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The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933
As it's usually told, the story of the German Jews starts at the end, with their tragic demise in Hitler's Third Reich. Now, in this important work of historical restoration, Amos Elon takes us back to the beginning, chronicling a period of achievement and integration that at its peak produced a golden age second only to the Renaissance.
Writing with a novelist's eye, Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons and activists. He peoples his account with dramatic figures: Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin in 1743 through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, and went on to become "the German Socrates;" Heinrich Heine, beloved lyric poet who famously referred to baptism as the admission ticket to European culture; Hannah Arendt, whose flight from Berlin signaled the end of the German-Jewish idyll. Elon traces how this minority-never more than one percent of the population-came to be perceived as a deadly threat to national integrity, and he movingly demonstrates that this devastating outcome was uncertain almost until the end.
A collective biography, full of depth and compassion, The Pity of It All summons up a splendid world and a dream of integration and tolerance that, despite all, remains the essential ennobling project of modernity.
(less)
Writing with a novelist's eye, Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons and activists. He peoples his account with dramatic figures: Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin in 1743 through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, and went on to become "the German Socrates;" Heinrich Heine, beloved lyric poet who famously referred to baptism as the admission ticket to European culture; Hannah Arendt, whose flight from Berlin signaled the end of the German-Jewish idyll. Elon traces how this minority-never more than one percent of the population-came to be perceived as a deadly threat to national integrity, and he movingly demonstrates that this devastating outcome was uncertain almost until the end.
A collective biography, full of depth and compassion, The Pity of It All summons up a splendid world and a dream of integration and tolerance that, despite all, remains the essential ennobling project of modernity.
(less)
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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May 5, 2017
As a result of reading this book, it occurred to me that the "German-Jewish epoch" (as the paperback's subtitle says) was something like Hellenistic Judaism, a form of Judaism that no longer exists but is the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged and which lasted six or so centuries. During the two centuries of the German-Jewish epoch, the German-speaking lands including Austria and particularly the eventually unified nation of Germany were the place to be and culture to join for Jews after the reality took shape that they would no longer be segregated in ghettos but would in some way, shape or form be joining the larger society. Germany, in other words, was their promised land and where they hoped to take root and even merge with the majority population in a way we find difficult to imagine, knowing what was to come.
That this was so also is difficult to understand for other reasons, one being that Jews did not only want to assimilate into the culture; they also felt as keenly patriotic and in love with German land, history and blood as the Germans--even though those Germans in large part considered them foreign and rejected them both as Germans and Europeans, which could lead to their being internally conflicted and torn.
I did not even have a clear perception of German as an ethnicity. That I attribute that to the American post-WWII homogenizing of differences among European immigrants so as to encourage unity and form a better contrast to evil of the Nazi sort. (On the other hand, I do have the idea of the Irish as an ethnic group--but then they now own that and treat it as a source of pride in a way Germans don't.)
The Jews were a tiny minority hovering around 1 percent. From the first, the progressive attitude among them was toward reform, modernizing, and, for many, assimilation, in the belief that it was their differences that led to persecution and kept them from being fully accepted. That's what people say (they still do): that "setting themselves apart" is what leads to their being disliked and persecuted, so for them to have believed that and moved in that direction seems reasonable. That worked when times were good (sometimes for decades, and during the good times it all feels so normal) but not when times were bad, and it never succeeded in bringing about a true pluralism. Coming full circle, the ultimate rejection in fact happened when most Jews had entered the middle class, and when many had become secular or even had converted. They had become more like the general population. Despite what people say, then, it was the erasure of distinctions that accompanied the worst reaction of all.
I'm not sure exactly what the author means by his title, The Pity of It All: what happened, or the fact that the Jews so wanted to be German. They wanted it so badly that they often blamed themselves. The more they were hated the more they were inspired to be good by contributing to society--and they contributed far out of proportion to their numbers to building this epoch--but the more they succeeded the more they were blamed. The narrative morphed but the punchline remained the same, and the joke was on them.
Then, when everything fell apart, there was a lot of difficulty adapting to new countries and languages. For that matter there was trauma in being stuck with German. There were a number of suicides among those who left and those who didn't.
Imagine being in what you have been thinking is a stormy but viable marriage, and then one day your spouse completely pulls the rug out from under you.
In many respects the history is the same as that covered in Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, except here we have a more exclusive focus on Germany that continues up to the Nazi takeover. And Emancipation is definitely at the Freshman level, with the current one at Sophomore. Elon mentions names galore--too many--and often expects the reader already to know who they all are. And he's not as clear in giving the historical and political framework.
What he's especially good at is making the reader feel what it was like to be there at various points along the way. I could feel the attraction of those salons. I could see how Heinrich Heine was a genius, rather than merely being told he was. (In a group discussion of this book, one participant recalled his immigrant relatives putting Heine on a Shakespeare-like level.) I could feel what it would be like to defend the Wiemar Republic and hear the fact I'd defended it be used to condemn it as a "Jew republic," or to survive an assassination attempt, only to have the judge put me rather than the perpetrator on the defensive.
But the author sometimes does that at the price of objectivity. He forgets to keep one foot on the shore and jumps in with both feet.
He approves when Jews are unexpectedly or heroically liberal, for example, when they voted like hard-pressed workers and leftist intellectuals even though they lived like bankers (p.255). He's disaproving of--and nonplussed by--right-leaning alliances: Indeed, few things are as curious in nineteenth century German history as Bismarck's success in enlisting the services of the insurgents of 1848 (p. 191). But rejection is a profound incentive to support unity. And on the other hand, whenever Jews were not disqualified from right-wing participation, some took advantage of the opportunity.
So I'm suggesting Elon has an agenda, or a need, to see Jews in a positive light, highlighting heroic liberalism, finding reactionary behavior inexplicable, and simply not finding clarity in discussing those who were communists. In contrast to such rosy tints, he has to see Germany through a dark lens (or, maybe the latter is a tendency to bind and confine evil by putting it all in one place). The trouble with an agenda is that having one interferes with objectivity and distorts the vision.
Which is why I rate this book three stars (and that former book, Emancipation, five). Plus, it was a slog.
I've learned a lot, though. A case in point is the figure of Walther Rathenau, son of the industrialist who founded the German electric industry, an enormously capable man who was managing a factory at 30 and who hobnobbed with aristocrats and the Kaiser, but who was an early version of "self-hating Jew," having internalized majority values. He had the foresight to view impending war with fear and trembling. But once the powers-that-be went with war, he volunteered his managerial skills and his connections to supply the war effort and in effect kept Germany going much longer than it could have without him. Then, after the war, he accepted the post of foreign minister, even though the likes of Einstein tried to persuade him that all Jews would be blamed for whatever he did. His mother was terrified he'd become one of the rising tide of political assassinations.
"Genius," the new television series based on Einstein's life, began with the assassination of Rathenau. How many viewers understood what they were seeing?
This book gave me the shivers whenever some event or situation reminded me of today's political scene. ...The description of William II was positively Trump-like....
This February (2017), I saw a documentary at the Jewish Film Festival: Germans & Jews. It was about Germans becoming able to confront their past and Jews feeling safe enough to move to Germany. But Jews are now 0.2% of the population, so most Germans have never seen a Jew. And the Jews in the film said they would never ever consider themselves German.
That this was so also is difficult to understand for other reasons, one being that Jews did not only want to assimilate into the culture; they also felt as keenly patriotic and in love with German land, history and blood as the Germans--even though those Germans in large part considered them foreign and rejected them both as Germans and Europeans, which could lead to their being internally conflicted and torn.
I did not even have a clear perception of German as an ethnicity. That I attribute that to the American post-WWII homogenizing of differences among European immigrants so as to encourage unity and form a better contrast to evil of the Nazi sort. (On the other hand, I do have the idea of the Irish as an ethnic group--but then they now own that and treat it as a source of pride in a way Germans don't.)
The Jews were a tiny minority hovering around 1 percent. From the first, the progressive attitude among them was toward reform, modernizing, and, for many, assimilation, in the belief that it was their differences that led to persecution and kept them from being fully accepted. That's what people say (they still do): that "setting themselves apart" is what leads to their being disliked and persecuted, so for them to have believed that and moved in that direction seems reasonable. That worked when times were good (sometimes for decades, and during the good times it all feels so normal) but not when times were bad, and it never succeeded in bringing about a true pluralism. Coming full circle, the ultimate rejection in fact happened when most Jews had entered the middle class, and when many had become secular or even had converted. They had become more like the general population. Despite what people say, then, it was the erasure of distinctions that accompanied the worst reaction of all.
