Tri-Continental Jew: A 20th Century Journey - Paperback

by Ernest Stock (Author)

I offer this memoir as a contribution to the speculation on the nature of Jewishness, which has become such a timely subject, one fraught with political implications. I would not, however, see it as leading to a single definition of Jewishness. The latter's character, as I perceive it, changed radically with each shift in location. In my native Germany, it was formally religious: Jews defined themselves as German citizens of the Mosaic faith. This held true until the Nazi government decided that the Jews were a race, and eventually formalized its decision in the infamous Nuremberg Laws. These excluded Jews from every level of national life - social and political, cultural and professional. The resulting ghettoization at first strengthened communal solidarity, along with individual Jewish consciousness, but this turned out to be a short-term delusion. No communal structure could withstand the government's determination to rid itself of its Jewish population. Still, in my own case the forced transfer, in third grade, from a public to a Jewish parochial school laid a solid foundation for what was to come. Upon leaving Germany, I came well prepared to play my part in Jewish life in Alsace, France, where I spent the first eight months of my exile. The encounter with new types of individuals and institutions in the bracing air of freedom led me to look upon Strasbourg Jewry in particular as the optimum to which a non-sovereign Jewish community might aspire. Alas, the outbreak of war in September 1939 brought the idyll I discovered across the Rhine to a sudden end.

Author Biography

Ernest Stock was born in 1924 in Frankfort, Germany, where he attended the Philanthropin, the comprehensive school of the Jewish community, until it closed down after the "Crystal Night" in November 1938. On December 6 his mother sent him with his younger sister on a Kindertransport to Alsace, France, after his father was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In Strasbourg Stock worked as apprentice to a photographer, until the outbreak of war caused the two children to seek refuge in the Paris area. In June 1940 they fled on bicycles before the invading German army and, after crossing Spain and Portugal, reached the U.S. where their mother awaited them. Their father had meanwhile escaped to Holland and survived the war in hiding with a Dutch family. Stock was drafted into the U.S. army in May 1943, became an American citizen after basic training, and a year later was back on European soil, in Normandy. He also returned to Frankfort as an American soldier in April1945. He was given permission to search for his father in Holland and found him there shortly after the war ended. Upon discharge from the army, Stock was admitted to Princeton University where he studied at its School of Public and International Affairs, graduating magna cum laude. He later received a Master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism and a doctorate from Columbia in Public Law and Government. His studies at Princeton, which included Middle Eastern politics, strengthened his belief in the need for a Jewish state. In 1952 Stock was among four recipients of a Ford Foundation Near East Area Research fellowship, which enabled him to study Israeli foreign policy, in particular relations with the U.S. The research, carried on under the auspices of the Israel Institute for Social Research, formed the basis of his doctoral thesis, Israel on the Road to Sinai, published in 1967 by Cornell University Press. In 1961 Stock was named by the Jewish Agency, Inc. In the interim, he worked for American Jewish organizations, including the Hillel Foundations and the Council of Jewish Federations, and contributed articles to various periodicals. He also taught in the Politics Departments of the Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan Universities and published three books on his specialty, the relations between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.