 Hi, this is Carl Ackerman, host of History is Here to Help. We are here today, and we are so happy you're here today, with Professor David Miola, who has just written a book called We Will Never Yield About Mid-19th Century Jewish Freedoms Through the Press. So I know that you went to school at Chapel Hill, and then you went to Vancouver to get your MA and your PhD. But what I'm most interested in is discovering what was your journey in terms of getting to sort of the liberation, the freedom of 19th century Jews in Germany through periodicals, because you have taken on an enormous task and done a wonderful job in doing it. Well, thank you, Carl. I really appreciate the plaudits from you, and also appreciate the invitation to come here and talk with everyone in Hawaii. Mahalo, everyone. And I really hope that this is informative for everyone. I started this entire project with a question about my family. I come from a family of German Jews that immigrated to the United States in the late 1890s. And growing up, I had all these questions. Why were they so not orthodox? Why did they not keep kosher? And so when thinking about these questions, this led me back to their lives as German Jews in Germany. And I originally thought when I was going to do my PhD that I was going to focus on emancipation around 1871 in the foundation of the German Empire. But as I started in my studies, I became more interested in liberalism. I became more interested in the public sphere and the means by which individuals became emancipated. And this brought me back slowly but surely to the period of the 1815 to 1848 era. And so while I was there, I remember doing a graduate seminar and needing to do a paper using primary sources. And I was doing this from Vancouver. How was I going to get primary sources early in my PhD program about Jewish life? Were there any online repositories which I could get? And I stumbled upon a UNESCO funded site that dealt with the German Jewish press. And from there, I wrote this paper which eventually got published about the Algemeine Zeitung des Unentums, which was the most important and long-standing paper written by German Jews for German Jews that started in 1837 until 1922 about how it informed the public about emancipation in the Grand Duchy of Bodin during the 1840s. And that got me into asking questions about, well, here we have the German Jewish press, but what about the local newspaper? What about the papers that other Germans, non-Jews, were reading? How did they see these debates about emancipation and also about Jewish religious reform play out in the public sphere? That's absolutely wonderful. And so now I'm going to ask you some. Now I get a full understanding of what you're doing. And you were very brave. I thought, I had images of you with a backpack with books traveling around these different areas of Germany. This is much more convenient. Thank God for the internet. But in your acknowledgments, I think that many viewers would be surprised that you acknowledged the Jewish community in Mobile, Alabama. And I was curious about this for two reasons. One, I didn't know there was a large Jewish community in Mobile, Alabama. And two, why the thank you for that particular community? I know your work was set in Germany and this online depository of many documents and periodicals. But why that acknowledgement? Well, mainly I'm a member of that community as well. I'm a professor at the University of South Alabama, which is in Mobile, Alabama. And someone who is in the community lives and breathes as a practicing Jew as well. That these are people I interact with every day and they have supported me. I've received fellowships, some grant money, and really just a lot of encouragement and support from lots of community elders. I have an endowed chair in Jewish studies. It's the Burton Fanny Meisler chair in history and Jewish studies at the university. And without the support of the Jewish community, I would not have a position, nor would I have the success that I have in running community events and running my program. I have a minor in Jewish and Holocaust studies there. And they have been super supportive of everything that I have done and they deserve the acknowledgement for everything. That's very complimentary, not only about the community, but also about your university. And I would say, stay there if you have an endowed chair. But also I think it's very interesting that you mentioned Holocaust studies because I noticed in your resume that you teach courses on the Holocaust, but also in generally European history. So your coverage is quite broad in terms of your teaching career also. So I'm now gonna get into some of the particulars in the book. And this is gonna be for our viewers, pretty academic discussion, but of course I deeply believe in academic discussion. So there we go. So David, as your book is largely about Jewish agency in the press, that is in the Jewish people becoming free through periodicals in the mid-19th century and specifically about the word agency, might you tell us what you mean here by that word agency? Yeah, I mean, foremost I consider my study to be that of the Jewish community advocating on their own behalf. So in this sense, Jewish agency is Jews fighting for themselves. In a lot of the literature, and as I wrote in the book, emancipation or the fight for political rights has often been associated with those people who were arguing on behalf of Jews, but were not necessarily Jews themselves. So what I've done is take a look at how Jews went into the press, how they went into the public sphere and how they tackled whatever it was that came up. It could be just writing an article that Jews deserve emancipation because we are equal, we are like others or defending their religion from people who want Jews to change the religion into some kind of form of a protesting Judaism for lack of a better term. And I think as well that, this was about Jews fighting for themselves and trying to determine the terms of the debate themselves as well and not letting their antagonists define those terms for them. And so, you mentioned this already briefly about your online depository, but how did you go about reading the multiple