Heine, the first prominent Jewish cosmopolite, had been realistic enough to insist that a true cosmopolitan society was possible only in Kuckkuckshimmel (never-never land). pp. 376-377)
I'm not sure exactly what the author means by his title, The Pity of It All: what happened, or the fact that the Jews so wanted to be German. They wanted it so badly that they often blamed themselves. The more they were hated the more they were inspired to be good by contributing to society--and they contributed far out of proportion to their numbers to building this epoch--but the more they succeeded the more they were blamed. The narrative morphed but the punchline remained the same, and the joke was on them.
Then, when everything fell apart, there was a lot of difficulty adapting to new countries and languages. For that matter there was trauma in being stuck with German. There were a number of suicides among those who left and those who didn't.
Imagine being in what you have been thinking is a stormy but viable marriage, and then one day your spouse completely pulls the rug out from under you.
Erich Maria Remarque, the exiled author of All Quiet on the Western Front, was asked whether he missed Germany. "Why should I, " he answered. "I'm not Jewish." (p. 399)
In many respects the history is the same as that covered in Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, except here we have a more exclusive focus on Germany that continues up to the Nazi takeover. And Emancipation is definitely at the Freshman level, with the current one at Sophomore. Elon mentions names galore--too many--and often expects the reader already to know who they all are. And he's not as clear in giving the historical and political framework.
What he's especially good at is making the reader feel what it was like to be there at various points along the way. I could feel the attraction of those salons. I could see how Heinrich Heine was a genius, rather than merely being told he was. (In a group discussion of this book, one participant recalled his immigrant relatives putting Heine on a Shakespeare-like level.) I could feel what it would be like to defend the Wiemar Republic and hear the fact I'd defended it be used to condemn it as a "Jew republic," or to survive an assassination attempt, only to have the judge put me rather than the perpetrator on the defensive.
But the author sometimes does that at the price of objectivity. He forgets to keep one foot on the shore and jumps in with both feet.
He approves when Jews are unexpectedly or heroically liberal, for example, when they voted like hard-pressed workers and leftist intellectuals even though they lived like bankers (p.255). He's disaproving of--and nonplussed by--right-leaning alliances: Indeed, few things are as curious in nineteenth century German history as Bismarck's success in enlisting the services of the insurgents of 1848 (p. 191). But rejection is a profound incentive to support unity. And on the other hand, whenever Jews were not disqualified from right-wing participation, some took advantage of the opportunity.
So I'm suggesting Elon has an agenda, or a need, to see Jews in a positive light, highlighting heroic liberalism, finding reactionary behavior inexplicable, and simply not finding clarity in discussing those who were communists. In contrast to such rosy tints, he has to see Germany through a dark lens (or, maybe the latter is a tendency to bind and confine evil by putting it all in one place). The trouble with an agenda is that having one interferes with objectivity and distorts the vision.
Which is why I rate this book three stars (and that former book, Emancipation, five). Plus, it was a slog.
I've learned a lot, though. A case in point is the figure of Walther Rathenau, son of the industrialist who founded the German electric industry, an enormously capable man who was managing a factory at 30 and who hobnobbed with aristocrats and the Kaiser, but who was an early version of "self-hating Jew," having internalized majority values. He had the foresight to view impending war with fear and trembling. But once the powers-that-be went with war, he volunteered his managerial skills and his connections to supply the war effort and in effect kept Germany going much longer than it could have without him. Then, after the war, he accepted the post of foreign minister, even though the likes of Einstein tried to persuade him that all Jews would be blamed for whatever he did. His mother was terrified he'd become one of the rising tide of political assassinations.
"Genius," the new television series based on Einstein's life, began with the assassination of Rathenau. How many viewers understood what they were seeing?
This book gave me the shivers whenever some event or situation reminded me of today's political scene. ...The description of William II was positively Trump-like....
This February (2017), I saw a documentary at the Jewish Film Festival: Germans & Jews. It was about Germans becoming able to confront their past and Jews feeling safe enough to move to Germany. But Jews are now 0.2% of the population, so most Germans have never seen a Jew. And the Jews in the film said they would never ever consider themselves German.
August 15, 2016
The first time I heard of this book was from my former employer, historian Rabbi Berel Wein, who said that it is a thorough history of German Jewry that would show how the Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum, but reading it would “make you want to weep.” That lead me to conclude that I *should* read the book, but it didn’t motivate me to actually do it. What changed my mind was that Malcolm Gladwell mentioned it as a source for his research in the first episode of his podcast, “Revisionist History.” Then the Nine Days of Mourning rolled around, so I figured it was the most appropriate time to look anti-Semitism straight in the face.
The book opens with the story of young Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin. For those who don’t know, Moses Mendelssohn was the spiritual founder of the Reform movement, though he himself was strictly observant and wouldn’t even eat in the home of the German nobleman who hired him as a teacher for his son. Mendelssohn is persona non grata in the Ultra-Orthodox world in which I live, but after reading this book, I am convinced that he was an idealist who loved the Jewish people so much, he misguidedly advocated assimilation as a protection against anti-Semitism. The rest of the book chronicles the rise of Jews in German society and the terrible backlash that resulted, culminating, of course, in the Holocaust. These kind of anti-assimilationist arguments are common in the Ultra-Orthodox world, but as far as I know, the author of this book is a secular Israeli historian. The book is almost exclusively about assimilated Jews, and the Orthodox are hardly mentioned at all. It was a great disappointment to me that the book contained nothing about Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch, who was fighting assimilation in Frankfurt. Instead I learned about other famous German Jews, all of them irreligious: poet Heinrich Heine, politician Walter Rathenau, and even a bit about Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. (If anyone can recommend any books about Rav Hirsch and the Frankfurt community, I’m very interested.)
This was probably the toughest book I’ve read all year, but even still, I can’t give it anything less than a 5. It’s thorough, authoritative, and it taught me a lot. As I said, I read it during the Nine Days, including on the Fast of Tisha B’Av. Between this, the Kinnos, and stories of terrorism in Eretz Yisroel, I sure do feel grateful to be in this peaceful corner of the galus. May Hashem redeem us soon, and please, if possible, let it be in peace.
The book opens with the story of young Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin. For those who don’t know, Moses Mendelssohn was the spiritual founder of the Reform movement, though he himself was strictly observant and wouldn’t even eat in the home of the German nobleman who hired him as a teacher for his son. Mendelssohn is persona non grata in the Ultra-Orthodox world in which I live, but after reading this book, I am convinced that he was an idealist who loved the Jewish people so much, he misguidedly advocated assimilation as a protection against anti-Semitism. The rest of the book chronicles the rise of Jews in German society and the terrible backlash that resulted, culminating, of course, in the Holocaust. These kind of anti-assimilationist arguments are common in the Ultra-Orthodox world, but as far as I know, the author of this book is a secular Israeli historian. The book is almost exclusively about assimilated Jews, and the Orthodox are hardly mentioned at all. It was a great disappointment to me that the book contained nothing about Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch, who was fighting assimilation in Frankfurt. Instead I learned about other famous German Jews, all of them irreligious: poet Heinrich Heine, politician Walter Rathenau, and even a bit about Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. (If anyone can recommend any books about Rav Hirsch and the Frankfurt community, I’m very interested.)
This was probably the toughest book I’ve read all year, but even still, I can’t give it anything less than a 5. It’s thorough, authoritative, and it taught me a lot. As I said, I read it during the Nine Days, including on the Fast of Tisha B’Av. Between this, the Kinnos, and stories of terrorism in Eretz Yisroel, I sure do feel grateful to be in this peaceful corner of the galus. May Hashem redeem us soon, and please, if possible, let it be in peace.
June 2, 2012
It's a very apt title for this well-written book.
Here is the story of the German Jews and their attempts to assimilate with their gentile neighbours, sometimes by even converting to Christianity. The more they tried to assimilate and the more freedoms that they were granted, the greater the anti-Semitism became, until...well, as we all know, the rest is a most tragic episode of recent history.
Here is the story of the German Jews and their attempts to assimilate with their gentile neighbours, sometimes by even converting to Christianity. The more they tried to assimilate and the more freedoms that they were granted, the greater the anti-Semitism became, until...well, as we all know, the rest is a most tragic episode of recent history.
May 10, 2025
Lyrical book about the tragic story of one great people. One critique is that he didn’t fully explain the sources of social conflict between German Jews and broader society and it seemed to just emerge ex nihilo every once in awhile. But the book is deeply moving on all counts.
June 15, 2015
To truly understand any important historical event, it is important to comprehend what came before it. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933, provides the context that is necessary to begin to see how the rise of the Nazi's, the Holocaust, and the behavior of the German people during World War II was possible. Often cited in other books, the book is powerful because it is both scholarly and accessible. The reader learns about the discrimation and terror that the German Jews suffered both from a factual and emotional point of view. Amos Elon provides biographical sketches of many prominent Jews, showing that Jews were not of one mind or attitude about the restrictions and prejudices they faced.
