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Ostjuden (German for "Eastern Jews"; singular Ostjude, adjective ostjüdisch) was a term used in Germany and Austria during the first half of the 20th century to refer to Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. The term often carried a pejorative connotation, echoing earlier derogatory epithets that reflected the negative qualities attributed to Eastern European Jews by German racism since the 19th century.

Because the stereotype of the Eastern Jew blended antisemitism with anti-Slavic sentiment and xenophobia, hostility toward Eastern European Jews could be found among both antisemitic non-Jewish Germans and assimilated German Jews alike. The latter sometimes reacted with fear and contempt to the arrival in Germany of Jews who spoke Yiddish, dressed differently, practised orthodox Judaism, and lived in extreme poverty. Other German Jews, however, were fascinated by Eastern European Jews and viewed them with sympathy and admiration, seeing in them a more authentic form of Jewish life and religious expression, a resistance to the values of bourgeois society, and the prototype of a Jewish identity untainted by assimilation.

The term Ostjude was widely used in völkisch and Nazi antisemitic propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s, but has been used neutrally in Jewish historical studies since the 1980s. In the German-speaking Jewish world and in Israel, the Ostjude is contrasted with the Yekke (or Jecke), the stereotype of the German Jew as bourgeois and largely assimilated into Western European culture.

The precise origins of the term Ostjude are difficult to trace.^[1] While it is frequently attributed to Nathan Birnbaum, a Jewish writer and journalist who used the adjective ostjüdisch in 1897 and introduced the noun Ostjude in 1904,^[2][3][4] this attribution is contentious among scholars.^[1] By the time of World War I, the term had acquired a decidedly pejorative connotation, joining the ranks of other derogatory labels like Schnorrer ("beggar"), Betteljude ("Jewish beggar"), and Pollack (a slang term for "Pole").^[5]

In its derogatory sense, Ostjude evoked negative qualities – laziness, dirtiness, promiscuity, ignorance, pettiness, etc. – that German racism had attributed to Central and Eastern European Jews since the 19th century,^[6] if not since the 18th century.^[7] The anti-Jewish stereotype of the Ostjude became a focal point for antisemitism, antislavism and xenophobia, attracting hostility from both openly antisemitic non-Jewish Germans and assimilated Jewish Germans alike. Among the former, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke warned of the danger posed by the Polish-Jewish "tribe", "alien to the European, and especially to the German national character".^[8][9][10] Among the latter, the Jewish journalist Hugo Ganz deplored the Ostjude's "laziness, their filth, their craftiness, their perpetual readiness to cheat", which gave rise to the "evil wish" that "this part of the Polish population did not exist at all".^[11][12][13] Similarly, the Jewish lawyer and activist Max Naumann described the Ostjuden as fundamentally foreign to German Jews – "foreign concerning the feelings, foreign concerning the spirit, physically foreign"^[8] – and the future German foreign minister Walther Rathenau characterised them as "a tribe of particularly foreign people", an "Asiatic horde on the sands of the March", "not a living member of the people, but an alien organism in its body".^[14] Traces of the widespread prejudice against Eastern Jews can be found in the work of the writer Karl Emil Franzos^[15][16][3] and in the autobiographical memoirs of Stefan Zweig.^[17]

Official speeches and private comments rife with hostility and contempt towards Eastern European Jews were already present in the communications of Otto von Bismarck and spread from the 1880s, when political anti-Semitism was born in Germany.^[18] In a 1904 parliamentary speech, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow denounced Eastern Jews as scroungers and conspirators.^[19] In the 1920s and 1930s, völkisch and Nazi propaganda further fueled these prejudices, appropriating the term Ostjude and its associated racist stereotype.^[20] This is evident in the film The Eternal Jew (1940) and the political rhetoric of the Völkischer Beobachter, Goebbels and other figures within the Nazi regime who stoked fears about the "danger of the Ostjuden".^[21]