periodicals for this book? There must have been other places and you must have traveled to Germany. So how is it capable? And I wanna tell our audience that David is also the proud father of four children. So I'm imagining you with backpack with one child, two hands with the other children, your wife being very supportive and that sort of thing. Well, there's another story around that. I was actually fortunate to do a lot of my researching in Germany. I was able to do, get some grants and spend several months at a time over there. I mentioned in my acknowledgments, I thank the Leipzig Institute for Oil Pesche Geschichte or the Institute for European History and Mints for their support where I had seven months unfettered access to Germany to their library and traveling around Germany. So most of these newspapers that I read are not digitized. So what I did was is I went to University Archives, I went to the Institute for Newspaper Research in Dortmund where they have microfilms and I read most of these newspapers on microfilms. In a couple of instances, they actually had the old books, bound copies of newspapers and I was able to touch, breathe, smell everything about these things, which is wonderful, by the way. Going into an archive and smelling this old paper is actually quite invigorating, but most of it was very tough microfilm on machines that were not quite the modern microfilm machines and it was, you know, it was bad for my eyes. Let's say that. So incredibly bad for your eyes. Having done something similar with books that could be volumes of colorful. So I get it and I like the smell, I get it completely. So here's kind of a broad question, David, for you. So what did you find? I mean, what did you find in terms of both the Jewish press and the German press and how did this help Jewish agency in terms of becoming liberated? And I know you had mentioned in your book that it may have been influenced by France originally and for those of us who were ignorant about this whole process, you know, we always thought that Napoleon was the person who liberated the Jews and sort of what was then called, you know, the Conviteration of the Rhine, but what did you find, David? Yeah, so I think that's a pretty broad question, so I'll try to answer this as concisely as I can. My wife and others will say that I am never at a loss for words. And bless you for that. Yeah. So, you know, the process of emancipation certainly came about, you know, it had been in the air for a while, you know, there was in 1781 and, you know, there was the tolerance patent that was promulgated by Joseph II of Austria and there was already change in the air. So even before the French Revolution, there was already ideas of what do we do with the Jewish population or for the rulers of Europe, right? Those, the enlightened absolutists. How do we incorporate Jews into these societies or not? And there was an entire debate in the 1780s that dealt with it. You know, Moses Mendelssohn was a part of this debate as well. And part of this was, you know, and the ideas and the spirit of the French Revolution, Jews were eventually emancipated. They were emancipated by the National Assembly and eventually emancipation of the Jews did move eastward as the Napoleonic, you know, the French and Napoleonic armies came through. Jews did achieve in some areas full emancipation. So as the Napoleonic regimes instituted, you know, Napoleonic domination and control, the Jews were emancipated and the French Revolutionary Law and French National Law was there. So for instance, Heinrich Heine, who's one of the most famous German Jews from the early 19th century and one of Germany's greatest poets, he grew up in a Düsseldorf where he was a citizen, right? And eventually after the Napoleonic era ended, a lot of those rights were rescinded again. So this fight for emancipation, and really it all depends its regional, right? You know, in Germany, there were 330 some odd different states when Napoleon first came and then destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in 1804, 1806 time. And then he consolidated all of that into about 36 different states. Well, those 36 different states each had different laws regarding Jewish emancipation. And I focused in on the Grand Duchy of Baden, mainly because it was a new state given to the, from the Margrave of Baden-Baden and Baden-Derlach eventually became the Grand Duke of this new Grand Duchy. The territory was enlarged, you know, four times, the population grew five, six times and a Jewish population also increased accordingly. And this state was, you know, influenced by these French ideals of government. So, you know, the Badenese administration actually resembled the things that were going on in France. And in 1807 and 1809, the Grand Duke basically gave these constitutional edicts that gave Jews rights. They became citizens. You know, the term is Ervaya Staatsbürger. You know, so the idea is that they were hereditary citizens of the state of Baden, which means that it could not be taken away from them and that it passes from generation to generation. And, but it was, it was not full emancipation. It was only, you know, it was second class citizenship. So in my excavation of the press in the 1840s, this is the German Jews in Baden who were looking to get those rights which they had yet to acquire. A lot of that was, you know, they were not allowed to live wherever they wanted. They were only restricted to certain amount of towns and they weren't allowed to be elected to positions of authority and things of that nature. So this was something that was important for that. And so this is part of why they did this. So when I went to these archives and in these newspapers, you see debates happening about Jewish emancipation. And these debates really happened after 1830 because the press almost all throughout Germany, but especially in Baden was very strictly controlled. You know, there was no freedom of the press. Censorship was instituted and was really strict, especially in this Metternichian German Confederation where the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 put strict censorship on these papers. In 1831, the Grand Duchy of Baden lifted