Here are some of facts from the book:
- before the Nazi's came to power, the intermarriage rate in Germany was over 20%. In the town of Breslau, it was over 50%. Some Zionists feared that intermarriage would be the end of the Jewish race.
- Jews wore yellow badges in the 1700's and before to identify themselves and to gain admission to German towns.
- Jews had to pay a tax in order to enter a town. The population of Jews in towns was closely controlled. If a family had more than one son, when the son's came of age, one could remain in the town. The others had to leave to find their fortunes elsewhere.
- Sophisticated, urban German Jews were often prejudiced toward Eastern Jews who suffered even greater oppression. Not wanting the Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Germany to stay, they helped them immigrate to the United States.
This book will persist because it tells such an important story. It will make you ponder the human soul - what it is capable of enduring and inflicting on others.
Here are some of facts from the book:
- before the Nazi's came to power, the intermarriage rate in Germany was over 20%. In the town of Breslau, it was over 50%. Some Zionists feared that intermarriage would be the end of the Jewish race.
- Jews wore yellow badges in the 1700's and before to identify themselves and to gain admission to German towns.
- Jews had to pay a tax in order to enter a town. The population of Jews in towns was closely controlled. If a family had more than one son, when the son's came of age, one could remain in the town. The others had to leave to find their fortunes elsewhere.
- Sophisticated, urban German Jews were often prejudiced toward Eastern Jews who suffered even greater oppression. Not wanting the Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Germany to stay, they helped them immigrate to the United States.
This book will persist because it tells such an important story. It will make you ponder the human soul - what it is capable of enduring and inflicting on others.
October 18, 2016
This is a very engaging history of the Jews of Germany from Moses Mendelssohn until the arrival of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Elon's focus is especially on the writers and thinkers over these almost 200 years. While never achieving true equality, with fits and starts, the German state and social world did open up some for the Jews. From total outcasts, very slowly, there was progress and then, of course, it all came to a crashing halt. The subsequent annihilation of German Jewry is not covered, but of course the author's and our awareness of what lies just ahead is always there.
July 31, 2012
From the introduction: "There has rarely been a confluence of two cultural, ethnic, or religious traditions that proved so richly creative at its peak. Frederic Grunfeld writes that had the end not been so awful we would now hail the decades before the Nazi rise to power as a 'golden age second only to the Italian Renaissance.'" When the Nazi's took over, the Jewish population consisted less than 1% of the 65,000,000 Germans - and yet their contributions to literature, art, sciences, music, business, politics etc. was so remarkable. My great-grandfather was born Jewish, but converted to Catholicism to be able to be more accepted as a "German". This is such an amazing book, yet it breaks my heart to read it.
July 6, 2022
There is a conversation stopper called "GODWIN'S LAW," which disqualifies any comment that draws a lesson or analogy from Hitler or the Nazi's. It is a shame, really, because we need to understand how civil society gave way to cruel totalitarianism and genocide, and how individuals and institutions failed to resist, or in all too rare cases, stood against it. The purpose of learning and thinking through our moral history is to prepare us for our own moral challenges, as individuals, as communities and as a nation. Amos Elon tells the story of "Jews in Germany, 1743-1933" in a well-woven narrative that you won't want to put down.
January 23, 2014
I suppose the lesson is clear, no matter what we Jews, especially German Jews, tried to do in becoming members of society, we were still Jews and when anti-Jewish sentiment arose, we copped it. We were removed. We were killed. The pity of it all, that no matter what we tried, it didn't work.
But I'm not so sure that the polemic which Alon persisted in pinging, is the only lesson we can gain from the book. At each fateful turn, any feeling and honest person would have to say something about the evil in people's hearts. What causes the hostility is not the church, not the venom of the deicide charge, but anti-Semitism itself. And that is not limited to, nor did it begin, in the church age. Sennacherib hated the Jews, as did Haman and Pharaoh. Anti-anyone makes no sense, honestly, unless one lives in a dog-eat-dog world. If we live in a civilized world, like 19th century Germany, then anti-Jewish hostility makes no sense. Therefore trying to 'make sense' of the hostility is an activity of painful frustration. Sense about something senseless? Useless enterprise. Hate makes no sense in a world of love and kindness.
Therefore the real problem in anti-Jewish sentiment is the natural condition of mankind, which is self-centered and morally corrupt. What the German people did and the government of Germany legislated was a function of their human-ness and not their Christianity.
That's why I cringed at times when Alon laid the blame on Christianity in regular beats through the book.
Other than that, the history is clear. The research awesome. His taking us through salons and universities, from shtetls to City Halls, made for a good read.
But I'm not so sure that the polemic which Alon persisted in pinging, is the only lesson we can gain from the book. At each fateful turn, any feeling and honest person would have to say something about the evil in people's hearts. What causes the hostility is not the church, not the venom of the deicide charge, but anti-Semitism itself. And that is not limited to, nor did it begin, in the church age. Sennacherib hated the Jews, as did Haman and Pharaoh. Anti-anyone makes no sense, honestly, unless one lives in a dog-eat-dog world. If we live in a civilized world, like 19th century Germany, then anti-Jewish hostility makes no sense. Therefore trying to 'make sense' of the hostility is an activity of painful frustration. Sense about something senseless? Useless enterprise. Hate makes no sense in a world of love and kindness.
Therefore the real problem in anti-Jewish sentiment is the natural condition of mankind, which is self-centered and morally corrupt. What the German people did and the government of Germany legislated was a function of their human-ness and not their Christianity.
That's why I cringed at times when Alon laid the blame on Christianity in regular beats through the book.
Other than that, the history is clear. The research awesome. His taking us through salons and universities, from shtetls to City Halls, made for a good read.
July 20, 2013
An essential read for those interested in European history in the past 300 years, as well as for those interested in Jewish history. It is an absolutely heart-breaking work, and perhaps I am not the only one who sees multitudinous echoes to much of what passes as politics in the US today. Frightening.
September 28, 2011
One of the finest history books I've ever read. Very well written and a fascinating (hi)story. I'm rereading it for the third time now.
October 15, 2020
On the cover of my copy of "The Pity of It All" is a "Portrait of the Manheimer Family," by Julius Moser, dated 1850. In the painting, pink-cheeked girls dressed in flimsy white dresses dance; the men gaze into the distance; mama plays the piano. It's a beautiful, enticing, happy scene.
But you know from the very beginning that it won't end well.
The Pity of It All traces the history of the Jews in Germany from 1743, when a fourteen-year-old boy, later famous as the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, trudged through the Rosenthal Gate into Berlin; it was the only gate in the city through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass. It ends in 1933, when the philosopher Hannah Arendt fled Germany, after spending "her last evening in Berlin in Mampe's wine restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm, reciting Greek poetry with Kurt Blumenfeld, her Zionist mentor."
In between these two dates is a fascinating history of Jewish life in Germany: Of poets and bankers, salonnières, soldiers and revolutionaries. For nearly two centuries, prominent Jews in Germany spent their lives yearning for equal citizenship, battling antisemitism. Many converted to Christianity in a quest for better opportunities; one of those who was baptized was the poet Heinrich Heine, who wept after his secret baptism in the small Prussian parish of Heiligenstadt and then deeply regretted his conversion.
I found the The Pity of It All to be utterly absorbing in its portraits of German Jews, including Albert Einstein, one of only of only four signatories of the "Manifesto to the Europeans" opposing Germany's entry into the First World War, and Rosa Luxemburg, co-founder of the anti-war Spartacus League, who was executed in 1919 by the German Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups.
It's impossible to read this book without thinking of our present times, when Donald Trump calls upon the violent, white supremacist Proud Boys to ‘Stand Back and Stand By.’ As the Amos Elon notes, Hitler's rise to power "was made possible by the chaos and disintegration of government in the aftermath of the depression, but it was not inevitable." Yet even after Hitler's investiture, Alon writes, "wealthy Jews left as usual for ski resorts." Their nonchalance did not last: fifty thousand Jews left Germany in 1933, 30,000 in 1934, 20,000 in 1935. Some remained; some who did so committed suicide. Those who left scattered across the globe: they traveled to Palestine, to the United States, to China and to England, which admitted "impecunious foreigners" only if if they were prepared to work as domestic servants.
Even those who left yearned for the Germany of old, for its culture, high art, and music. As Alon notes in the last chapter, titled, "The End":
"[Expressionist poet] Else Lasker-Schüler, a few weeks after receiving the Kleist Prize, Germany's highest poetry award, was beaten up by Nazi hoodlums in the street. Still dazed, she boarded a train for Zurich, where she was picked up in a park for vagrancy:
Homeless I rove together with the deer
Dreaming through bitter days--yes, I loved you well."
