On Wednesday, August 6, 2014 9:39:26 PM UTC-7, rbowman wrote:
Todd wrote:
[...]
It's a slow read but Rigg's 'Hitler's Jewish Soldiers' documents a strange

phenomenon. The most famous was Field Marshall Erhard Milch:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Milch

When critized for using Milch, Goering said: "Wer Jude ist, bestimme Ich!" (I decide who is a Jew!)

His mother wasn't Jewish so he technically wasn't a Jew but a Mischling and
was declared an Aryan. That's where the book bogs down, the minute
examination of the racial laws.

Even sadder, many middle class German Jews thought of themselves as Germans
and really didn't like the backward eastern Jews either. They thought Hitler
was just talking about the kaftan wearing Orthodox from the polish shetls..

This was the case in other (Central?) European families as well. Film I've seen several times: "Sonnenschein" = Sunshine, with Ralph Fiennes playing character in saga about 3 generations of an aristocratic Hungarian Jewish family and their eventual fate under the Nazis. (Though my late mother said that the Arrow Cross, the Jew-hating Hungarian fascists, made the Nazis look like boy scouts.)

The snobbery you cite was replicated in New York, as the wealthy, long-established German Jews with their hochkultur patronized the "wretched refuse of [your] teeming shores" -- the late 19th & early 20th flood of poor Jews from Central/Eastern Europe. Sure, they did their duty under Jewish law to take care of their poor coreligionists, but in a condescending way -- at arm's length.

"Our Crowd" by Stephen Birmingham.

HB