these restrictions and allowed for freedom of the press and then this explosion of critical newspaper reporting and opinion pieces came about. And then within six months, the German Confederation came back and quashed it. You know, so, but there still had to be this space, right? That, you know, the cat was let out of the bag, so to speak, right? I mean, this freedom of opinion, you know, this public opinion, you know, had to be somewhere, right? Otherwise it was going to become more deleterious than that. So eventually some more newspapers were allowed to come about after 1837. And then you start seeing these increasingly more progressive, more liberal newspapers advocating for Jewish emancipation and Jews taking part of those discussions as well. And, you know, this begs the question. And you defined it, but I want you to talk about it with our audience is, you define being Jewish because this whole book is really about a set of inferences from your research on periodicals and what that meant for Jewish emancipation. You define being Jewish as being within a quote unquote, a set of cultural practices. And can you elaborate? Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, and one of the things that's important is that Judaism itself was changing at this time. So, you know, there were these certainly sets of cultural practices, right? You know, being Jewish wasn't only about being Jewish religiously. And we can kind of speak more generally of kind of a confessionalization of Judaism during the 19th century, which is analogous to certain things that were happening in Christianity of the time, right? So there was this kind of bourgeois Protestantism, kind of a bourgeois Catholicism. There was a movement towards these friends of light or the wrongians of the 1840s that were also bringing about a more open bourgeois notion of Christianity. So there were these set of cultural practices is that, you know, being Jewish did not necessarily have to be, you know, being circumcised, although that was up for debate as you read in the book, right? The idea that one is to be Jewish is one must be circumcised was something that was up for debate at the time. You know, other things is, you know, the disputes about who was fit to be a rabbi to lead our community. You know, the idea that there's this group of reformers who saw themselves much more like a David Friedländer from the 1790s and other of these mascaline or these enlighteners and educators from the time of Moses Mendelssohn and a little bit later, who saw really to create this kind of what was called pure mosaism. I know that's a really clunky term, but the idea is that reformers look to bring Jews back to the five books, to the Torah, you know, and to the Haftara and that was going to be the basis, right? No longer, you know, were they going to be bound by the strictures of Talmud? And so, you know, these things were, these cultural practices were shifting, right? You know, but yet again, there's all these others like, so who was Jewish? Well, you know, there were those who had converted who never really left, right? Someone like a Heinrich Hina who converted in the 1820s to Protestantism. He officially left the Jewish community, the Jewish religious community, but never really ever felt that. And indeed, he's claimed today as a German Jew, right? Despite conversion. So I think there are these cultural practices, right? And if you actually read a lot of Hina, he references a lot about Judaism and a lot of these writers, they talk a lot about Judaism. But in the case of what I'm doing, I chose mostly to write about Jews who were Jews and didn't leave the community. You know, one of the really unique and a chapter that I fell in love with that David had to tell you the truth was, when within the context of your monograph, you discussed 19th century Jewish philanthropy in terms of German acculturation. And might you talk about this and perhaps within the story of the Humbert fire because this was a particularly intriguing part of your text and the notion of philanthropy leading to a culturalization and also to acceptance was also very interesting for me. Yeah, I loved writing this part. This was actually a lot of fun. I found this idea of philanthropy is something that, there's always philanthropic organizations, right? You have the Hevrah, Khadisha, or the burial societies. And there's always a certain notion of these societies and philanthropy that Jews did within the community. In fact, the authorities up through the early modern period demanded that Jews take care of the Jewish poor. So that was something that was forced philanthropy on the one hand, but in this period of time, we start seeing philanthropy as kind of a bourgeois institution that if you were a member of the middle class, that being, you know, this was something that you had to do, right? And I'm not talking about, you know, what happened much later on where you're building big buildings or you're endowing stools, right? You're talking about the bricks and mortar types of philanthropy, but I actually wanted to take a look much more at kind of these everyday instances of philanthropy. And indeed with my case, this is what we're called Spenda or really no Spenda, right? These emergency donations or some kind of national emergency. And I came to this because in one of the newspapers in Karlsruhe, I'd started noticing, you know, these philanthropy lists after the Great Hamburg Fire of 1842. And I started noticing Jewish names, right? So in some sense, I don't think it's necessarily that remarkable that Jews were also donating money, but in a sense I was, right? Here we have German Jews donating to a national cause alongside other German, right? German Christians, right? And then I saw these societies, right? The Chamber of Commerce and the Harmony Society and the lists are replete with Jewish names. Well, all the other societies, as I argue in the book, who donated only put the total number and didn't enumerate any of their members, but the Jewish societies did. And in my mind, that was done tactically, right? The idea is that the more individual members of the Jewish community who were donating, the more it becomes obvious that more and