Jewish Studies in Germany: Programs Attract Non-jews

Julie Bouchain first became interested in things Jewish as a result of learning about the Holocaust in school.

When it came to explaining German atrocities against the Jews, she says, teachers at her Hamburg high school were very thorough.

“It was explained all too well,” said the 27-year-old university student. “In fifth grade, we were first shown pictures of mountains of corpses. I think we were too young for that.”

But the lessons left an impression, which only deepened when the events of the Holocaust were brought up year after year in school.

It got to the point that Bouchain, who grew up Catholic, wished that she were Jewish.

After high school she went to Israel, learned Hebrew and stayed for two years, working in a home for the disabled.

While in Israel, Bouchain also became interested in Islamic culture. And when she came back to her native Hamburg, she enrolled in an Islamic studies program.

But when the Moses Mendelssohn Institute of Jewish Studies opened last year in Postdam, near Berlin, she enrolled there in an effort to give her experiences in Israel an academic foundation.

Bouchain is one of a growing number of non-Jewish university students who are enrolled in Jewish study programs throughout Germany.

There are now more than six such programs in Germany. Three additional programs have either been announced or opened in what was East Germany, where the Jewish community in the days before the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall amounted to a few hundred people, most of them elderly, out of a total population of 17 million.

Academics say the programs could not survive without non-Jewish enrollment.

The program at the College for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg, for example, began with 16 students. As of 1993, there were 130 enrolled, but only 22 of them were Jews.

Why would someone who is not Jewish enroll in a Jewish studies program — in Germany, of all places?

“Students discover an interest in Jewish studies as part of our German identity,” says Christoph Schulte, an academic assistant at the Mendelssohn Institute.

Of the 40 students in that program, only a third are Jewish. The faculty has a similar breakdown of Jews and non-Jews.

Schulte, a philosopher who describes his background as “liberal Catholic,” said his interest in Jewish studies developed when his parents took him as a child to visit Israel, where he first became acquainted with Jewish culture.

Katharina Gruber, 27, and Thomas Renspies, 35, both got interested in Jewish studies through books.

“I didn’t know any Jews growing up,” said Gruber, who was raised in the Black Forest region of western Germany. “How could I have? There are very few Jews in Germany.”

Both Gruber and Renspies, who were raised in the Protestant faith, are students at the Heidelberg program, which was founded in 1979 with support from Germany’s Jewish community.

Gruber is specializing in Jewish literature. Renspies has chosen a more esoteric path of study, especially for someone who is not Jewish.

He is concentrating on the analysis of rabbinical texts and is now writing his master’s thesis on “Kingdoms in Rabbinical Literature.”

Critics within the Jewish community, such as retired Rabbi Ernst Stein, say German Jews are not interested in their own heritage. This lack of interest explains why there are not more of them enrolled in Jewish studies programs, he said.

According to varying estimates, there are between 40,000 to 80,000 Jews now living in Germany, which has a total population of 80 million. Even using the higher estimate, Jews account for only 0.1 percent of the overall population.

But those in the Jewish studies programs say that Germany’s Jews are no different from their non-Jewish counterparts.

“We live in a secular world,” said Schulte. “Most Christians are not religious. Why should the Jews be different?”