"Triple Identity": The Evolution of a German Jewish Arizonan Ethnic Identity in Arizona Territory

GERHARD GRYTZ

MODERN HISTORIANS OF GERMAN immigration often struggle with the placement of German Jews. Historians of the German experience in America encounter the dilemma of how to approach the Jewish segment of the German immigrants and their unique situation. The majority of them are fully aware of the important role Jews played in the German American communities, yet they cannot decide whether to treat them as Germans. The most common approaches by historians of German immigration are either the complete inclusion of German Jews as Germans without any reflection on their differences or their total exclusion. Struggling with the Nazi experience, many twentieth-century historians cannot imagine that nineteenth-century German Jews identified themselves equally as Germans and Jews. For many writing after the Holocaust, such a dual identity is inconceivable. Yet for people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the conditions of the Nazi era were not part of their intellectual equation. In effect, this divide is counterfactual history, a reading back into the past the conditions of a later time.