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The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933

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Too often the history of Jews in Germany is portrayed as beginning with the Weimar Republic and ending with the Holocaust. This German-Jewish history begins much earlier, in 1743, and ends before the Third Reich has obliterated the German Jewish community. It is a sobering tale.

The story of Jews in Germany is essentially one of a long unrequited love affair. From decade to decade, and century to century, the Jews featured in this book wanted nothing more than to be Germans. They did everything in their power to demonstrate their "Germanness," from eagerly volunteering to fight for Germany in the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars, to making important scientific discoveries (10 German Jews won Nobel prizes in science), to financing various principalities, to writing great German poetry. A good many Jews were even willing to convert to Christianity in order to blend in, or to be able to practice their professions. The rulers of various German states (there was no united "Germany" until 1871) cynically used Jews as a source of funds, allowed them minimal rights, and expelled or denied them advancement at whim.

Still, the people who refused to call themselves "German Jews" ("We are German citizens of the Jewish faith!") kept abasing themselves to join this society. One wonders why. One reason is that Germany did have a lot to offer -- it was a leader in philosophy, science, music and art. A historian visiting Berlin in the 1970s said that the 20th Century could have been the German century. Another reason is that as bad as Germany was, it treated its Jews better than many other places in Europe, particularly Russia. And in the Weimar Era, German Jews were represented at all levels of government: the Foreign Minister was a Jew, as was the head of a short-lived socialist government in Bavaria. Jews were leaders in science, architecture, music and theatre. German Jews even believed that they were better off than their co-religionists in the United States,where Jews were excluded from many neighborhoods and jobs, and Ivy League schools had quotas. (Of course, there is nothing in American Jewish history remotely similar to the German religious exclusions, or, worse still, "Hep, Hep!" riots.)

The major flaw in this book is that while it discusses the impact of German Jews on Germany, it gives short shrift to the impact of German Jews on Jewish life, and neglects the more religious Jews altogether. The omission of Samson Raphael Hirsch, one of the greatest Orthodox leaders of all time, is inexplicable. The philosophy of "Torah im Derech Eretz," i.e., that Jews should simultaneously study Torah and be conversant with modern culture and thought, is the foundation of the Modern Orthodox movement -- and it started in Germany.

It is sometimes difficult to wade through long non-fiction books, especially history, but not this one. The book grabs you in the beginning and never lags. (Not only is Elon a great writer, but he has made the not-inconsiderable effort to translate German poetry into rhymed English!) The story is painful, and often heartbreaking, but well worth the effort.

This is a heartbreaking story about a people who tried to shake their pariah status and, although sometimes things got better sometimes worse, ultimately they failed and failed horribly. Told in a series of sketches against the backdrop of European and German histories, this book combines the best of fiction and non-fiction in a seamless and utterly readable whole.

It is refreshing too that there are neither demons nor saints in these pages. The Jews portrayed here (from Mendelsohn to Arendt) are simply people who try to convince themselves that they too can be German. And for a while they succeeded not in becoming German (for the Germans never regarded them as anything but pariahs) but in convincing themselves that they had achieved that much-coveted status.

And when they had convinced themselves they forgot that "the step-child must always be on his best behavior," forgot even that they were step-children; so heady was the illusory promise of Emancipation, so wondrous was Kaiser's pledge that "he no longer knows any parties, [he knows] only Germans" that the Jews allowed themselves to be deceived. During WWI, they were "as conformist" as all others, forgetting that in war hatred abounds and that the fastest way to get hold of an ideology is to declare that they hate someone. And that the easiest group to hate is a minority that had always been persecuted.

The reminder (a Jew census to determine how many Jews served on the front lines) was a shock but it was not a big enough shock to make the Jews flee Germany. A place where they had lived for thousands of years; where they had lived before the Germans arrived. For, as Amos Elon makes clear, there was noting inevitable about the Holocaust. Even at the very end of the Weimar Republic, there was a paradox of surging Nazism and increasing assimilation, of growing anti-Semitism and growing Jewish prominence for Jews in every field in Weimar culture." For the Jews this meant that they could cling to the belief that they could yet become German; for the Nazis this meant that the Jews were increasingly prominent and therefore so much easier to hate.

The end we know.

But there was so much more to the German Jewry than their horrible and tragic end. This is their story, beautifully told. I highly recommend it.

Amos Elon opens this book describing Moses Mendelsohn, a German philosopher's entry as an impoverished and uneducated teen into Berlin through a gate reserved for "swine, oxen, and Jews," and ends it with a famous Jewish writer's fleeing Berlin by train just hours ahead of the Gestapo.

Between these bookends you'll find the history of the German Enlightenment, the general acceptance and tolerance that Jews came to enjoy in Germany, of the significant role that Jews played in Germany's cultural, scientific, political and business worlds, and of the assimilation process that led to the specific identity of being a German Jew, and of most tragic suffering. What a pity!

