German-Jewish writers idealized eastern Jews as authentic, pure, and indestructible.

Evidence

Writing to Martin Buber, in May 1918, the German-Jewish novelist Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) announced his plans for a new book: “I am going to write a full account of the Jews of the East, as I have come to know them among the Lithuanian Jews. In a text written in conjunction with some fifty new lithographs by [Hermann] Struck, I am going to establish the claim that I now simply write down here: the Jewish human being is indestructible, undistortable, undistractible, is oriented toward purity, sincerity, candor.” Zweig and Struck were at the time both stationed in the German Press Division Ober-Ost, the place where Zweig had his first opportunity, as he emphatically put it, “to experience the eastern Jews personally.” What is most striking about Zweig’s letter to Buber is his unabashed admission of the ideological bent of his project, namely, to render a gripping portrait of the eastern Jews, in highly romanticized, idealized, even utopian terms. In order to achieve this most effectively, Zweig had to rely on a strict dichotomy between the world of eastern Jewry—marked by such choice catchwords as “purity,” “sincerity,” and “candor”—and the world of Western Jewry, the ultimate site of cultural crisis. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism framework and the general pattern of self-Orientalizing the Other within one’s own ethnic group; also relates to how European writers idealized rural or folk populations as authentic.
• QUESTION: How did Zweig’s idealization of eastern Jews intersect with German antisemitic caricatures of the same population during WWI occupation?