The state of ‘apartness’ in which most Jews in German-speaking territories existed until the late eighteenth century did not yield to its opposite in the nineteenth. For many, processes of acculturation and assimilation led at best to a sense of in-betweenness. I propose to examine the problematic implications of this new position for an individual’s sense of home. Galut, or exile, is a perennial theme in Jewish culture; but, in a number of nineteenth-century literary texts by German-speaking Jewish writers, it is the prospect of submersion into Gentile society, especially through religious conversion, which rears the spectre of homelessness for the characters concerned – even when those characters do not have a particularly developed conscious Jewish identity. The paper will focus particularly on texts by Fanny Lewald and Leopold Kompert.