It is the privilige of the victor to write history; most English-language histories of Germany's Jews to a greater or lesser degree approach their story through the prism of Anglo-American history, and adopt some of the prejudices and justifications of Anglo-American historians sometimes becoming but recitations of trusims. Not so this book, which is far more sophisticated. Without excusing that which ought never have happened, Elon clearly symapathisizes with the German people, and does not, for example, only describe the depths of the racial hatred to which they sunk, but also describes how barely 30 years before, they were far and away the most tolerant and least racist nation in history. Would that this were better known.

Not only is it a (brief) history of German Jewry, but also a brief history of German culture, politics and science. Elon believes that the Social-Democrats were far too weak, disorganized, and confused to have been able to maintain law and order during the Weimar Republic, and that the more conservative parties, which largely were extensions of churches, were too tied down by their religious affiliations to have been able to provide effective government. This, he believes, meant that the only form of government that could have saved Germany from the horrors that came to be would have been a military dictatorship. Expecting the Germans to smoothly transition from centuries of monarchic rule to a democracy during the depths of the Great Depression was not realistic. Democracies cannot exist without citizens who think for themselves, monarchies often raise people to follow orders without question. This is an interesting idea, and not what one hears from the sort of historians who write that the horrors arose because people weren't nice enough.

This is a hugely informative and highly moving book that is history sine ira et studio, history at its very best. I heartily recommend this book.

Belief in the coming of the Messiah and a Messianic era of world peace is an integral part of traditional Judaism. Even secularized Jews, starting with Moses Mendelssohn and others, transfer this belief into an attempt to create a worldly utopia in the here and now while abandoning traditional Jewish observance. This explains why various universalist, utopian philosophies, such as Marxism, attracts secular Jews. Similarly, attempts to create an improved "Reform" Judaism, or a quasi-universalist Socialist Zionism attracted Jews who had abandoned belief in the Jewish religious tradition. Amos Elon, a Jew of this type, in this outstanding book, looks back at what seemed at the time, the most successful attempt of the Jews to shed their supposedly "parochial" traditions and to assimilate into what looked like a vital culture, Germany of the 19th and early 20th century which had such a flowering of music, literature, art, science and industry in which Jews played such a major role. Although most Jews abandoned religious tradition in the period, moving upward in the social and economic mileu of Germany, and felt that they were as German as any non-Jewish German, especially after having fought as good patriots in the wars of the 1870 and 1914-1918, the whole edifice of German Jewish assimilation came crashing down, dragging much of Europe into the abyss with it. Many Jews came into prominence in the highest levels of German society and politics, even into the Kaiser's entourage, and yet, when the crunch came with the defeat in 1918, the Kaiser and others blamed "the Jews" for the defeat, even though the Jews were the most loyal of all Germans. As Elon points out, many in Europe admired or feared the Germans, only the Jews loved them. And this love was totally unrequited, as the Germans, as a people, decided that the Jews were responsible for all their problems and that the Jews would have to be annihilated, even if it meant the destruction of their own country in the process.
Elon describes well the adoption of the "kulturreligion", the religion of culture that the German Jews adopted with their almost fanatical devotion to music, literature, art and philosophy, and their blind, fanatical patriotism that burst out in 1914 when even many who would later claim to be pacifists such as Martin Buber expressed bloodthirsty enthusiasm for war and German aggression. However, I don't agree with Elon's assertion at the end of the book that Hitler and the Holocaust "weren't inevitable" since he claims that Hitler came to power only through a shabby political deal and not through "irresistable historical forces". All the accounts I read of the period by Germans who were around at the time said most people, especially the young, felt that Germany's future was "either Red or Brown" (i.e. Communist or Nazi) and that democracy was discredited.
What is especially interesting is how Elon is expressing his own longing for such a secular messianic era. Once an ardent Zionist, who thought a similar Israeli society based on a similar "kulturreligion" would develop in Israel and people like him would be revered as national "philosophers", he, to his horror, saw the revival of traditional Jewish religious observance, bringing him to the decision earlier this year to leave Israel for good. As he stated in a newspaper interview, he used to be able to call the Prime Minister of Israel to arrange a personal meeting, but today, the political elite has no interest in him, so he sees no reason to remain in Israel.
At the end of the book, he express the despair of the good German Jews who loved their country so much. Instead of pointing out how tens of thousands of German Jews made "aliyah" (immigrated) to Israel and enriched the emerging society there, in spite of the inevitable hardships, he instead focuses on all the Jews who committed suicide, unable to live outside their beloved Fatherland which had foresaken them. Elon is giving expression to his own despair that the Jewish state is returning to its own Jewish roots and his alienation from them.
This book is a must for those who want to understand the tragic culmination of Jewish life in Germany and Europe as a whole, and the odyssey of the alienated Jew who simply wants to abandon his own people and tradition, something that the Germans and Europe proved is impossible.

