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The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933

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I am surprised to be the first reviewer of this book. Although the title may suggest that the book is narrow and scholarly, nothing could be further from the truth. By focusing on Germany in the Enlightment and modern periods, Elon has written a microcosm of the history of anti-Semitism and of Europe. Using well-known German Jews, like Heine, and lesser-known figures, Elon brings these 200 years of history to life. He is historically scrupulous, but writes with the ease of a novelist. It's a good read that's good for you.

This is one of the finest works of history, in any subject, I have ever read.

Elon transcends "Jewish History" to write a book that is indeed about Jews in Europe - and is thus about Europe, European civilization, and the enlightenment in general. Prior to reading this work, I had no idea of the significance of Napoleon to the Jewish people, nor the horrific conditions under which most Jews lived. The heavy representation of Jews among progressive reformers and visionary intellectuals reflects the yearnings of the elite of an opressed and ostrasized class - and their vital contribution. Anti-semitism co-mingled with economic and political reactionary views in response to both Jewisch emancipation, and social, cultural and political progressive movements in Europe - culminating in the madness and obscenity of the holocaust. Elon traces with regret the degree that Hitler confirmed and gave strength to Jewish sepratists, who viewed the assimilationist and universalist yearnings of generations of European Jews as racial and religious treason.

Elon is a masterful yet unobtrusive historian. Reading his book is like spending a term with a great professor, under whose tutalage the world becomes larger, sadder, and more deeply intelligible. Elon's work itself stands as a statement that the Holocaust and the Nazi movement did not destroy humanity's progressive vision

Amos Elon's book is a masterpiece. I read it cover to cover and could not put it down. Filled with crucial historical data and drawn from a wide variety of sources, it is engrossing while being perhaps the saddest book I ever read. Elon captures the poignancy of the German Jews wish to be true parts of Germany, their heartfelt efforts. Yet throughout, despite the times when it feels like they are on the threshhold of acceptance, you know the end of the story and sense its tragic inevitability.

Alvin Rosenfeld, MD, co-author with Bruno Bettelheim, The Art of the Obvious.

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.
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.

There are many strengths to this book- one of the main strengths is the variety of uses that it has. It's obvious purpose is to relate the history of German Jews from the rise of the Enlightenment to the rise to power of the Nazi party. But it serves other purposes as well. I came to it for an understanding of the intellectual background of both Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. It could serve as background reading for anyone interested in Einstein, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Freud, Adler, Fromm, Marcuse, Mannheim, Popper, Bernstein, Cassirer, Schoenberg, Husserl, Weill, among other German-Jewish intellectuals to numerous to mention. Which brings me to my third purpose. I have never read anything that made me realize just how badly Germany damaged itself intellectually during the rise of the Nazis. It serves as the primary example of politically ripping your heart out because your brain commands it. Who knows what the country could have become if it had embraced it Jewish citizens? Finally, for me, this book makes me understand why Zionism became such a political force. At some point, when you are treated like the Jewish citizens of Germany were, what else can you do? Elon makes it clear that their suffering began long before the twentieth century.
I want to talk about Elon's methodology. His book is basically a series of well chosen capsule biographies of prominent German Jews whose lives and struggles for emancipation and assimilation serve as to tell the stories of all German Jews. His focuses on people like Moses Mendelssohn, Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Borne, Ludwig Bamberger, Gershon Bleichroder and Walter Rathenau. Along with this main biographies are several dozens of shorter ones. Elon then surrounds these stories with a certain amount of sociological history (two of his favorite statistics are to look at the rate of conversions from Judaism to Christianity and the rate of intermarriage). He tries to relate those stats to larger historical events. Finally, he also uses a bit of cultural history,e.g., he sees Goethe's idea of Bildung as having an even larger impact on German Jews than on the rest of the German population.
This methodological approach to his story has some drawbacks. Non-intellectual and/or lower class German Jews remain in the background in Elon's book. I am not sure how this could be avoided. There may be some sort of historical record that would tell us more about this part of the population but it is hard to imagine what that record would be. It is also easy to imagine that life for the poorer and less literate parts of the German Jewish population would have been even worse. Most careers were closed to them, all civil and political rights were denied to them and many times, entire cities or districts were closed to them. In most cities they lived in ghettos and were not allowed to go out into the rest of the city on Sundays or Christian holidays.
Elon also makes it clear that in many ways, Germany was one of the most liberal countries toward its Jewish citizens. I found myself sometimes reading this book wondering when the revolution was going to start. As I said earlier, reading this book makes the appeal of Zionism easy to understand.
I have a few other minor laments about Elon's book. I would have appreciated much more of a history of both Zionism and reform Judaism within the context of his history. I would also have learned from a history of how the understanding of the galut changed over time. But this is a minor quibble. Elon's books fulfills its own purpose and many other purposes magnificantly. There are other books that can tell the story of the missing pieces.
I came to this book from my reading of Strauss. It makes me appreciate Strauss's ideas about the theological-political problem so much more. Strauss basically used the place of the Jewish citizen within a liberal polity as his basic metaphor for the challenge of the other to a community/state. He also saw it as a metaphor for the role of the philosopher in the community/state. In both cases, it stands for an outsider who can never be other than an outsider. Strauss felt that this issue tears at the core of the liberal state. It is one that we can never run from and must always face with all our wisdom and humanity. Reading Elon argues strongly that Strauss may have been right. But mostly, reading Elon leave you with a sense of how much all of us have lost from what happened to the Jewish population of Europe during the thirties and forties. The Pity of It All is right.