Lasker-Schüler lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem and died there on January 22, 1945.
But you know from the very beginning that it won't end well.
The Pity of It All traces the history of the Jews in Germany from 1743, when a fourteen-year-old boy, later famous as the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, trudged through the Rosenthal Gate into Berlin; it was the only gate in the city through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass. It ends in 1933, when the philosopher Hannah Arendt fled Germany, after spending "her last evening in Berlin in Mampe's wine restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm, reciting Greek poetry with Kurt Blumenfeld, her Zionist mentor."
In between these two dates is a fascinating history of Jewish life in Germany: Of poets and bankers, salonnières, soldiers and revolutionaries. For nearly two centuries, prominent Jews in Germany spent their lives yearning for equal citizenship, battling antisemitism. Many converted to Christianity in a quest for better opportunities; one of those who was baptized was the poet Heinrich Heine, who wept after his secret baptism in the small Prussian parish of Heiligenstadt and then deeply regretted his conversion.
I found the The Pity of It All to be utterly absorbing in its portraits of German Jews, including Albert Einstein, one of only of only four signatories of the "Manifesto to the Europeans" opposing Germany's entry into the First World War, and Rosa Luxemburg, co-founder of the anti-war Spartacus League, who was executed in 1919 by the German Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups.
It's impossible to read this book without thinking of our present times, when Donald Trump calls upon the violent, white supremacist Proud Boys to ‘Stand Back and Stand By.’ As the Amos Elon notes, Hitler's rise to power "was made possible by the chaos and disintegration of government in the aftermath of the depression, but it was not inevitable." Yet even after Hitler's investiture, Alon writes, "wealthy Jews left as usual for ski resorts." Their nonchalance did not last: fifty thousand Jews left Germany in 1933, 30,000 in 1934, 20,000 in 1935. Some remained; some who did so committed suicide. Those who left scattered across the globe: they traveled to Palestine, to the United States, to China and to England, which admitted "impecunious foreigners" only if if they were prepared to work as domestic servants.
Even those who left yearned for the Germany of old, for its culture, high art, and music. As Alon notes in the last chapter, titled, "The End":
"[Expressionist poet] Else Lasker-Schüler, a few weeks after receiving the Kleist Prize, Germany's highest poetry award, was beaten up by Nazi hoodlums in the street. Still dazed, she boarded a train for Zurich, where she was picked up in a park for vagrancy:
Homeless I rove together with the deer
Dreaming through bitter days--yes, I loved you well."
Lasker-Schüler lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem and died there on January 22, 1945.
August 16, 2008
"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.
June 10, 2012
An amazing book and sad book. It makes me wonder what is next for us Jews. Will someone be writing a book about American Jews in the future like this? Will we be pitied?
January 10, 2012
To truly cover the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 would probably take ten volumes,but this is a very good overview for a layman. You get an idea of how the Holocost happened, but I will never understand the why. We might take a lesson from it for today. Beware the powerful (politicians, generals, princes, ceo's) who tell you what you want to hear and play up to your hatreds.
November 9, 2010
One of the most amazing pieces of history I have ever read.
Read
July 24, 2012!!!!
October 19, 2018
The Pity of It All by Amos Elon is my most recent delve into German history through the eyes of German Jews. I have encountered many of the characters in the dramatis personae before: Moses Mendelssohn figured prominently as one of the great rationalists in The Age of Reason: From Kant to Fichte. Hannah Arendt, another later philosopher, showed up in The Existentialist Cafe. And Walter Rathenau, the great industrialist and German foreign minister murdered shortly before Hitler came to power, was a main character in several including Berlin, a history of factors leading to the Great Depression Bankers, and a memoir of a fellow German (well, Austrian actually) Jew The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.
How much do you know about Judaism in Germany? Most had the basics of the Holocaust covered in history classes throughout their school experience. And perhaps you have visited the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. This book takes the timeline a step back, and actually doesn't directly deal with the Holocaust at all (you'll notice the dates in the title end in 1933 right when Hitler came to power). The book is wrestling with the question that many have: was Germany's history somehow inevitably leading it towards the Holocaust? Did the Germans have some deep-seated hatred of Jews that led them to this atrocity?
The answer is a lot more complex than you'd think. While the history of Jews in Germany is a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, in German Jews were patriotic, proud of their country, and had no intentions of leaving. In general, there was an upward trend towards increased rights for Jews that usually outdid their neighbors in Europe (the exception being Napoleon who extended equal rights to Jews during his brief tenure). In the late 19th and really up to 1933, Jews were democratically elected to positions of power, over with very high representation. Russia was actually known as the most antisemitic nation at the time, killing millions of Jews in horrible pogroms right into the 20th century. One reason German Jews supported World War I was the prospect of fighting against Russia. But German antisemitism was there through it all too. Jews were pretty much blamed for every lost war, every economic recession. The prominence of Jews in journalism, the intelligentsia, and government, gave Germans irrational fears that often lead to accusations of secret schemes of world domination. Jews gained and lost rights back and forth.
The book is cleverly framed with two German emigrations: the first, young Moses Mendelssohn entering Berlin at the invitation of one of the few wealthy Jews given permission to live within the city limits (many cities, Berlin included, either had a blanket prohibition on Jews or would only allow wealthy Jews but with exorbitant fees). Mendelssohn would become the first truly integrated Jew into German culture, moving Jews away from their culture of separatism (many didn't even know German, they only studied the Torah, and avoided interactions with Gentiles) towards a proud German identity. The book ends with Hannah Arendt fleeing Berlin shortly after Hitler's election. Many Jews called her crazy for abandoning Germany, because "Germany is your past, present, and future." Hitler was, unfortunately, not a passing craze that would wear off once the economy picked up.
identity
I identified strongly with the attempts of German Jews to merge their German-ness with their Jew-ishness. A passage in the first chapter tries to capture this struggled:
For all their irony and skepticism, the Jews of Germany never ceased in their effort to merge German and Jewish identity. The heartstrings of their affection were tied early; their overriding desire was to be complete Germans. Many succeeded. If their success appears in retrospect an illusion, it was often a highly creative one and with a grandeur of its own. Accepted or rejected, German Jews continued to potter with their identity, inventing, suppressing, rediscovering, or professing it. The vast majority never hid the fact that they were Jews. There were long intervals when the forthright approach was no impediment, especially in smaller communities. A great many intermarried. Tens of thousands converted and disappeared within the majority. Those who converted often seemed no less remarkable or creative than those who, spurred by the force of a divided allegiance, found themselves in the vanguard of modern art and inquiry.
As a Mormon, I feel some of the same unique interactions between my relationship with my faith community and the outer culture of the academy, of politics, and everything else. Perhaps we all have some element of colliding identities, but the example of German Jews is even more stark because of its tragic ending. By looking at how small prejudices can result in mass murders over time, should we not be vigilant within our own communities?
Rahel Levin is an interesting case. She held a very popular salon in Berlin at the turn of the 18th century. German princes, scholars, and writers all came to meet in her parlor. I like this sentiment she struggled with about fitting in:
The idea that as a Jew she was always required to be exceptional-- and go on proving it all the time-- was repugnant to her. "How wretched it is always to have to legitimize myself!" That is why it is so disgusting to be a Jew." She was one of the first of a new breed more common later on, always self-conscious, always looking over her shoulder. She was denied, she felt, what was readily granted to the simplest peasant woman-- an easy sense of identity.
Later in the 19th century, another Jew made a list of Judenuebel, what he saw as the failings of the Jews. Some Jews became very critical of their culture and faith communities, sometimes to the point of self-hatred:
Religious concepts, especially God's love and exclusive favoring of the Jews.
Conceit
Superstition
Intolerance of other viewpoints...
Huckstering
Avarice
Greed
Contempt for science; all leading to
The persistent delusion, contrary to law, that it is permissible to cheat non-Jews.
You could imagine such a list being written on a Mormon blog about Mormons like at By Common Consent. Oh wait, there's one right here. Such inward-looking critiques I feel are good, but can nose-dive into self-hatred: like Walter Rathenau, who literally thought Jews needed to do everything they could to look like Germans: he hated how crooked his nose was, how black his hair was, etc. etc.