"The Pity of it All" is on par with Peter Gay's works in terms of the elegance of the writing and the delicate evocation of its period. Elon's work is thoroughly researched but does not bury its reader in needless detail the way so many historians, eager to show off their research, do. Nor does Elon wring his hands over the genuinely difficult question: "How could Germany's Jews not have known they were hurtling torward disaster?" Elon answers this question, in a sense, by avoiding it and instead carefully evoking a very particular place and time. Once he has done that, the question evaporates--or, at least, no longer seems separable from understanding that place and time. Elon's work is studded with mini-biographies of important historical players (Moses Mendelsohn, Walter Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Chaim Weizmann, Hannah Arendt, to name just a few), which keep the reader's interest; they are empathetic portrayals but never hagiographical. Overall, a great read.

One of the best history books I read (and I read quite a few):
Well written, the past comes to life and what's more important you start to live it as if you don't know the future. One of the biggest problems in reading history is the fact you know "the answers" a privilege people don't have when they actually live and take decisions. This book gives you the feeling as if you almost are there with out knowing how things will eventually turn out.
Side bonus: a look in to the best of European culture of the 19th century.
A key for understanding lots of current issues, it will also help to understand the desires and nightmares of Jews in Israel today.

I decided to read this book out of my interest in European Jews' History, and it has not let me down. Seen from Spain, the history of Jews in Germany makes me wonder whether it has lots of similarities with what happened here 500 years ago when Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain. A lot of our towns have "juderías" (Jew Neibourghoods). Falling empires seem to have a tendency of looking for guilt on "different" people. A great book. A must for those interested not only in Jew History but also in the so-call "dialogue among cultures".

The progress of Jews toward full acceptance in the society of Germany and Austria--or at least Vienna--is traced thoroughly and at length. Writers, politicians, artists and industrialists, all are met here. Of some figures--those of peculiar importance or eccentricity--a whole biography is written. Others are mentioned almost in passing, never to be heard of again. The unique role of the **HofJude** (court Jew) and the **KaiserJude** (Emperor's Jew), these being close to power without actually wielding it, is well explained for readers in democratic America.

The one weakness in the book lies in its failure adequately to explain how things went from sugar to s--t so quickly. It's an account of steady gains, almost a mutual love affair between the Jews who contributed so much and the society that valued them like none other, then suddenly, in the final chapter, it's all taken away and the Jews must flee for their lives as Hitler and the Nazis come to power.

There is a bit more to the story but you will read little of it here. Even the most sympathetic chronicler has acknowledged that along with the flowering of art, literature and theater during the Weimar Republic came a fair amount of decadence and depravity. Many sectors of German society, those from the rural areas especially, were deeply offended by what went on in smart-set Berlin in the twenties, and by the alienated political commentary of some Jewish writers of the time which was intended to wound and did so.

Perhaps little of this was perceived at the time. Elon seems hardly to perceive it in retrospect, devoting all of two sentences on the second to last page to the excesses of the Weimar period.

This book is truly one of a kind. It's detail and clarity is unprecedented and its topic very engaging as Elon does an amazing job in taking his readers through the 200-year journey and labyrinth of a mostly unexplored period of Jewish history. Awesome! Truly the best thing since sliced bread. Besides being a fabulous historical treatise, it answers many questions.......many many questions and problems and does it so wholesomely and so didactically and flawlessly.

My hat is off to you, Mr. Elon. I am silenced by the great amount of awe and respect I now harbor toward you. Thank You!

We have come to expect absorbing and well-written works from Elon, and this one is not disappointing. The author helps us understand two questions: first, how a small and harmless group which contributed so much to European and world civilization could still be so intensely despised, and second, how some of modern history's worst crimes against humanity were cheerfully committed by a nation which had one of the most well-educated and intellectually respectable citizenry in history.
This book is more than a glimpse of some interesting but irrelevant period of history. Anti-semitism, for example, is as alive today as ever, and no one believes that if the Jews or Israel were in mortal danger today, they would not be happily abandoned by everyone (except perhaps by the US). Civilized people continue to abandon not only the Jews, but many other minority groups around the world (including the Palestinians, by the way, who are effectively despised by many of their so-called brothers). This book helps us understand why it happens and how "intellectuals" and political leaders of the left and the right continue to acquiesce or collaborate. Elon helps us understand how humanity continues to have a "dark side," despite the advances of modern civilization. It is unlikely this situation will change much when the Chinese take over world leadership, either, given their traditional xenophobia.

I would recommend this book to anyone who seeks to understand why productive minority groups continue to have such a difficult time in this so-called "inclusionary" and globalized world.