THE PITY OF IT ALL is a valuable book, well worth reading (especially, I suspect, for non-Jews), but to me it is vaguely disappointing. I sense it could have been much more. The back cover contains blurbs to the effect that Amos Elon is "a master of the telling anecdote" and that the book is constructed with "memorable, well-executed anecdotes." Sure enough, there are plenty of memorable, well-executed, and telling anecdotes, but in a sense the book is more a farrago of anecdotes than it is a history of the German-Jewish epoch. To be sure, the book is sub-titled a "portrait" rather than a "history", so it can't be said that the book promises something it fails to deliver. I just wish there were more narrative continuity and more analysis and explanation -- in short, more history.

The focus of THE PITY OF IT ALL is divided between (a) how Jews were mistreated over the two centuries covered by the book (ever-evolving manifestations of fundamentally the same anti-Semitism), and (b) portraits of leading Jewish figures in German culture or society. A principal point Elon makes is that for the German Jews, "[t]heir home * * * was not 'Germany' but German culture and language. Their true religion was the bourgeois, Goethean ideal of Bildung (high culture)." Though THE PITY OF IT ALL ends in 1933 with Hitler's assumption of power, throughout looms the horror of the Holocaust, for which everything in the book sets the stage. Elon's portrait shows the periodic waxing and waning of anti-Semitism over those two centuries, but Elon makes little effort to explain the causes of those developments, those ups and downs.

For me, the last two chapters, covering 1914-1933, are the best. Probably this is because I already know much more about those years in German history so I don't need the historical framework or structure that by and large Elon does not provide and I can more readily integrate the anecdotal filler that is his strength. Still and all, I learned a lot, especially about notable Jewish figures -- such as Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Borne, Martin Buber, and Walter Rathenau -- about whom I previously knew embarrassingly little. The writing is accomplished, the narrative flow rarely bogs down, and the numerous illustrations are welcome.

Perhaps I am asking too much from Elon and the book. Perhaps it is enough that I am glad I read THE PITY OF IT ALL, which certainly is the case.

