Profile | Ernst Jäckh ( 1875 – 1959 )

Mavi Boncuk |

Ernst Jaeckh [Jäckh | Jackh] (February 22, 1875 in Urach, Germany – August 17, 1959 in New York City, USA) was a German author.

He was born in Urach Germany. During the First World War, Jaeckh was one of the main propagandists of the German-Turkish alliance and worked for Eugen Mittwoch[1] and his Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient[2]. In 1920, he founded the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, a key liberal think tank of the Weimar Repub Being a staunch Anti-Nazi, he emigrated to Britain in the 1930s. In 1932, he became international director of the newly founded New Commonwealth Society. In 1940, he migrated further to the United States where he became professor at Columbia University and founded the Columbia Middle East Institute in 1948. In the 1940s he headed the Middle Eastern Department of the British Ministry of Information, a close associate was Eugen Mittwoch . 

He is remembered to be an author and academic. He promoted the German-Turkish Alliance (1908-1914) and founded the German Turkish Association in 1912. He became professor of Turkish history at the University of Berlin in 1914. Ernst Jäckh was a member of the diplomatic service during World War I and with Friedrich Naumann, he organized the liberal movement in Germany (1902-1912). Jäckh emigrated to Britain s and held the position of international director of the New Commonwealth Institute until 1940 when he became Professor of Public Law and Government at Columbia University specializing in the politics of Germany the Balkans and the Middle East. He wrote books that include Albanian War, Der Austeigende Halbmonde, Background of the Middle East, Deutschland im Orient.

Ernst Jäckh bei seiner Türkeireise | Ernst Jäckh on his trip to Turkey 1911.

See also: Thesis | Ernst Jäckh and the Search for German Cultural Hegemony in the Ottoman Empire 

Ernst und Hans Jäckh in Heilbronn – zur Verleihung desHans-Jäckh-Preises 2019

Ernst Jäckh: Der goldene Pflug. Lebensernte eines Weltbürgers [ The golden plow. Life harvest of a global citizen ]. Stuttgart 1954, S. 471.

Yale | Ernst Jäckh papers 

These papers, purchased from Ernst Jäckh in 1949, consist of correspondence, reports, and other materials dealing with political and diplomatic affairs in Turkey and the Middle East from 1908 to 1921, particulary in reference to the interests of the German Foreign Office in that area.

Papers of the German naval attache Hans Humann form the bulk of the material. Included are his correspondence with Jäckh (1911-1918) and reports from Constantinople (1914-1916), many in the form of telegrams and extracts of official correspondence, to the chiefs of the German admiralty and of the naval administration. Humann was a close friend and foster brother of the Ottoman general and commander-in-chief Enver Pasha, a member of the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 and one of the triumvirate that virtually ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918. Enver played a key role in allying the Ottoman Empire with Germany in World War I, and Humann was in constant contact with him regarding Turkish national and international issues, especially the preparation of Ottoman war policy.

Other materials included in the Ernst Jäckh Papers are extracts of Enver Pasha's letters from Albania (1911), from the Tripolitanian War (1911-1912) in Libya where he successfully organized and led Arab resistance to the Italian invasion, and from the Second Balkan War (1912-1913) where he was chief of staff. In addition, the papers contain part of his unpublished autobiography. Some correspondence of grand vizier Mehmed Talât Pasha and his unpublished autobiography accompany these papers, as do a manuscript describing Baron Oppenheim's designs for an Islamic holy war from India to Morocco and information about native Moslems used by the German intelligence service (1914). Finally, also included are reports to German ambassador Baron Wangenheim in Constantinople on the "Armenian Massacres" of 1915-1917 from observers in Asia Minor and from Wangenheim to the Foreign Office in Berlin, and a collection of political drawings relating to the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908.

This material was originally part of the Edward M. House Papers, Manuscript Group Number 466.

Also in: Yale Orbis 

[1] Eugen Mittwoch (December 4, 1876 - November 8, 1942) was the founder of Modern Islamic Studies in Germany, and at the same time an eminent Jewish scholar (He was a doctoral advisor and rabbi of Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Coming from an old Orthodox Jewish family, Mittwoch was born in Schrimm, Prussian Province of Posen, Imperial Germany (now Srem in Poland). He initially wanted to become a Rabbi. During his studies in Berlin he discovered Islamic studies and did his doctorate with Eduard Sachau.