The Betrayal of the intellectuals
The other fascinating aspect was just how riled up German Jews got with their fellow Germans by the emotion of the times, the best example being World War I. The WWI German propoganda machine painted England and France in vile terms. The Jews, who tended to have an very internationalist view, got caught up in it just as bad as everyone else. Einstein, for instance, saw his fellow Jew and academic friend Franz Haber, dedicate his talents to making poison gas for the war effort. Einstein reflected:
He was shocked that intellectuals proved to be the most likely to yield to the collective psychosis of hate: perhaps this was so, he speculated, because they had no contact with life in the raw but only with life on the printed page.
Karl Kraus, a critic of the war whose articles somehow escaped the censors, had similar thoughts:
Man had invented the airplane but his political imagination was still dragging through the mud like mail coaches before the age of railways. The brainwashing was made possible, above all, by the corruption of language in politics and in some of the major newspapers. The newspapers ignored the horrors. They found words only for the courage of young men at war and none for the madness of those who sent them there. Kraus warned of the world's impending downfall through the "black magic" of newsprint... How was it possible, that even as, on a single day, fifty thousand human beings lay dying, caught in barbed wire, poets still found words to laud the carnage?
I could write a lot more, but my time is cut short (I write these on bus trips to campus), and book reviews shouldn't be summaries (sorry! I always degenerate into this form). The book was also some of my first solid history into pre-20th century German history. I knew, for instance, that Germany was a collection of autonomous kingdoms and city-states, but I had no idea how they came together under one government (other than the name Bismarck being thrown around). While reading, I took advantage of the great bibliography to add some primary and secondary sources to my German reading list Fritz Stern sounds like another good historian of all things at the German/Jewish interface. Many of the books look like they've been long forgotten, judging by their Goodreads pages. It looks like I'll be well-stocked for a while!
How much do you know about Judaism in Germany? Most had the basics of the Holocaust covered in history classes throughout their school experience. And perhaps you have visited the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. This book takes the timeline a step back, and actually doesn't directly deal with the Holocaust at all (you'll notice the dates in the title end in 1933 right when Hitler came to power). The book is wrestling with the question that many have: was Germany's history somehow inevitably leading it towards the Holocaust? Did the Germans have some deep-seated hatred of Jews that led them to this atrocity?
The answer is a lot more complex than you'd think. While the history of Jews in Germany is a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, in German Jews were patriotic, proud of their country, and had no intentions of leaving. In general, there was an upward trend towards increased rights for Jews that usually outdid their neighbors in Europe (the exception being Napoleon who extended equal rights to Jews during his brief tenure). In the late 19th and really up to 1933, Jews were democratically elected to positions of power, over with very high representation. Russia was actually known as the most antisemitic nation at the time, killing millions of Jews in horrible pogroms right into the 20th century. One reason German Jews supported World War I was the prospect of fighting against Russia. But German antisemitism was there through it all too. Jews were pretty much blamed for every lost war, every economic recession. The prominence of Jews in journalism, the intelligentsia, and government, gave Germans irrational fears that often lead to accusations of secret schemes of world domination. Jews gained and lost rights back and forth.
The book is cleverly framed with two German emigrations: the first, young Moses Mendelssohn entering Berlin at the invitation of one of the few wealthy Jews given permission to live within the city limits (many cities, Berlin included, either had a blanket prohibition on Jews or would only allow wealthy Jews but with exorbitant fees). Mendelssohn would become the first truly integrated Jew into German culture, moving Jews away from their culture of separatism (many didn't even know German, they only studied the Torah, and avoided interactions with Gentiles) towards a proud German identity. The book ends with Hannah Arendt fleeing Berlin shortly after Hitler's election. Many Jews called her crazy for abandoning Germany, because "Germany is your past, present, and future." Hitler was, unfortunately, not a passing craze that would wear off once the economy picked up.
identity
I identified strongly with the attempts of German Jews to merge their German-ness with their Jew-ishness. A passage in the first chapter tries to capture this struggled:
For all their irony and skepticism, the Jews of Germany never ceased in their effort to merge German and Jewish identity. The heartstrings of their affection were tied early; their overriding desire was to be complete Germans. Many succeeded. If their success appears in retrospect an illusion, it was often a highly creative one and with a grandeur of its own. Accepted or rejected, German Jews continued to potter with their identity, inventing, suppressing, rediscovering, or professing it. The vast majority never hid the fact that they were Jews. There were long intervals when the forthright approach was no impediment, especially in smaller communities. A great many intermarried. Tens of thousands converted and disappeared within the majority. Those who converted often seemed no less remarkable or creative than those who, spurred by the force of a divided allegiance, found themselves in the vanguard of modern art and inquiry.
As a Mormon, I feel some of the same unique interactions between my relationship with my faith community and the outer culture of the academy, of politics, and everything else. Perhaps we all have some element of colliding identities, but the example of German Jews is even more stark because of its tragic ending. By looking at how small prejudices can result in mass murders over time, should we not be vigilant within our own communities?
Rahel Levin is an interesting case. She held a very popular salon in Berlin at the turn of the 18th century. German princes, scholars, and writers all came to meet in her parlor. I like this sentiment she struggled with about fitting in:
The idea that as a Jew she was always required to be exceptional-- and go on proving it all the time-- was repugnant to her. "How wretched it is always to have to legitimize myself!" That is why it is so disgusting to be a Jew." She was one of the first of a new breed more common later on, always self-conscious, always looking over her shoulder. She was denied, she felt, what was readily granted to the simplest peasant woman-- an easy sense of identity.
Later in the 19th century, another Jew made a list of Judenuebel, what he saw as the failings of the Jews. Some Jews became very critical of their culture and faith communities, sometimes to the point of self-hatred:
Religious concepts, especially God's love and exclusive favoring of the Jews.
Conceit
Superstition
Intolerance of other viewpoints...
Huckstering
Avarice
Greed
Contempt for science; all leading to
The persistent delusion, contrary to law, that it is permissible to cheat non-Jews.
You could imagine such a list being written on a Mormon blog about Mormons like at By Common Consent. Oh wait, there's one right here. Such inward-looking critiques I feel are good, but can nose-dive into self-hatred: like Walter Rathenau, who literally thought Jews needed to do everything they could to look like Germans: he hated how crooked his nose was, how black his hair was, etc. etc.
The Betrayal of the intellectuals
The other fascinating aspect was just how riled up German Jews got with their fellow Germans by the emotion of the times, the best example being World War I. The WWI German propoganda machine painted England and France in vile terms. The Jews, who tended to have an very internationalist view, got caught up in it just as bad as everyone else. Einstein, for instance, saw his fellow Jew and academic friend Franz Haber, dedicate his talents to making poison gas for the war effort. Einstein reflected:
He was shocked that intellectuals proved to be the most likely to yield to the collective psychosis of hate: perhaps this was so, he speculated, because they had no contact with life in the raw but only with life on the printed page.
Karl Kraus, a critic of the war whose articles somehow escaped the censors, had similar thoughts:
Man had invented the airplane but his political imagination was still dragging through the mud like mail coaches before the age of railways. The brainwashing was made possible, above all, by the corruption of language in politics and in some of the major newspapers. The newspapers ignored the horrors. They found words only for the courage of young men at war and none for the madness of those who sent them there. Kraus warned of the world's impending downfall through the "black magic" of newsprint... How was it possible, that even as, on a single day, fifty thousand human beings lay dying, caught in barbed wire, poets still found words to laud the carnage?
I could write a lot more, but my time is cut short (I write these on bus trips to campus), and book reviews shouldn't be summaries (sorry! I always degenerate into this form). The book was also some of my first solid history into pre-20th century German history. I knew, for instance, that Germany was a collection of autonomous kingdoms and city-states, but I had no idea how they came together under one government (other than the name Bismarck being thrown around). While reading, I took advantage of the great bibliography to add some primary and secondary sources to my German reading list Fritz Stern sounds like another good historian of all things at the German/Jewish interface. Many of the books look like they've been long forgotten, judging by their Goodreads pages. It looks like I'll be well-stocked for a while!
August 21, 2021
This book was a long slog; full of so many people, places, things, and dates; but it was enlightening. I didn't know how much I didn't know. I didn't see this long historical account of prejudice as a bad versus good so much as yet another story of cultural collision; something that has been going on forever and will probably continue for ever. The prevalence of conversion to Christianity is one of the most frustrating parts of the history to have to grapple with, for me. Protestantism didn't seem to be a big help in this epoch. No question the intellectual power of the Jewish tribe was a big help, but not as much as one would hope. I suppose the German's felt that as long as they had Goethe, they could live without just about everyone else. German history ain't pretty, but then history ain't pretty. Well, at least there's death, and then re-birth, and hope. A slog, at that.
Read
October 21, 2024I heard about this book on the Honestly podcast by Bari Weiss. I have read about three-fourths of the book at a very slow pace. It is informative, but unfortunately, it is not holding my attention well enough to continue.
