This chapter investigates Steven E. Aschheim's Brothers and Strangers (1983). In the 19th century, German Jews made their great social, political, and cultural bid for a sort of assimilation. In becoming Prussian and German citizens and diehard patriots, they desperately tried to minimize or totally break off the already limited relations with the neighbouring Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Around 1850 and later, the term ‘Ostjude’ stood for an image of an uncivilized, superstitious Easterner totally alien to the German Jew. Only when the assimilationist process suffered its first serious setbacks did some doubts, affecting the validity of the stereotype, creep in. For certain Jewish circles, especially Jewish intellectuals drafted into the German eastern front armies during World War I, the Ostjude became the very image of a Jewish cultural hero. Aschheim's book discusses both the stereotypes and the ideological discourse which manifested itself in the relations between these two great Jewish populations.