During World War I, Mittwoch was the head of the German Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient from 1916 until 1918. After the agency initially employed people who advocated Jihad and violence against the Western powers, Mittwoch hired more liberal and cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals for the Nachrichtenstelle such as the Swiss Max Rudolf Kaufmann (Mittwoch hired him for the Nachrichtenstelle, after he arrested, briefly imprisoned and deported from Turkey because Turkish intelligence had found letter of Kaufmann criticizing German-Turkish militarism and jingoism), the Social Democrat Friedrich Schrader and the Zionist Nahum Goldmann. Schrader and Kaufmann were correspondents for the Jewish-owned liberal Frankfurter Zeitung and close associates of Paul Weitz (de), one of the sharpest critics of German collaboration with the genocidal politics of the Young Turks.

In the 1920s Mittwoch was the leading orientalist in Germany, and the founder of a more politically oriented, modern science of Middle East Studies, in contrast to the traditional philologic, apolitical approach very much influenced by Goethe.

In 1924, Mittwoch stayed in Jerusalem, where he participated in the founding of a Department for Semitic Studies at Hebrew University.

Since he was the leading specialist on Ethiopian languages world-wide, Mittwoch did not lose his academic position in 1933 immediately like almost all his Jewish colleagues in Germany did at that time. This had to do with a special intervention by Mussolini with Hitler on behalf of Mittwoch. Because of their colonial activities in Ethiopia, the Italians were extremely interested in Mittwoch's knowledge and research. Mittwoch was very active on behalf of the Ethiopian Jews (Falasha), and was also one of the first German Jews who could speak fluent Ivrit.

Starting in 1933, Mittwoch used his "privileged" position in Germany (he continued to receive his salary as a German professor until the beginning of the war) on behalf of the Jewish community, he became head of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Berlin. However, in 1938, after Kristallnacht, also Mittwoch had to emigrate, and moved via Paris to London with his immediate family. During the last 18 months of his life, he worked for the Middle East department of the British Ministry of Information under the leadership of Ernst Jaeckh.

The remaining family, including his mother, who was murdered in Bergen-Belsen, perished in the Shoah. A daughter Adele Mittwoch (1925 - 2011) was a renowned psychotherapist in England, specializing in group psychotherapy, another daughter Agnes (born 1926) later immigrated to Israel ( made aliyah ) and was a university lecturer in Jerusalem. The oldest daughter, Ursula, born 1924, was professor for human genetics at the UCL (University of London) and, in 2014, was still scientifically active and celebrated her 90th birthday in her old institute.

Mittwoch died in London, England, UK.

[2]  Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient | The Intelligence Bureau for the East was a German intelligence organisation established on the eve of World War I dedicated to promoting and sustaining subversive and nationalist agitations in the British Indian Empire and the Persian and Egyptian satellite states. Attached to the German Foreign Office, it was headed by archaeologist Baron Max von Oppenheim and, during the war, worked intricately with the deposed Khedive Abbas II of Egypt, and Indian revolutionary organisations including the Berlin Committee, Jugantar, the Ghadar Party, as well as with prominent Muslim socialists including Maulavi Barkatullah. 

Aside from Oppenheim himself, recruits to the Bureau included Franz von Papen, later briefly the Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Wilhelm Wassmuss (sometimes referred to as the German Lawrence), Gunther von Wesendonck, Ernst Sekunna and others. Oppenheim was replaced in 1915 by Schabinger von Schowingen, and later in 1916 by Eugen Mittwoch, internationally the most respected and prestigious German orientalist (and also a respected Orthodox Jewish scholar), who recruited more liberal and cosmopolitan people for the Nachrichtenstelle such as Friedrich Schrader, his Swiss associate Max Rudolf Kaufmann [*] or the young Nahum Goldmann (later President of the World Jewish Congress).

