This chapter takes a step back to consider the state of the German Jewry at length after the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933. Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, for his part, held a rather hopeful view of the situation that year, going so far as to repeatedly express that the Jews had nothing to fear from the Nazis, and the controversies his optimistic views caused within the German Jewish intellectual community. In the meantime, Hitler was beginning to implement more antisemitic reforms. His banning of the sheḥitah — the Jewish practice of ritually slaughtering meat — in particular shocked the Jewish community. At the same time that discussions about the sheḥitah issue were going on, Weinberg was confronted by plans to transfer the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary to Palestine. Though a minor episode in Weinberg's life, through it the chapter provides further insight into the relationship between east European talmudists and the modern rabbinical seminary.
Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953