The "Ostjuden problem" was largely a fabrication of antisemitic propaganda. The vast majority of Jewish immigrants were merely transiting through Germany on their way to America and other destinations^[22][23] and had no intention of settling in a country that, with its entrenched hostility, offered little opportunity for an autonomous and flourishing Jewish cultural life.^[24] The fabricated crisis, however, had a tangible impact. During the Weimar Republic, it led to the persecution of Eastern European Jews, including deportations, internment in camps, and violent attacks.^[25][26] Even the naturalisation was often deliberately protracted and arduous for fremdstämmiger Ostjuden (foreign-born Eastern Jews).^[27]

The term Ostjude has also been used neutrally, devoid of negative connotation, by Jewish intellectuals. Notably, Birnbaum and others, particularly in the years before the First World War, sought to bridge the divide between native and immigrant German Jews by presenting a positive, sometimes idealised, image of Eastern European Jews (see § The cult of the Ostjuden, below).^[6] Furthermore, the term has been adopted neutrally in scholarly studies of Jewish history and culture, especially since the 1980s.^[28]

In the German-speaking Jewish world and in Israel, the Ostjude is opposed to the Yekke (or Jecke), who is the stereotypical German Jew, bourgeois, largely assimilated into Western European culture.^[3] In everyday conversation and writing, Yekke is often used as a synonym for snobbery and insensitive meticulousness, while the word Ostjude evokes the image of the Jew as a victim of his own people.^[29]

The stereotype of the Ostjude developed during the first half of the 19th century, although the term only became popular during and after the First World War, when people in Germany began to complain about the "danger of the Eastern Jews" (Ostjudengefahr) or the "Eastern Jewish question" (Ostjudenfrage).^[30][5] According to widespread prejudice among Germans, including assimilated German Jews, Jews from Eastern Europe were dirty, noisy, uncouth, culturally backward and immoral: in their eyes they appeared as a separate and inferior ethnic community.^[30] Moreover, Jews in general and Eastern Jews in particular were accused of being dishonest, cheats, traitors to their country, enemy agents and communist revolutionaries.^[31] Steven E. Aschheim [he] argues that the stereotypical image of the Ostjude stemmed from the divergence between a West where Jews were emancipated, assimilated and bourgeois, and an East where political exclusion of Jews and traditional Jewish culture persisted; this divergence in the 19th and 20th centuries would have led a crisis in European Jewish society and its international solidarity.^[32]

The differences between German and Eastern European Jews in Germany were striking. German Jews were largely assimilated and rarely spoke Yiddish, a language often disparaged as mere "jargon" (Jargon). Its use was seen as incompatible with higher culture, and all sectors of German-Jewish society were pressured to abandon it in their pursuit of modernisation and acculturation.^[33][3] Beyond language and accent, Eastern European Jews stood out for their distinctive dress (kaftan and payot), strict Talmudic education, and adherence to Hasidism, which clashed with the Enlightenment and bourgeois values embraced by Western Jews undergoing assimilation. Furthermore, they often lived in extreme poverty, concentrated in the dark and overcrowded ghettos of large cities or in the closed backwardness of the shtetls, from which they fled due to pogroms and persecution.^[34][35][3] Economic poverty was accompanied by a lack of political rights: while Jewish emancipation in the West followed the French Revolution and was largely achieved by the 19th and 20th centuries, official antisemitism persisted in Russia, with violent manifestations as late as the 1880s.^[36]

A wave of pogroms swept southern Russia and Ukraine between 1881 and 1884, followed by repressive measures and antisemitic state policies. This led to an unprecedented exodus of Eastern European Jews.^[37] Between 1881 and 1914, an estimated 2.4 to 2.7 million Jews fled Europe and sought refuge in America, South Africa, Palestine and Oceania.^[38] Most of these emigrants passed through Germany heading for the ports of Hamburg and Bremen or other western European cities for their onward journeys.^[23] This influx of predominantly poor and less-educated Eastern European Jews^[39] into Western European Jewish communities provoked mixed reactions. Some Western European Jews reacted with dismay and hostility to the "sudden appearance on their doorsteps of a huge, untidy, endlessly marching army of distant cousins from the east".^[40]

