A Jewish National Race in the Great European Family: Adolf Jellinek’s Der jüdische Stamm

From the late 1860s through the mid-1880s, Adolf Jellinek (1821-1893), chief rabbi of Vienna, engaged in his final series of major scholarly projects, an attempt to understand the ethnographic and sociological reality of Jewish nationhood, ethnicity, and racial difference. Called Der jüdische Stamm (The Jewish Tribe), the work appeared in four volumes and reflected an attempt to engage with the questions: Who exactly, were the Jews, and was Judaism a religion (a set of beliefs) or a nation (like the Germans or Hungarians or Poles) or an ethnicity (like Slavic or Anglo-Saxon)?

As this paper will argue, the collected volumes of Der jüdische Stamm reveals a thinker grappling with rising cultural antisemitism from the perspective of a scientific, historically-minded thinker. The first volume, subtitled “An Ethnographic Study,” begins with a set of theoretical meditations on the nature of particularism and universality, objectivity and subjectivity. Its second section examines such historico-philosophical problems as “the teleological side of the Jewish tribe” and “historical influences on the development of the Jewish tribe.” The three later volume are a remarkable example of early folklore studies: collections and analyses of the portrayal of Jewish difference in the proverbs (Sprichwörtern) of non-Jewish Europeans, from Spain to Russia. Taken together, Jellinek’s Der jüdische Stamm was a remarkable set of scientific arguments against racial antisemitism but for Jewish difference, made through a series of astute anthropological essays that focused on the question of who the Jews were, how they came to be, and why they deserved a place in the family of European peoples.