German military service in WWI shaped Jewish intellectuals’ romantic view of eastern Jews.

Evidence

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.” … In capturing the fullness of the so-called Ostjuden, or eastern Jews, whom he observed in the Lithuanian towns and cities, in what he would later title Das ostjüdische Antlitz [The face of east European Jewry] (1920), Zweig employed not only the impassioned language of an ethnic apologist, but also a notable strain of orientalist rhetoric. In Zweig’s account, the eastern Jew maintains a close lineage with the oriental Jew, a figure with whom there is almost virtual interchangeability in terms of their stock features. In Zweig’s rendition, the eastern Jew represents the exotic other, the more authentic, primal Jew—derived from myth, lore, and from his own “personal” encounters—a variation, perhaps, of the same figure who first entered the German-Jewish imagination in Buber’s Hasidic writings from the turn of the century. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 417

Categorization

• XREF: War experience as ethnographic contact zone parallels colonial officers’ encounters with ‘native’ populations; relates to Said’s observation that colonial administration produced orientalist knowledge.
• QUESTION: Did German military occupation of the Baltics function as an internal-colonial apparatus producing a ‘native’ Jewish subject for German-Jewish consumption?