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Ostjuden (German for "Eastern Jews"; singular Ostjude, adjective ostjüdisch) was a term used in Germany and Austria during the first half of the 20th century to refer to Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. The term often had a pejorative connotation and, like other disparaging epithets of earlier use, evoked the negative qualities that German racism had attributed to Eastern European Jew since the 19th century.
Because the stereotype of the Eastern Jew blended antisemitism with anti-Slavic sentiment and xenophobia, hostility toward Eastern European Jews could be found among both antisemitic non-Jewish Germans and assimilated German Jews alike. The latter sometimes reacted with fear and contempt to the arrival in Germany of Jews who spoke Yiddish, dressed differently, practised orthodox Judaism, and lived in extreme poverty. Other German Jews, however, were fascinated by Eastern European Jews and viewed them with sympathy and admiration, seeing in them a more authentic form of Jewish life and religious expression, a resistance to the values of bourgeois society, and the prototype of a Jewish identity untainted by assimilation.
The term Ostjude was widely used in völkisch and Nazi antisemitic propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s, but has been used neutrally in Jewish historical studies since the 1980s. In the German-speaking Jewish world and in Israel, the Ostjude is contrasted with the Yekke (or Jecke), the stereotype of the German Jew, bourgeois and largely assimilated into Western European culture.