's Lax lecturer will be Fritz Stern, university professor emeritus of Columbia, an internationally respected historian and specialist on modern Europe. Professor Stern will speak October 22 on the topic "Neither Disraeli nor Dreyfus: German Jews and Liberal Europe."

According to Assistant Professor of History Jeremy King, a former student of Stern's, much of Stern's work has concentrated on the paradoxical situation for German Jews during the nineteenth century. Emancipated, in many ways integrated into the mainstream of German society, Jews nonetheless found that full acceptance eluded them.

The "assimilationist" strategy pursued by Benjamin Disraeli--a Jew baptized into the Church of England as an adolescent and destined to become prime minister of Great Britain--did not apply as well to the situation in Germany. Nor did the more combative strategy that was forced on Alfred Dreyfus and on his allies in France. There, strong anti-Semitism in official circles translated during the 1890s into the framing of Dreyfus and into a challenge to the principle that one could be simultaneously Jewish and French--and also into Dreyfus's vindication and into the birth of Zionism.

In Germany, perhaps, anti-Semitism was stronger than in Great Britain and less strong than in France, and thus in many ways more difficult to confront and to combat, according to King. What options did German Jews have in Liberal Europe? Stern's lecture will provide some answers.

The John Lax Memorial Lecture was endowed in 1982 by professors Peter and Anneli Lax in memory of their son John, a historian who taught at Mount Holyoke in the 1970s. The annual lecture is given by a historian of the highest distinction; past Lax lecturers have included C. Vann Woodward, Jonathan Spence, Gerda Lerner, Eric Hobsbawm, Natalie Z. Davis, and William McFeely.