In France and Britain, protests erupted against the "foreign invasion" of unskilled workers willing to accept any wage, and the never-dormant xenophobia and antisemitic sentiments of the native population re-emerged.^[40] In Germany, the situation was further complicated by the continuing public relevance of religious affiliation: since being Jewish and a member of a formally established religious community entailed special rights and obligations, the influx of Eastern Jews posed a particular problem of integration into local communities.^[41] German Jews feared that immigrants from the East would disqualify them in the eyes of their non-Jewish compatriots, partly because the alarm over the arrival of Eastern Jews was often fuelled by antisemitic publications against the national Jewish minority.^[42] Furthermore, the hostility of German Jews also depended on the traditionalist orthodox orientation of Eastern Jews, as opposed to the liberal-reformist orientation prevalent in German Judaism, which led to tensions in synagogue life and rivalries in the ordination of rabbis.^[43]

German Jewish attitudes toward Eastern European coreligionists were not only marked by hostility or contempt. Already in the 19th century, writers such as Leopold Kompert and Aron Bernstein had depicted "with sympathy and human warmth the life of the ghetto, stylising it in Gemütlichkeit in a warm intimacy".^[44] In the 20th century, a peculiar interpretation of the divide between Western and Eastern Jews emerged among Jewish intellectuals who idealised the Eastern European Jew, casting him as the protagonist of a more authentic form of life, religiosity, and resistance to bourgeois society and capitalist modernisation.^[45][46] Traces of this underlying inspiration, visible as early as the correspondence of Heinrich Heine,^[3][47] became a significant theme in the work of Joseph Roth, in Martin Buber's Hasidic tales, in Alfred Döblin's Journey to Poland^[48] and in the work of Franz Kafka, which, according to Giuliano Baioni [it], is marked by the anguished "awareness of the fragmentation of the ostjüdisch unity".^[49]

Arnold Zweig is a key figure of the "cult of the Ostjuden".^[45] Influenced by Buber's Hasidic writings, Zweig felt alienated from both institutional German Judaism and official Zionism.^[50] His 1920 book Das ostjüdische Antlitz ("The Eastern Jewish Face"), featuring illustrations by Hermann Struck, stated: "This book speaks of the Eastern Jews as someone who has tried to see them".^[51] Struck's beautifully crafted portraits challenged the prevailing stereotype by showing that "The Eastern Jewish countenance was not hideous nor depraved but reflected beauty, hidden strength, and great sensitivity".^[52]

Hermann Cohen, a prominent neo-Kantian philosopher and one of the leading intellectuals of German Jewry, also celebrated the Ostjuden's serene fortitude and noble naturalness.^[53] Particularly before World War I, intellectuals associated with the journal Ost und West ("East and West") sought to raise awareness of Eastern European Jewish culture among German Jews.^[54] Figures like the liberal rabbi Felix Goldmann [de] emphasised the fundamental unity and solidarity between German and Eastern European Jews, warning that "today the tide goes against Polish Jews, tomorrow against naturalised Jews, the day after against established German citizens".^[55] The shared experience of the Nazi extermination camps and the resulting sense of brotherhood with the Ostjuden is also a theme in a Primo Levi's poem collected in Ad ora incerta.^[56]

The ambivalent attitude of German Jews toward their Eastern European coreligionists^[57] was reflected in the Zionist movement's internal debates. Zionism sought to unite Western and Eastern Jews through a shared national identity. As Theodor Herzl said in 1897, Zionism wanted to achieve "something remarkable and heretofore regarded as impossible: a close alliance between the ultra-modern and the ultra-conservative elements of Jewry [...]. A union of this kind is possible only on a national basis".^[58]. This alliance was interpreted differently. Some, like Leon Pinsker, saw it philanthropically, as the rescue of Eastern European Jews by their wealthier Western counterparts. Others, like the German Communist Moses Hess and the Hungarian Zionist Max Nordau, viewed it as the redemption of the Western Jews from the moral misery of assimilation and the rediscovery of the authentic Jewish identity personified by the Eastern Jew.^[59]

