|
|
March 28, 2003/Adar2 24 5763, Vol. 55, No. 31
History of Germany's Jews is more the pity
JON M. SANDS
Special to Jewish News
In 1743, a young Jewish scholar named Moses Mendelssohn entered Berlin through a gate reserved for livestock and Jews. Since the number of Jews allowed was restricted, the story goes that Mendelssohn was questioned about what he sought in the city. "To learn," he replied.
Thus begins Amos Elon's probing and profound intellectual study of Jews in Germany, "The Pity of It All, A History of Jews in Germany 1743-1933" (Metropolitan Books, $30 hardcover). It is an appropriate starting place for Elon, because "learn" is what Mendelssohn did. Elon describes how within a few years, through sheer intellectual willpower, Mendelssohn became renown throughout Germany and Europe as a philosopher, literary critic and man of letters. Mendelssohn showed that one could be both a good Jew and a good German. He exemplified the promise of Enlightenment Germany.
"The Pity of It All" traces the course of Jewish engagement in Germany. Elon undertakes to survey what the Jewish life of the mind hoped to find in the nation of Kant and Goethe, and how it sought to contribute to the culture. To use one noted scholar's phrase, the outsider wanted to be an insider.
Over the next two centuries, Jews engaged in, contributed to, and were changed by German culture. Elon brings great insight and sensitivity to this relationship that was full "of such promise but also so vexed, so tangle, and ultimately so terrible."
"The Pity of It All" follows the course of Jewish intellectual life in the fragmented states that made up Germany. He explores how a sliver of a minority, never more than 1 percent of the population, became so expressive in it, and so feared and hated. Elon believes the tension in society related to the historical inability of German society to view Jews as capable of being "German Jews." The outsider could never truly become an insider.
Elon describes the complexity of identity, how German Jews saw themselves and as society viewed them. It was this "duality of German and Jew - two souls within a single body - (that) would preoccupy and torment German Jews" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. "Nowhere in Western Europe," concludes Elon, "was this duality as deeply felt and finally as tragic."
By 1933, just short of 200 years since Mendelssohn entered Berlin "to learn," Jews were learning too late that the bright promise had become a deadly nightmare.
Elon's history is an intellectual account that focuses on key Jewish intellectuals over the course of the time span. Mendelssohn and Heine are the stellar figures, but numerous Jewish luminaries in the arts and politics are sketched to show how Jews strove, at every opportunity, to give voice to German, and in a sense European, culture. Ideas from Jewish intellectuals coursed through German life, and Jewish hunger at being accepted found its way into their mirror societies, such as clubs and associations, from which they were excluded.
If there is a fault in Elon's work, it is his almost exclusive focus on ideas and intellectuals. He touches on economic and social history, but his themes are notable thinkers and what they thought. It is the engagement of the mind, of ideas and ideals, which interests him.
Elon recounts how the Enlightenment came to the majority of German Jews through Napoleon. He unlocked the ghetto doors for most Jews and ushered them into German society where they were met with distrust and suspicion. Napoleon's defeat saw a reemergence of German aristocratic rule, which was maintained through all the revolutionary waves that swept out of France and only slowly and grudgingly accommodated representative voice. The outsider remained outside the palace.
The Modern Age, the age of change, became to many Germans synonymous with Jewish change. In a conservative political society, imbued with militarism and jingoism, the Jews, as leading figures in literary salons and discussion groups, as writers and agitators, were viewed as being outsiders.
In their relationship with German culture, Elon also discusses how Jews reacted and responded to German society. The responses were varied over time and place. This included a redefining of their Judaism and reinterpreting their religion. The Reform movement is but one example. Elon, for his study, defines "being Jewish" as what German society saw as Jewish identity. In this way, he can address assimilation, belief, and what it meant for Jews "to be accepted" from their perspective and what it meant from the different German perspective.
Elon rejects the overly deterministic approach of some scholars and their almost fatalistic view of the inevitability of the Holocaust. Rather, Elon shows the terrible tragedy of Jewish involvement in a culture that both nurtured and despised them.
Elon's perspective of German history through a Jewish prism is sad and wrenching. It reads of the hopes and efforts of a people to be accepted by a society, and culture, in which they were conversant but remained forever the outsider. His book though offers Germany as an example of a land where the Jews strove to be accepted, thought they were, but were demonized in a tragic set of historical factors. It was, in the end, the sorrow and the pity of it all.
Sands is a Phoenix attorney.
|