Overall, a well-researched and balanced account of the topic. Without repeating the accolades from others reviewers, let me just add that this book also offers some truly "humorous" quotes (if you can call them as such). My favourite one: [A Jewish man confronted with the choice of converting to Christianity] "How can I believe in Christianity when I don't even believe in Judaism, which is the only true religion?". The wide spectrum of views expressed by German Jews pre-WWII with respect to the level of anti-Semitism in Germany is quite intriguing.

Is it possible to write history that doesn't anticipate its eventualities? If we were to write about Jews in Germany without knowing what happened after the stock market crash of 1929, would our understanding be quite different? The picture that Elon paints of assimilation, differentiation, and anti-Semitism can not avoid drawing judgments from anticipation of what eventually happened. And, of course, that is what the reader is interested in. How was the stage set for the Holocaust? With the Holocaust in mind our judgment of both Germans and Jews focuses on the fatal flaws that seem to lead to it. This magnifies what otherwise might be seen as mundane failings.

Elon's writing is both succinct and clear. He makes his points with literary skill. I am sure that technical historians have taken exception to almost every claim he made. Nonetheless he has drawn a picture of Jews in Germany which has given me insight into my own genealogy but also left me with many questions. Because of residential restrictions that allowed only wealthy Jews to live in German cities and the rapid increase in their economic success and assimilation into German kultur, Elon's history is bound to be tilted in the direction of this rich and creative strata. The names used to characterize different phases of German Jewish history are truly impressive: Mendelssohn, Haber (who improved poison gas during WWI making it a more effective weapon and while doing pesticide research invented Zyklon B later used in concentration camps to kills Jews), Rathenau (who organized the German economy in WWI which was otherwise totally unprepared and was assassinated while serving as foreign minister during Weimar), Einstein, Buber, Heine, etc. But what then of the lesser Jews. Their population grows from 100,000 in the early 19th century to 5 times as many by WWI. My great great grandfather came from Bavaria after 1848, a schuhmacher, maybe a fischermann. What were their experiences like as opposed to bankers, doctors then publishers, and scholars. Who were the poor Jews living in small towns and then cities when they were subsequently allowed to? Were there none? Elon says that in 1800 70% of Prussian Jew were paupers living as peddlers and beggars. By 1870 60% had "secure middle-class status," making German Jews the most upwardly mobile people in modern European history. As Germany became a state it lifted restrictions on Jewish occupations and education. By 1867 all Jewish fourteen year olds could read German and 15% of Berlin high school students were Jewish, quadruple their proportion in the population. Despite these openings, streams of anti-Semitism persisted, often embedded in German nationalism growing out of the romantically inspired idea of a German volk. Jewish financial and intellectual accomplishment kept Jews in the limelight.

It is fascinating to think that if we stopped motion at various points in Elon's narrative we would have very different ideas of the situation of Jews in Germany. The high points were Napoleon's emancipation, the late 19th century when it is claimed that Jews in Germany were the most free in Europe, the beginning of WWI when the Jew are both outspoken nationalists and increasingly acceptable as real Germans. With German military victories in the east commanders tried to get eastern Jews to rise up against the hated Russians who responded by deporting a half million Jews eastward. Nevertheless the Germans shipped a fifth that many Polish and Lithuanian Jews to Germany as forced laborers. German Jews did not protest this as they had paid for the transshipment through Germany in box cars of Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms, sealing them off from infecting German society and causing embarrassment to German Jews. Another highpoint was in the late 20's before the crash when the anti-Semitism of the post WWI collapse seemed to dwindle. Are we to say these eras blinded successful Jews to an intrinsic underlying German anti-Semitism which growing out of the crusades and the plague years, would erupt when there was a need for a scapegoat. After the defeat of Napoleon and the reaction in its wake, with de-emancipation and hard times, there were pogroms in Bavaria and elsewhere which caught the authorities by surprise. The offenders were both the underclasses and the bourgeoisie. Elon claims nothing like this had happened since the Dark Ages. As the century progressed Jews were assimilating rapidly. Yet after the stock market crash of 1873 there was another outburst of anti-Semitism blaming Jewish stockbrokers for the crash. Again after WWI anti-Semitism was rampant, blaming the Jews for defeat and the punitive Versailles treaty. This eased with economic improvement. Then the depression decimated the recovering society and brought Hitler to power. Somewhere behind anti-Semitism Elon finds lurking the German bureaucracy, the Junker gentry, the churches, and the educational system. Was it a fatal flaw for accomplished Jews to identify with being German? Were they kidding themselves all along? Certainly liberation from Ghetto religious narrowness is something I can identify with. And aside from Buber's romanticizing Hassid's there was little wish to replicate the Jewish madrasas of Poland and Russian. Elon gives us little information how much of this tradition existed among the not-so-rich Jews. With their literacy in German, did orthodox traditions fall away? I assume the use of Yiddish, so despised by the assimilated as an impoverished language, vanished.