The idealisation of Eastern Jewish identity was even more pronounced in the writings of cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha'am, who criticised political Zionists, including Nardau, for being influenced by a "foreign culture" disconnected from Judaism's deep roots.^[60] Similarly, Nathan Birnbaum criticised Western Judaism for lacking an original and autonomous culture.^[61] Birnbaum, who is often credited with coining the word "Ostjude"^[1] as well as the word "Zionism",^[62] reversed the liberal order of priorities, calling for the emancipation of Eastern Judaism from Western Judaism. Opposing the Zionist aim of transcending Eastern Jewish identity, Birnbaum promoted the use of the Yiddish language, and in the last years of his life he embraced Orthodox religious views.^[62]

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that this idealisation of the Ostjude by German Jews sometimes ethe rising völkisch nationalism, incorporating themes of blood, soil, rootedness in the ethnic community, virility and courage. As Bauman notes: "Once more, the 'Eastern European Jews' turn into a myth construed according to the latest concerns of their more civilized Western kin".^[63]

After World War II, tensions arose within the newly re-established Jewish communities in Germany. Assimilated German Jewish survivors, many of whom had endured the war by hiding or through the protection of mixed marriage, regarded the incoming Orthodox Jewish displaced persons from Eastern Europe with suspicion. These reservations were rooted in social, cultural, and linguistic differences, and revived old stereotypes of Ostjuden. Conversely, many Eastern European Jews, often Zionist-leaning and eager to leave Germany, looked down on the German Jews. They criticised the separate community structures and accused the German Jews of not sharing the collective Jewish destiny. Despite these tensions, Eastern European Jews often became the backbone, and in some cases the majority, of postwar German Jewish communities.^[3]

A testimony and a reflection on the living conditions of Eastern European Jews can be found in Joseph Roth's 1927 essay Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews).^[64] Roth, himself an Eastern European Jew who had moved to Vienna, set out to describe the life and circumstances of this community in the hope, as he wrote, "that there may still be readers from whom the Eastern Jews do not require protection":^[65] 

readers with respect for pain, for human greatness, and for the squallor that everywhere accompanies misery; Western Europeans who are not merely proud of their clean mattresses. These are the readers who feel they might have something to learn from the East, and who have perhaps already sensed that great people and great ideas (...) have come from Galicia, Russia, Lithuania, and Romania

Roth sympathetically describes the suffering of Eastern European Jews ("The Eastern Jew fails to see the beauty of the East. He has not been allowed to live in villages or in big cities. Here Jews live in dirty streets and collapsing houses. Their Christian neighbours threatens them. The local squire beats them. The officer has them locked up. The army officer fires his gun at them with impunity"^[66]) and their urge to emigrate to the West ("Newspapers, books, and optimistic emigrants all tell him what a paradise the West is"^[67]). Roth's Ostjude is idealised as both "a son of the soil" and an "intellectual".^[68] In describing his life in the Eastern European shtetl, Roth seeks to portray not only its misery and authoritarian patriarchal constraints but also "the boundless vastness of the horizon, the richness of human material, the authentic and intact humanity".^[69] The shtetl emerges as a timeless system governed by messianic hope,^[70] its values forming a communal utopia – a counterpoint to the malaise of Western society.^[69] Thus, The Wandering Jews also serves as a warning against the illusions of assimilation, depicting the decline of Eastern Judaism and its dissolution in the West:^[71][72] "They gave themselves up. They lost themselves. They shed their aura of sad beauty. Instead, a dust-grey layer of suffering without meaning and anxiety without tragedy settled on their stooped backs".^[73]

In the 1937 preface to the second edition of The Wandering Jews, Roth observed that the title's scope had broadened to encompass not only Eastern European Jewish refugees but also native German Jews, now "more exposed and more homeless even than [their] cousin in Lodz had been a few years before".^[74] When the book was written, "What mattered (...) was to persuade the Jews and non-Jews of Western Europe to grasp the tragedy of the Eastern Jews", because "It is an often ignored fact that Jews, too, are capable of anti-Semitism",^[75] but now it was time to face the new problem of Western Jews fleeing Nazi persecution without passports or entry visas: "And what is a man without papers? Rather less, let me tell you, than papers without a man!".^[76]