In its initial period, the bureau was intricately involved in almost all the events that ultimately came to be called the Hindu–German Conspiracy, including the Annie Larsen plot, Ghadar Conspiracy, Siam–Burma plan, attempts in Bengal as well as other lesser known plots in the Near east including of the western borders of British India and in Afghanistan.

In addition to its subversive campaigns against British possessions in India, it also attempted to instigate instability in British possessions in the Muslims in India as well as around the world in the Middle east and in Egypt. It was involved in early Turkish plans for war and the Caliph's decision to declare Jihad. The bureau was involved in intelligence and subversive missions to Persia and to Afghanistan, and also attempted, along with the Berlin Committee, to recruit Indian soldiers in Mesopotamia. Its Persia operations were led by Wilhelm Wassmuss.

Under the leadership of the also internationally highly respected Mittwoch (who founded the semitic department at Hebrew University in 1924, and worked for British Intelligence in World War II, after he had to flee to London from Nazi persecution), the Nachrichtenstelle, which had to deal with the failure of the initial subversive campaigns, pursued a more rational, scientific approach, e.g. by publishing the respected quality journal "Der Neue Orient".

[*] Max Rudolf Kaufmann (29 April 1886 in Basel, Switzerland - 1963 in Bonn, Germany), was a Swiss author, translator from Turkish, and journalist, who worked and published in Switzerland, Turkey, the United States and Germany.

Kaufmann was born on 29 April 1886 in Basel and studied philology in Bern, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1907.

After some years as journalist in Paris, he moved to Constantinople in 1910, where he joined the editorial staff of Osmanischer Lloyd, the German language newspaper co-founded and managed by Dr. Friedrich Schrader. Who served as his mentor, he was a German liberal democrat and a sympathizer of the German SPD, Kaufmann soon criticized the arrogant and imperial behaviour of official German representatives in Turkey. He was rather soon fired by the owners of Osmanischer Lloyd (the German Foreign Office and the consortium of the Baghdad Railroad Project), but continued working for various newspapers as a correspondent, including Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Frankfurter Zeitung. The chief correspondent at that time of Frankfurter Zeitung was Paul Weitz, a key figure in German diplomacy at that time and main adversary of Hans Humann.

After German intelligence got hold of a letter where he openly expressed these critical views right in the middle of World War I, in 1916, Kaufmann was deported by the Turkish authorities allied with Germany to Ankara, and later expelled from Turkey. Schrader was fired from the editorial board of Osmanischer Lloyd one year later. Back in Germany, Prof. Dr. Eugen Mittwoch, who just had become head of German Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient, the semi-official German Intelligence and propaganda organisation for the Middle East, immediately hired Kaufmann. After the end of World War I, Kaufmann stayed in Berlin and worked for Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, at that time the leading liberal-conservative Berlin newspaper. He worked as deputy editor in chief for some time, until he was fired after the newspaper was bought by the powerful Stinnes trust, and Hugo Stinnes had made Hans Humann, the former German military attache in Constantinople, and back then the main adversary of Weitz, Schrader and Kaufmann, the CEO of the DAZ publisher.

In 1925 Kaufmann moved to the United States, where he became a correspondent of Hamburger Fremdenblatt, at that time Germany's leading business and commerce newspaper, and also served as editor of a German-language daily newspaper in Newark, New Jersey, the New Jersey Freie Zeitung. After the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Kaufmann discontinued his work for German media and moved back to his native Switzerland, where he worked for different local papers and also as a librarian at the University Library in Basel.

In 1952, the Adenauer government in Bonn formed Inter Nationes as an organisation to increase Germanys reputation in countries at that time allied with West Germany. Kaufmann moved to Bonn in order to manage the Middle Eastern department of that organisation. At the same time he became active in the Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft (German Turkish Society), where he became publisher of the regular proceedings of that association. In Germany, Kaufmann was decorated with the Bundesverdienstkreuz by President Theodor Heuss[**], who was himself a former journalist and had been active in Constantinople during World War I.

Kaufmann died in 1963 in Bonn.

[**]  Theodor Heuss (b.  31 January 1884 – d. 12 December 1963) Theodor Heuss, a friend of Naumann and Jäckh, who designed the German Cultural Centre in Constantinople and later became the first Federal President of Germany from 1949 until 1959.