Michael A. Meyer GOOD FOR THE JEWS, BAD FOR JUDAISM: JEWISH BERLIN IN THE MODERN PERIOD * *** The Jewish community of Berlin has usually been considered consis- tently central for German Jewry in modern times. After all, there were some 175,000 Jews in Gross-Berlin in 1925, close to one third of the Jews in all of Weimar Germany. And although the Jewish population of Berlin declined thereafter, the capital continued to be by far the largest and most important Jewish community in Germany. It has therefore been tempting to project backwards and assume that also in the period before World War One and back to the eighteenth-century Berlin was similarly central, not only in its population of Jews but also in signifi- cance for Judaism. In presenting an argument against that assumption, I would like here to begin by noting an abundance of evidence for the contention that Jewish creativity, and especially religious vibrancy, dur- ing the nineteenth century, with few exceptions, was to be located in places other than Berlin. And beyond that contention, I will argue that from the beginnings of Jewish modernity in the late eighteenth century until into the twentieth, and to some extent until the Nazi period, Berlin may have been good for the Jews’ material interests but was not nearly as good for Judaism. Let us begin with the realization that whether one considers Orthodox Judaism, Liberal Judaism, or Wissenschaft des Judentums, these were all more firmly based outside of Berlin than within it, espe- cially in the cities of Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, and Breslau. In 1816, each of these cities boasted a larger Jewish population than doi:10.1093/mj/kjz022 Advance Access publication December 27, 2019 ß The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com *A slightly different version of this essay was initially presented as the in- troductory lecture at the Summer University of the Selma Stern Zentrum fu ¨r Ju ¨dische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg, devoted to “Jewish Berlin—Past and Present” and held July 1--12, 2019. This new version is dedicated to Steven T. Katz, honoring his forty years as editor of Modern Judaism.