I find myself cheering for my ancestors' reformation of Judaism. The reform temple of my youth had Sunday school but also Friday services. My stettl born mother and my yekes father managed a religious household tilted in the reform direction. And the Turkish looking dome on temple Isaiah Israel on the south side of Chicago looks exactly like one of the great German synagogues pictured in Elon's book. The Zionists counter claim that wanting to be German undermined something intrinsically Jewish in the heart of Jews and that German's would never really accept Jews seems proven by the Holocaust. Yet like Elon I wonder whether without the humiliating and economically destructive Versailles treaty and the depression the strain of rigidity in Germany would not have subsided and both the subsequent history of the world and Jewry would not have been totally different. As a residually sentimental Jew, I watch with horror human's blind self destruction from the Cold War through Vietnam, two Afganistans, India and Pakistan, Darfur, Israel and Palestine and American Republicans fiddling their conservative tunes while the US burns in its own greed and twisted international blundering. Standing in Berlin in 1898 or 1914 would I have been as optimistic as elite German Jews or as nationalistic. My Jewish acquaintances range from famous scientists to well known spiritual teachers. We are all very much Americans. While we might despise American involvement in Iraq and have mixed opinions about Israel we share the pre-Nazi lack of paranoia of German Jews. Many Zionists might say we are naïve. History proved German Jews misguided. But history is after the fact. It is easy to say, ah, they were blind. If I knew this morning what I know this evening about today's stock market, I would be a rich man. But it doesn't work that way. In addition to this unknowing, there is sometimes arrogance and self-satisfaction. Elite German Jews certainly were not exempt from these. In any case I, for all my "understanding" of history, could have been one of them. No one knows what comes next!

Charlie Fisher Emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

One immediately thinks of paralells with the last centuries of Jewish life in Spain. High levels of acculturation leading to complete assimilation. The "loophole" was a simple one - conversion. As such it was the admissions ticket to acceptance and opportunity yearned for by German Jews. For the Jews of Spain the ending was the inquisition and expulsion of 1492. For the Jews of Germany the result was annihilation in a different, more terrible way. Elon is a master writer and thinker.

"The Pity of It All" is a masterful accomplishment of scholarship, insight and tone. It describes the world and history of German Jews before the Holocaust in ways that illuminate the catastrophe that follwed, but with a wise restraint that holds back from glib or pat theories. For instance, Elon is careful to insist that the outcome for Germany's Jews was not inevitable, and that although virulent, persistent anti-semitism was widespread in German culture, Hitler's and Nazism's rise also benefitted from the blunders and complacency of competing politics, and from other random hazards. In focusing on and describing the preceding two centuries of rapid development of a German Jewish community of prosperity and accomplishment, Elon gives these people back their identity and dignity as something other than doomed or pathetic foreshadows of predestination. While the book provides valuable food for thought about the Holocaust, it also, and predominantly, honors and rewardingly brings to our awareness the rich and fascinating parade of Jewish life and individuals in Germany from the mid-18th century forward.