September 1, 2020
What a sobering and humbling read.
I've read a pretty decent amount on the holocaust as well as on recent Jewish history, yet this book humbled me. It added context to events I thought I well understood, and changed some long-held beliefs in the process.
The book starts out with Moses Mendelsohn making his on-foot trek to Berlin. It takes you on a 200 year journey (1743-1933) of German Jews, from entering Berlin through the same crossing points dedicated for cattle, to the Jews acquiring positions in all levels of government, and running some of the largest and richest German enterprises.
It talks about the mass conversions of Jews converting to Christianity, and it is with so much pain that one reads such stories. To demand of a people to degrade themselves to such a degree, to disown their core, their being. Yet so many of them did exactly that, including so many of the elites.
To be fair, they didn't really "convert". In fact, most were not observant Jews to begin with, and so were also non-observant Christians. But it's hard to fathom the mere idea that one would surrender their identity. And you know you're missing context, missing the feel on the ground, when so many accomplished people reluctantly chose that path.
Growing up, we often heard how the German Jews were a lesson for why we should never feel safe in the diaspora. They did exceptionally well for themselves, better than Jews in any other country, yet "look what happened to them" was the common theme. And what this book reveals, is that the reason German Jews did so poorly in the end was not in spite of their success but as a result of it.
In some ways, it feels the German Jews were more successful than even the Jews of America today.
The Jews were less than 1% of the German population, yet they held super high positions across all functions of society. For example, post WWI, the foreign minister of Germany was a Jew, and so were many of those who helped finance the war. This made many Germans feel that it was the Jews who lost the war, the ones who gave up too much to the allies, which in the end set the stage for WWII.
The Jews were on a mission to "germanize" themselves...and in many ways, were more German than the Germans. To give just two examples, Moses Mendelsohn and Heinrich Heine were more popular as philosophers and poets than any German of their time. This no doubt must have bothered the Germans to the core...the Jew was more "enlightened" than the inventors of enlightenment.
In their effort to assimilate and be accepted, the Jews seized the opportunity to display nationalism by supporting Germany's entry into WWI. Their writers, journalists, and philosophers were almost all in support, and their masses lined up in droves to serve in the military. They felt they would finally be accepted as true Germans by offering their blood for the country.
So in the end, because of their advanced integration and assimilation, they were an opportunistic target for entering and ultimately losing the war, as well as all other ills plaguing the German people.
It was interesting to read how Einstein confronted Walther Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister post WWI, and told him he has no right to be foreign minister of a "foreign" country. Einstein understood that Jews holding this much power in a land not their own would work against them.
This made me wonder about the perspective of the Jews in America during WWII. We often hear how they didn't do enough, how they were afraid to flex their muscles and raise their heads as Jews. It's infuriating to read about...why would they not do more. But after reading this book, it makes you wonder if perhaps they understood the downfall of the German Jews better than we do today, and so chose to make as little noise as possible. In hindsight, this is not an excuse, but it could help in at least understanding the rationale behind their thought process.
All in all, the account of the German Jews leading up to WWII is a decisive blow to the idea of assimilation, and a critical part of the Jewish history. It teaches us the contradiction of conversion/assimilation. On the one hand you're asked to convert, but once you oblige, you're seen as someone who has given up their soul, the worst form of self-hatred. And when one hates oneself, asking others to respect you is asking for more respect than you afford yourself.
And to those Jews who feel it now in vogue to distance themselves from Israel, read your history.
I've read a pretty decent amount on the holocaust as well as on recent Jewish history, yet this book humbled me. It added context to events I thought I well understood, and changed some long-held beliefs in the process.
The book starts out with Moses Mendelsohn making his on-foot trek to Berlin. It takes you on a 200 year journey (1743-1933) of German Jews, from entering Berlin through the same crossing points dedicated for cattle, to the Jews acquiring positions in all levels of government, and running some of the largest and richest German enterprises.
It talks about the mass conversions of Jews converting to Christianity, and it is with so much pain that one reads such stories. To demand of a people to degrade themselves to such a degree, to disown their core, their being. Yet so many of them did exactly that, including so many of the elites.
To be fair, they didn't really "convert". In fact, most were not observant Jews to begin with, and so were also non-observant Christians. But it's hard to fathom the mere idea that one would surrender their identity. And you know you're missing context, missing the feel on the ground, when so many accomplished people reluctantly chose that path.
Growing up, we often heard how the German Jews were a lesson for why we should never feel safe in the diaspora. They did exceptionally well for themselves, better than Jews in any other country, yet "look what happened to them" was the common theme. And what this book reveals, is that the reason German Jews did so poorly in the end was not in spite of their success but as a result of it.
In some ways, it feels the German Jews were more successful than even the Jews of America today.
The Jews were less than 1% of the German population, yet they held super high positions across all functions of society. For example, post WWI, the foreign minister of Germany was a Jew, and so were many of those who helped finance the war. This made many Germans feel that it was the Jews who lost the war, the ones who gave up too much to the allies, which in the end set the stage for WWII.
The Jews were on a mission to "germanize" themselves...and in many ways, were more German than the Germans. To give just two examples, Moses Mendelsohn and Heinrich Heine were more popular as philosophers and poets than any German of their time. This no doubt must have bothered the Germans to the core...the Jew was more "enlightened" than the inventors of enlightenment.
In their effort to assimilate and be accepted, the Jews seized the opportunity to display nationalism by supporting Germany's entry into WWI. Their writers, journalists, and philosophers were almost all in support, and their masses lined up in droves to serve in the military. They felt they would finally be accepted as true Germans by offering their blood for the country.
So in the end, because of their advanced integration and assimilation, they were an opportunistic target for entering and ultimately losing the war, as well as all other ills plaguing the German people.
It was interesting to read how Einstein confronted Walther Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister post WWI, and told him he has no right to be foreign minister of a "foreign" country. Einstein understood that Jews holding this much power in a land not their own would work against them.
This made me wonder about the perspective of the Jews in America during WWII. We often hear how they didn't do enough, how they were afraid to flex their muscles and raise their heads as Jews. It's infuriating to read about...why would they not do more. But after reading this book, it makes you wonder if perhaps they understood the downfall of the German Jews better than we do today, and so chose to make as little noise as possible. In hindsight, this is not an excuse, but it could help in at least understanding the rationale behind their thought process.
All in all, the account of the German Jews leading up to WWII is a decisive blow to the idea of assimilation, and a critical part of the Jewish history. It teaches us the contradiction of conversion/assimilation. On the one hand you're asked to convert, but once you oblige, you're seen as someone who has given up their soul, the worst form of self-hatred. And when one hates oneself, asking others to respect you is asking for more respect than you afford yourself.
And to those Jews who feel it now in vogue to distance themselves from Israel, read your history.
October 23, 2017
For years I've been trying to piece out how it is that as supposedly civilized a country as Germany with as cultured a population as it was reputed to have could have spawned, allowed into power, and willingly followed as heinous and morally disgusting a group as the Nazis.
Elon explains quite clearly that the German culture was always one of 'marching in lock step' to one's German-ness, one's core Aryan heritage and fatherland, and the highest possible level of service was always via the military, since war was considered the most noble possible service one could offer one's country.
In addition, what this well researched, well written book makes abundantly clear is that anti-Semitism was always an integral part of the German culture, whether overtly so in the 18th and early 19th centuries when Jews were officially banned from professions, civic positions, even living in certain cities, to the so-called enlightened era when they were nominally allowed to attend university and live where they wanted. Still, they were passed over for academic positions and blocked from being promoted beyond low level positions in most professions and most telling, from higher military ranks.
Even when the Kaiser willingly accepted the gifts and loans (which often became un-repaid donations) from wealthy Jewish subjects, he rarely rewarded their fealty and loyalty in a commensurate manner. On occasion he'd throw a decorative rank someone's way, but his inner circle knew it was done mockingly and afforded little in the way of real benefits.
Even during the years when Jews were allowed access to many things within Germany, it was done grudgingly and sparingly. And of course, at the first sign of economic or civic trouble, the Jews were always the first to be scapegoated.
After reading this book, it's easier to understand why Nazism took hold in Germany, and why so many would willingly swallow the gross anti-Semitism that was so integral to their politics. What's more distressing to me, however, is how similar so much of what's happening now is to the events that played out post WWI when Hitler's 'philosophy' took root and gained followers--nationalist sentiment adopted first by the already virlulently ant-Semitic, the nakedly amoral and ambitious, and the crude, poorly educated, sometimes unemployed subsections of the populace who reveled in the National Socialists' promise to 'Make Germany Great Again.'
