az előzőből:

"Roughly speaking, the Western Jews (the Jews in Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna) represented the liberal part of European Jewry. They were very eager to integrate and assimilate into the middle class of society, and finally adopted to a very large extent the secular values of the bourgeoisie.43 In contrast to the “Western Jews”, the “Eastern Jews” still adhered to religious Orthodoxy, which was not confined to religious matters, but exerted a strong influence on their way of living as well. Jewish religious Orthodoxy, and even more so its more radical offshoot, Hasidism, did not separate the secular and the religious world. Instead, religion was all-encompassing and ruled everyday life outside the synagogue as well. Against this background, there is no denying that a cultural gulf existed between Western Jews and their brethren in Eastern Europe. The division of European Jewry into Eastern and Western Jews was not so much a geographical as a cultural categorization. This cultural borderline was also held to account for the separation between a physically “defective” and a “normal” Jewish type. In advocating a cultural instead of a racial perspective for interpreting the anthropological or medical data on Jews, and thus showing that specific modes of life contributed to somatic traits, Jewish scientists wanted to render the apprehension of “the physically distinct Jew”, which encompassed all Jews, and the concept of race obsolete. Since the Westjuden had assumed the cultural norms of the bourgeois societies, they hoped that they would no longer be regarded as representing a “physically distinct Jewish type”. It was only the Ostjuden, who, by adhering to a different culture, were to be described as physically different and diseased."