History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The truth is that, despite Germany’s long tradition of vicious anti-Jewish feeling – despite, as it were, the Judensau–Jews felt at home in Germany. It was a society which honoured and revered its professoriat, and in some respects its values were those of the Jewish cathedocracy. A Jew could slip naturally from a yeshivah into one of Germany’s universities, now in their golden period of effort and achievement. He relished the opportunities which slowly opened to him in a country where intellectual achievement was justly measured and treated with awesome respect. German Jews worked fanatically hard. They soon began to carry off the new Nobel prizes: two in physiology and medicine, four in chemistry, two in physics, all for work done before the First World War.193 Ferdinand Julius Cohn founded bacteriology. Paul Ehrlich produced the first practical form of chemotherapy. Franz Boas founded the science of cultural anthropology. German Jews were workaholics, hurrying men. Eduard Devrient wrote of his friend Felix Mendelssohn: ‘The habit of constant occupation, instilled by his mother, made rest intolerable to him’; he kept looking at his watch.194 Gustav Mahler used to run from his apartment to his office at the Opera House in Vienna; on his return, to save time, he would announce his arrival by whistling the opening bars of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, as a signal for lunch to be served. But it was not merely intellectual habits Jews shared with the Germans: there was intelle...