Elon explains quite clearly that the German culture was always one of 'marching in lock step' to one's German-ness, one's core Aryan heritage and fatherland, and the highest possible level of service was always via the military, since war was considered the most noble possible service one could offer one's country.
In addition, what this well researched, well written book makes abundantly clear is that anti-Semitism was always an integral part of the German culture, whether overtly so in the 18th and early 19th centuries when Jews were officially banned from professions, civic positions, even living in certain cities, to the so-called enlightened era when they were nominally allowed to attend university and live where they wanted. Still, they were passed over for academic positions and blocked from being promoted beyond low level positions in most professions and most telling, from higher military ranks.
Even when the Kaiser willingly accepted the gifts and loans (which often became un-repaid donations) from wealthy Jewish subjects, he rarely rewarded their fealty and loyalty in a commensurate manner. On occasion he'd throw a decorative rank someone's way, but his inner circle knew it was done mockingly and afforded little in the way of real benefits.
Even during the years when Jews were allowed access to many things within Germany, it was done grudgingly and sparingly. And of course, at the first sign of economic or civic trouble, the Jews were always the first to be scapegoated.
After reading this book, it's easier to understand why Nazism took hold in Germany, and why so many would willingly swallow the gross anti-Semitism that was so integral to their politics. What's more distressing to me, however, is how similar so much of what's happening now is to the events that played out post WWI when Hitler's 'philosophy' took root and gained followers--nationalist sentiment adopted first by the already virlulently ant-Semitic, the nakedly amoral and ambitious, and the crude, poorly educated, sometimes unemployed subsections of the populace who reveled in the National Socialists' promise to 'Make Germany Great Again.'
August 24, 2022
Although he was a journalist, Elon skillfully employed many academic methods in writing Pity. For example, he utilized a wide array of primary and secondary sources which were referenced in the text and were demarcated in 25 pages of end notes. Unfortunately, there was no bibliography.
His arguments were clear, coherent, and well organized into chapters that summarized various trends which characterized the Jewish experience in Germany between the 1740’s and the early 1930’s. To his credit he included a chapter about the Jews in Germany before the time of Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in 1743.
The author did an excellent job of placing the people he discussed into the context of the German social, political, and cultural dynamics in which they were living. Ie, this is an informative book about German history as much as it is about some of the Jews living there.
Elon did four things in Pity which enhanced my engagement. First, he made liberal use of quotations from his sources to elaborate on the points he was making. These included newspapers, poetry, diaries, correspondence, and literature.
Second, he included copies of lithographs, paintings, and/or photographs of many of the people presented in the book. This helped me to actually visualize who he wrote about.
Third, his prose consisted for the most part of direct, declarative sentences. This made the book quite readable.
Finally, in order to provide the reader with a feel for how Jews were perceived in Germany he used German vocabulary on occasion. He was always mindful, however, to provide a translation so as to ensure that what he was communicating was clearly understood.
The only ‘flaw’ with Pity is that at points so many individuals were presented that it became a challenge to remember them all. And sometimes Elon’s discussions were so comprehensive and nuanced as to make it slow going.
For a reader like me who admittedly had very little knowledge of the subject matter Pity was well worth the patience required on occasion to get through it. Ie, I came away feeling much more knowledgeable by the end of the book.
For those who wish a more general history of this issue I recommend Anti Judaism: A Western Tradition. A word of caution: it is even dense and slow going at times than Pity is.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
His arguments were clear, coherent, and well organized into chapters that summarized various trends which characterized the Jewish experience in Germany between the 1740’s and the early 1930’s. To his credit he included a chapter about the Jews in Germany before the time of Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in 1743.
The author did an excellent job of placing the people he discussed into the context of the German social, political, and cultural dynamics in which they were living. Ie, this is an informative book about German history as much as it is about some of the Jews living there.
Elon did four things in Pity which enhanced my engagement. First, he made liberal use of quotations from his sources to elaborate on the points he was making. These included newspapers, poetry, diaries, correspondence, and literature.
Second, he included copies of lithographs, paintings, and/or photographs of many of the people presented in the book. This helped me to actually visualize who he wrote about.
Third, his prose consisted for the most part of direct, declarative sentences. This made the book quite readable.
Finally, in order to provide the reader with a feel for how Jews were perceived in Germany he used German vocabulary on occasion. He was always mindful, however, to provide a translation so as to ensure that what he was communicating was clearly understood.
The only ‘flaw’ with Pity is that at points so many individuals were presented that it became a challenge to remember them all. And sometimes Elon’s discussions were so comprehensive and nuanced as to make it slow going.
For a reader like me who admittedly had very little knowledge of the subject matter Pity was well worth the patience required on occasion to get through it. Ie, I came away feeling much more knowledgeable by the end of the book.
For those who wish a more general history of this issue I recommend Anti Judaism: A Western Tradition. A word of caution: it is even dense and slow going at times than Pity is.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
January 1, 2025
The Pity of It All as much an exploration of European culture as it is a history of Jewish contributions to modern life. Indeed the two are inextricable. In what we now see to have been a unique cultural flourishing, Germans of Jewish background helped create a cultural milieu during the rise of the modern German state that was a world wonder. The evanescence can be compared to renaissance Florence, Tang China, or classical Alexandria. And like these epochs the moment disappeared, wrung out by quotidian social tensions and political swings and unexpected events. Such periods of flourishing are fragile. If this book does anything it should remind us to treasure them.
In the German example Jews from eastern Europe were able to thrive in a quickly modernizing German culture that was at times welcoming, at others antagonistic. Jewish peoples at the time took two approaches, either seeking to remain culturally separate or to assimilate. The assimilationists were constantly disappointed, until the German State from 1933 finally clarified the issue. But the dream persisted, after 1945 transported to new locales like the United States and Canada. The anti-assimilationists of course succeeded in establishing Israel as a political entity. Both worldviews thrive today.
There is no need to list all the outstanding individuals who contributed to the Jewish renaissance, from Felix Mendelssohn to Einstein to Franz Kafka. These are individuals whose thinking continues to impact our lives today, in many fields. Elon uses their lives to unveil the various periods in the grand narrative of Jewish-German life. He begins with the greatest philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, who arrived in Berlin in 1743. Elon structures most of the chapters by following two or more outstanding individuals whose lives exemplify the period. Throughout the primary focus is on Berlin, while paying due respect to such other centers as Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna. The intellectual ferment was everywhere, but in Berlin it burned brightest.
Assimilation proceeded along several lines. Jews were slowly accepted into most realms of civic life—with the military it would be the Weimar Republic before full acceptance would be attained. Along the way Jews were established in trading, industry, finance, journalism, academia, and the arts, making immense contributions. Jews were involved in the grand failures as well, for instance in jingoist promotion of WWI and its disastrous results. Jewish intellectuals, businesspeople and artists clearly achieved a high degree of assimilation, even though it was not complete, and serious prejudice remained. This was reflected in the number of converts to Christianity, including the great poet of the German language, Heinrich Heine.
Along the way there were constant reminders that absolute assimilation, possible for many, was never going to be complete. The Hep! Hep! Riots of 1819 were a stark reminder of the overt hatred experienced throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. These riots led to the creation of one of many Jewish organizations, The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews (Wissenbchaft). While ultimately unsuccessful, the Society bore the banner of an effort to reform Judaism and eliminate aspects of Judaism that did not “fit” the modern world.
How to we explain the assumption that Jews would be fully assimilated into European culture, and especially the German? Part of it is surely due to the progression of modernity, the ongoing unfolding of an enlightenment project based on the rights of individuals and a new compact between state and individual. New rights spreading through Europe, especially during the revolutionary changes of the Napoleonic wars, the revolutions of 1848, and the nationalist movements within the Hapsburg empires, the Italian states, and the disunited German states, led most Jewish publications to hope out-loud that the new states would treat them with equality. Their hopes were inevitably dashed. As in 1819, the revolutions of 1848 were followed by anti-Jewish riots (p. 158).
Throughout these modernizing events the Jewish religion itself was also changing. In mid-19th century half of the Jewish population practiced traditional rituals and stayed aloof from civic life. The other half saw themselves as politically liberal and willing to engage in politics (160). Jewish rabbis generally favored political change. 1848, “the year of folly,” led to a uniting of liberals of all backgrounds, including Jews (179). The novelist Berthold Auerbach felt that both his German-ness and his Jewishness were strengthened by the revolution of (167),
Things appeared to improve steadily with the era of Bismarck, who served as Prussian prime minister from 1862 to 1890. Ludwig Bamberger and Gerson Bleichröder were Bismarck’s primary bankers, Walter Rathenau his primary industrialist. The emancipation law of 1871 seemed to cement the new status Jews felt as full-fledged German citizens. But the stock market crash of 1873 would lead to more anti-Semitic trouble. It would never die out completely, no matter how fervently German Jews assimilated to German values and converted to Christianity.