• History of the Jews in Germany
• Eastern European Jewry
• Jewish assimilation
• More German than the Germans
• Jewish ethnic divisions
• Hasidic Judaism
• Antisemitism in Europe
• Anti-Slavic sentiment
• Xenophobia

• Aschheim, Steven E. (1982a). Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923. The University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-09110-4.
• Aschheim, Steven E. (1982b). "Caftan and Cravat: The Ostjude as a Cultural Symbol in the Development of German Anti-Semitism". In Drescher, Seymour; Sabean, David; Sharlin, Allan (eds.). Political Symbolism in Modern Europe. Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-87855-422-5.
• Aschheim, Steven E. (2008). "Reflection, Projection, Distortion: The "Eastern Jew" in German-Jewish Culture". Osteuropa. 58 (8/10). Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag: 61–74. ISSN 0030-6428. JSTOR 44934276. Retrieved 2023-04-30.
• Bauman, Zygmunt (2007). Modernity and ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-1242-3.
• Beck, Hermann (2022). ""Ostjuden" as Predetermined Targets". Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 73–102. doi:10.1093/oso/9780192865076.003.0003. ISBN 978-0-19-195553-2.
• Birnbaum, Nathan (1916). Was sind Ostjuden? Zur ersten Information. Flugschriften zur Aufklärung über ostjüdische Fragen (in German). Vol. 1. Vienna: Löwit Verlag.
• Brenner, Michael (2019). Geschichte des Zionismus (in German). Munich: C.H. Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-74166-1. OCLC 1127928000.
• Fuchs, Anne (1999-01-01). "Roth's Ambivalence: The Logic of Separation in His Writings on Eastern Jewry". A Space of Anxiety: Dislocation and Abjection in Modern German-Jewish Literature. BRILL. doi:10.1163/9789004657632_006. ISBN 978-90-420-0797-0.
• Kałczewiak, Mariusz (2021). "When the "Ostjuden" Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews". Naharaim. 15 (2). Walter de Gruyter GmbH: 287–309. doi:10.1515/naharaim-2020-0015. ISSN 1862-9148.
• Klier, John D. (1999). "Westjuden: Germany and German Jews through East European Eyes". The German Lands and Eastern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 136–156. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-27094-1_7. ISBN 978-1-349-27096-5.
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• Magris, Claudio (1989). Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (in Italian). Einaudi. ISBN 9788858422328.
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• Roth, Joseph (2001). The Wandering Jews. London: Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-86207-470-5.
• Saß, Anne-Christin (2017). "Ostjuden". In Diner, Dan (ed.). Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Cultures Online. Brill. doi:10.1163/2468-8894_ejhc_COM_0608.
• Seelig, Rachel (2016). Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish literature between East and West, 1919-1933. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-12228-8. OCLC 959956289.
• Sonino, Claudia (1998). Esilio, diaspora, terra promessa: ebrei tedeschi verso Est (in Italian). Milano: Mondadori. ISBN 978-88-424-9475-1.
• Vital, David (1999). A people apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-821980-6. OCLC 40338446.
• Volková, Bronislava (2021). "Exile as Expulsion and Wandering: Joseph Roth, Sholem Aleichem, Stefan Zweig". Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America. Academic Studies Press. ISBN 978-1-64469-405-3. JSTOR j.ctv2175r23.5. Retrieved 2025-02-23.
• Weinbaum, Laurence; McPherson, Colin (2000). "No Milk and No Honey: The Yekkes and the Ostjuden". Jewish Quarterly. 47 (3): 25–30. doi:10.1080/0449010X.2000.10705191 (inactive 22 February 2025).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of February 2025 (link)
• Wertheimer, Jack (1987). Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9781423737339.
• Zweig, Arnold; Struck, Hermann (1920). Das ostjüdische Antlitz. Mit fünfzig Steinzeichnungen (in German). Berlin: Welt-Verlag.

• Haumann, Heiko (1998). Geschichte der Ostjuden (in German). Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 3-423-30663-7. OCLC 40154902.
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• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe