In the nineteenth 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 - sometimes plus allemands que Siegfried - 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 tries to discuss both the stereotypes and the ideological discourse (rather one-sided, one must say) which manifested itself in the relations between these two great Jewish populations. Aschheim sees clearly - he states it to the point of becoming repetitive - the dilemma of the German would-be assimilated Jew. The mere existence of the Ostjuden and the looming threat - as the Russian pogroms intensified - of their large-scale immigration into Germany constituted a sort of cultural and political cauchemar, pitting narrow self-interest against the politics of compassion and ethnic solidarity. Generally a mild form of egoism and a pathetic German patriotism prevailed, though sometimes - especially in the years 1914-16 - it seemed that one could combine German raison d'etat with active support for the cause of the Eastern brethren. The German Jews, many- of them relatively recent newcomers of Eastern origin, linked the growing German anti-semitism to the uncontrolled influx of their half-barbaric kinsmen (were they kinsmen?) from the east and did their best to direct the streams of emigration further westwards. But this by no means simple historical process was accompanied by incessant soul-searching and debates. The Osy.ude and the German Jew were, as Aschheim states, mirror opposites. Whether negatively or positively conceived, ‘the Ostjude was in a certain sense regarded as the real Jew and the living model of Ur-Jewishness lost to German Jewry’ (p. 252).