Germany’s rising prosperity at the turn of the 20th century produced even more talented German Jews, from scientists Paul Ehrlich and Fritz Haber to the theologian Martin Buber. There was, as Elon notes, “a flood of talent” (275). All of the confidence and optimism that came along with these achievements would come to a screeching halt with World War I, however. Many prominent Jews, including the Zionist leader Max Bodenheimer and the writer Stefan Zweig, supported the war (319). In the wake of Germany’s defeat and the onerous settlement at Versailles, the Weimar Republic was formed in 1919.
Elon’s final chapter, titled simply “The End,” takes the reader as far as Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The story from that point, one familiar to the general reader, becomes something different—no longer about a German-Jewish culture, it becomes that tale of a minority carved out from their home culture and singled out for exclusion and extinction. The impact of this move on German culture as it stands today is a fascinating question, one not discussed by Elon. German culture went its way, and Jewish religion and peoples continued in a different direction. What we are left with is an allusion to a unique possibility: If German culture had continued with its Jewish side intact, in an imperfect yet viable symbiosis, if not for Hitler, if not for the first World War, if not…Germany could have become the dominant nation in the world. But what we are left with, and which Elon describes in detail, is an incredible effulgence of human creativity and industry, an epoch whose contributions live on in our modern world.
In the German example Jews from eastern Europe were able to thrive in a quickly modernizing German culture that was at times welcoming, at others antagonistic. Jewish peoples at the time took two approaches, either seeking to remain culturally separate or to assimilate. The assimilationists were constantly disappointed, until the German State from 1933 finally clarified the issue. But the dream persisted, after 1945 transported to new locales like the United States and Canada. The anti-assimilationists of course succeeded in establishing Israel as a political entity. Both worldviews thrive today.
There is no need to list all the outstanding individuals who contributed to the Jewish renaissance, from Felix Mendelssohn to Einstein to Franz Kafka. These are individuals whose thinking continues to impact our lives today, in many fields. Elon uses their lives to unveil the various periods in the grand narrative of Jewish-German life. He begins with the greatest philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, who arrived in Berlin in 1743. Elon structures most of the chapters by following two or more outstanding individuals whose lives exemplify the period. Throughout the primary focus is on Berlin, while paying due respect to such other centers as Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna. The intellectual ferment was everywhere, but in Berlin it burned brightest.
Assimilation proceeded along several lines. Jews were slowly accepted into most realms of civic life—with the military it would be the Weimar Republic before full acceptance would be attained. Along the way Jews were established in trading, industry, finance, journalism, academia, and the arts, making immense contributions. Jews were involved in the grand failures as well, for instance in jingoist promotion of WWI and its disastrous results. Jewish intellectuals, businesspeople and artists clearly achieved a high degree of assimilation, even though it was not complete, and serious prejudice remained. This was reflected in the number of converts to Christianity, including the great poet of the German language, Heinrich Heine.
Along the way there were constant reminders that absolute assimilation, possible for many, was never going to be complete. The Hep! Hep! Riots of 1819 were a stark reminder of the overt hatred experienced throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. These riots led to the creation of one of many Jewish organizations, The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews (Wissenbchaft). While ultimately unsuccessful, the Society bore the banner of an effort to reform Judaism and eliminate aspects of Judaism that did not “fit” the modern world.
How to we explain the assumption that Jews would be fully assimilated into European culture, and especially the German? Part of it is surely due to the progression of modernity, the ongoing unfolding of an enlightenment project based on the rights of individuals and a new compact between state and individual. New rights spreading through Europe, especially during the revolutionary changes of the Napoleonic wars, the revolutions of 1848, and the nationalist movements within the Hapsburg empires, the Italian states, and the disunited German states, led most Jewish publications to hope out-loud that the new states would treat them with equality. Their hopes were inevitably dashed. As in 1819, the revolutions of 1848 were followed by anti-Jewish riots (p. 158).
Throughout these modernizing events the Jewish religion itself was also changing. In mid-19th century half of the Jewish population practiced traditional rituals and stayed aloof from civic life. The other half saw themselves as politically liberal and willing to engage in politics (160). Jewish rabbis generally favored political change. 1848, “the year of folly,” led to a uniting of liberals of all backgrounds, including Jews (179). The novelist Berthold Auerbach felt that both his German-ness and his Jewishness were strengthened by the revolution of (167),
Things appeared to improve steadily with the era of Bismarck, who served as Prussian prime minister from 1862 to 1890. Ludwig Bamberger and Gerson Bleichröder were Bismarck’s primary bankers, Walter Rathenau his primary industrialist. The emancipation law of 1871 seemed to cement the new status Jews felt as full-fledged German citizens. But the stock market crash of 1873 would lead to more anti-Semitic trouble. It would never die out completely, no matter how fervently German Jews assimilated to German values and converted to Christianity.
Germany’s rising prosperity at the turn of the 20th century produced even more talented German Jews, from scientists Paul Ehrlich and Fritz Haber to the theologian Martin Buber. There was, as Elon notes, “a flood of talent” (275). All of the confidence and optimism that came along with these achievements would come to a screeching halt with World War I, however. Many prominent Jews, including the Zionist leader Max Bodenheimer and the writer Stefan Zweig, supported the war (319). In the wake of Germany’s defeat and the onerous settlement at Versailles, the Weimar Republic was formed in 1919.
Elon’s final chapter, titled simply “The End,” takes the reader as far as Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The story from that point, one familiar to the general reader, becomes something different—no longer about a German-Jewish culture, it becomes that tale of a minority carved out from their home culture and singled out for exclusion and extinction. The impact of this move on German culture as it stands today is a fascinating question, one not discussed by Elon. German culture went its way, and Jewish religion and peoples continued in a different direction. What we are left with is an allusion to a unique possibility: If German culture had continued with its Jewish side intact, in an imperfect yet viable symbiosis, if not for Hitler, if not for the first World War, if not…Germany could have become the dominant nation in the world. But what we are left with, and which Elon describes in detail, is an incredible effulgence of human creativity and industry, an epoch whose contributions live on in our modern world.
April 29, 2012
You can read the other comments for a synopsis of the book. I found it well-written and very informative. I was generally aware that in many respects Jews in Germany were well-established and generally successful in pre-Holocaust Germany, similar to their situation in the US. What I was less aware of was the cycle of assimilation and discrimination that occurred in Germany over the 200 years that preceeded the Holocaust. Although always present below the surface,the most overt expressions of Anti-semitism occurred during period of economic or political distress--the post-Napoleonic emancipation period and the "period of anxieties" that followed the stock market crash of 1873, to name just two. As Elon points out, this pattern played out during the Weimar era, with the attacks and assasinations that took place during the early Weimar period,followed by a more peaceful 1924-1928 era when the economy improved and the currency stabilized and to come to flare up again with the great depression.
If I have any complaints about the book, it has to do with multiple examples Elon uses to prove his points. The detail may enhance the books historical value but it can make for some slow reading at times.
If I have any complaints about the book, it has to do with multiple examples Elon uses to prove his points. The detail may enhance the books historical value but it can make for some slow reading at times.
September 22, 2013
A wonderful history literature, describing the Lives, contributions and conflicts of Jews in Germany throughout the years. Makes one understand the enormous contribution of the Jewish people to the German Kultur, and even wonder if the cultural, Liberal society of Germany in the 1920's wasn't formed mainly of those Jews.
As such, the book gives the non-European reader strong tools in the understanding of the German people, their civil tradition and history.
As such, the book gives the non-European reader strong tools in the understanding of the German people, their civil tradition and history.
January 17, 2024
two centuries of german-jewish history, started with denied entry to berlin and ended with thousands of evacuations, and effectively the whole of german jewish intelligensia committing suicide. what a depressing saga.
great book, relying on individual stories. i generally dont prefer this style, but elon did it well.
great book, relying on individual stories. i generally dont prefer this style, but elon did it well.
Want to read
July 19, 2009Just came across a write-up on Amos Elon in NY Review of Books (excellent publication, by the way). Apparently, he warned of the danger of the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank at a time when those warnings would have fallen on deaf ears. This one seems like a must-read.
September 18, 2013
I thought this was an excellent book, all the more sadder because it depicts a lost people that have scattered to the earth. There is another book that describes the diaspora of all of the German Jews. I can't recall the name but when I do, I'll post it here.
June 9, 2021
A little too into the weeds of the background of prominent German Jews at times, but an excellent narrative that really illustrates the plight of Jews in the German speaking world from the 18th century until the rise of the Nazis.
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