The Pity of it All: A Portrait of Jews in Germany 1743-1933 (Hardcover)

Previous books about the Jews in Germany have focused almost exclusively on Hitler's maniac search for a 'Final Solution' and the resulting Holocaust, but this one ends before those darkest days of European history. The curtain comes down with the rise of Nazism - although not before a resurgence of anti-Semitism. The first question to be asked is, why start the story in 1743? What was the significance of that year? Even the majority of Jews will not know the answer to that. But Jewish historian and scholar Amos Elon sees it as a defining moment in the history of his people. It was in that year that a crippled Jewish boy limped into the fortified city of Berlin, then the Prussian capital. He was forced to enter by a gate that was restricted to cattle and Jews. The boy, Moses Mendelssohn, grew up to become one of the greatest writers and philosophers of the European Enlightenment. His writings and speeches helped break down the anti-Semitism that infected not only Germany but so much of Europe in the 18th century, and released the Jewish people to show their prowess in all the arts, in commerce, science and in common humanity. Elon comes forward in time with a series of character studies rather than with a detailed social history of his people. He focuses on well-known figures such as Heine, Marx and Herzl, as well as lesser-known personalities who nonetheless played significant parts in Jewish history. Many people have asked over the years why so many Jews remained in Germany after Hitler came to power. Why didn't they emigrate when they had a chance? Elon's answer is simple. The Jews had by then largely intermingled and intermarried with the Gentile population, and few of them regarded Nazi ideology as anything other than a passing aberration. It was a tragic error of judgement. This book is beautifully written, even-handed and enormously enlightening - a must for anyone who really wants to know about the many important roles played by Jews in Europe over nearly 300 years. (Kirkus UK)

A superb account of the sometimes exalted, often tragic relations among Germans and Jews, "two souls within a single body." Jews, writes Israeli novelist and historian Elon (A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East, 1997, etc.), had lived in Germany since the days of the Roman conquest, though always uneasily. For a 200-year period, however, much of German society opened to them, with institutional barriers and common prejudices falling away. Elon begins with the arrival in Berlin, in 1743, of a shoeless, hunchbacked boy from Dessau, Moses Mendelssohn, who spoke only Hebrew and Yiddish; fewer than 20 years later, Mendelssohn had taught himself several languages and had "become a renowned German philosopher, philologist, stylist, literary critic, and man of letters, one of the first to bridge the social and cultural barrier between Jews and other Germans." Within a few years, other Jews were able to enter the professions, attend university, and engage in business more or less openly; some even received titles of nobility. Over time, their influence on the arts and culture, combining with what otherwise was a golden age for German language and literature, produced a remarkable body of work that has been likened to that of the Renaissance and, Elon observes, would be remembered as such had not the end been so tragic. In few other places did Jews so successfully assimilate into the dominant society, so much so that German Jews widely opposed the mass immigration of their brethren from Russia following the pogroms of the late-19th century, with German-Jewish politician Walter Rathenau decrying the arrival of the "Asiatic horde." At the time of WWI, Germany was renowned as a place of religious tolerance, a situation that would soon thereafter change abruptly with the assassination of Rathenau, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Well-written, humane, full of learned asides and character sketches of figures such as Heinrich Heine, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Karl Kraus: a memorable evocation of a disappeared world. (Kirkus Reviews)

"Amos Elon has not only written a great history, but an elegy for a lost civilisation."