more Jews are acting like their peers, right? Because other people would not necessarily know that Harmony Society was a Jewish society, but by putting all the names there, it was quite clear that it was. And so part of this goes into the concept of capital exchange, right? This kind of cultural capital exchange by Pierre Bourdieu. And the idea is that when you attain or acquire some kind of cultural or social capital, is that you can then exchange that capital for other means like political rights. So in some sense, we see that Jews by putting their names into the press and by enumerating their donations, they are trying to build that capital, right? And the hope is that if they are seen as German, they will then be given emancipation. And as I tie into the chapter on constants later on, they specifically actually reference what they did with these donations and saying that when the fire happened and the Great Hamburg fire happened, we were there, right? Like we helped, right? So it was clear that tying those two things together was that Jews were doing this philanthropy and they were intentionally using these arguments on their own behalf to say, we are just like you, we deserve to be emancipated. And in the case of constants, we deserve to have a Jewish community and live in constants as a Jewish community. That's a fascinating part of your book and we'll have another discussion about this perhaps some other time. But that was a really unique chapter and this notion of philanthropy leading to a culturalization is really quite unique and I haven't seen it in any other place. So it's really wonderful. So we talked about the definition of being Jewish, but my other question, because I faced the same thing in my dissertation in the Alexandria Mount of Edgerton, is what do you mean by German for the very reasons that you outlined? You know, because there was no Germany, that Bismarck had not united all of Germany. So how did you get around that and how did you, I mean, you're very good in your book about talking about this came from Baden, except for this came from another provincial area and everything was localized, but how do you unite them under that one single term German? Well, I think some of this has to go back almost to this kind of herders notion of like language and nationality, right? I mean, one of the things that happened, and as you saw in the book, the Badenese liberals were part of a movement with other German speakers who saw themselves as in the process of trying to unite Germany under one roof, right? That there was this incomplete emancipation. Indeed, actually that's kind of what I'm gonna be pivoting to in my next project, but looking at how Jews in Baden and in Germany worked in the liberal and democratic movements of the 1840s in order to help bring about a united Germany. And we saw some of that, you can see some of that in the 1848 revolutions where there was a united Germany, there was the Frankfurt parliament. So Germany really is the German cultural sphere, right? Or those areas that were distinctly very Germanic, right? I mean, of course, what does German mean? Like if you were to go talk to a Bavarian, do they think of themselves as German or those like the Sorbs, do they think of themselves as German? What about those in the Austrian empire, right? There are Germans and there's all these others, right? The non-German speakers didn't think of themselves as German, but people, many of the liberals, saw themselves as this tradition of German, right? And some of that was negatively defined, right? They saw themselves as almost the antithesis of the French, right? And imposed by the Napoleonic Wars, but there was a sense of German camaraderie. And I think you have the Hamburg fire shows this great unity that Germans from all across the German states were supporting Hamburg, right? You know, the fact that so many people thought of Hamburg as Germany's Weltstadt, right? They used the term Deutschland, right? Even though Deutschland didn't exist, you know? And then you get others like the Cologne Cathedral, which was completed, relatively completed in 1843. That was another instance of Germanness, right? The celebration throughout Germany, not just pressure, but all of Germany. So there was a sense of being German. And so I really think of this as kind of the Hochdeutsch, you know, press region, right? So like, you know, the newspapers that I used for the pan-German side of my study were those that had a much broader audience and were basically written in Hochdeutsch. You know, my concluding question was gonna be, and where from now, you know, in the words, and where you're gonna go? And I'm gonna leave you that, I know we have about one minute left, the last word goes to you, David, and if you could repeat what is next and repeat the name of your book and where people can get ahold of it, that would be great. Yeah, so I'll start with the book. My book is titled, We Will Never Yeild, Jews, the German Press and the Pfeiffer Inclusion in the 1840s, published by Indiana University Press just this April. And you can get it at Amazon, you can get it directly from IUPress.org, or, you know, you can get it from other online retailers as well. Now, in terms of what I'm going forward, I'm actually looking at Jews involved in the liberal movement, and I'm focusing on the cities of Heidelberg and Monheim and really looking at those fraternal spaces or spaces where Jews and Christians came together and started working together towards a United Germany and to really uncover that Jews were actually agents, again, this term agency, agents in the fight for German liberalism and in the rise of German liberalism, which has not yet been uncovered. We'd like to thank Professor David Mioław, and of course, people should rush out and get his book. We Will Never Yeild, and it's on Amazon, I assume. Yes. Yes, so a wonderful, wonderful book, wonderful discussion. David, thank you for interrupting your busy day in Canada and for speaking on Think Tech Hawaii. And I'm just, I know that our other co-host, Jay Padel, would have liked talking to you also. So thank you, David. Great, thank you, Carl, and thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.