Product Description

The Pity of It All is a passionate and poignant history of German Jews, tracing the journey of a people and their culture from the mid eighteenth century to the eve of the Third Reich. As it is usually told, the story of the Jews in Germany starts at the end, overshadowed by their tragic demise in Hitler's Reich. Now, in this important work of historical restoration, the acclaimed historian and social critic Amos Elon takes us back to the beginning, chronicling a 150-year period of achievement and integration that at its peak produced a golden age second only to the Renaissance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200306 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
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)

Telegraph, March 15, 2003 (by Daniel Johnson)
"Amos Elon has not only written a great history, but an elegy for a lost civilisation."

Independent Magazine, April 12, 2003 (by Michael Arditti)
"This is a meticulously researched, richly detailed account of the profound connections between two (in Kafka’s word) 'pariah' nations."

Customer Reviews

A warning from history if ever there was one
This ought to be required reading for everyone who thinks that they understand 'multiculturalism'. If ever there was a test case for the strategy that says minority groups must adapt themselves to the majority culture, the Jews of Germany are it. And the test case does not appear to vindicate the strategy.

I grew up with the Zionist account of the Jews of Germany -- that their experience proves the folly of assimiliationism. Elon tries hard to present assimilationism as a valid and sensible choice rather than treating it with the benefit of hindsight. He shows just how reasonable it seemed, pointing out that antisemitism in Germany was seen as weaker than in most of the rest of Europe for much of the period he covers. Actually I rather think he tries too hard here. The relationship of the German Jews to Germany rather strikes me as one with an abusive lover, who mixes the violence with just enough affection to keep the victim close by. But treating the German Jews as sensible people making valid choices is a useful way of writing the book, and it shed really interesting light on lots of really interesting characters.

It's hard not to find the German Jews' wish to be accepted as good Germans repugnant. The kind of nationalism that it embodied is out of fashion in most of the west right now, though the opponents of multiculturalism would, I suspect, like to revive it -- even if they don't admit or even know this.

And curiously, it was the German Jews who pioneered Jewish self-hatred -- not in terms of opposition to Zionism, which is the usual basis for the charge these days, but genuine, physical disdain for their own kind. Elon tells this story really well, with lots of wonderful stories and anecdotes.

This is a brilliant exercise in group biography - prosopography, I think. Read it.

Top rate history and more
Amos Elon takes on a very large subject, charting the history of Jews in Germany over several hundred years. He successfully combines the big picture, showing the vicissitudes of the German-Jewish experience over the centuries, with mini-biographies of some of the most prominent German Jews, including several composers (Mendelsson, Offenbach, Mahler), Scientists (e.g. Fritz Harber & Einstein), mainstream politicians (notably Walter Rathaus, a key figure in WW1), literary figures (e.g. Heinrich Heine), revolutionaries (Marx, Rosa Luxemburg etc) and many more. It's a very colourful tapestry and very illuminating as well, demolishing quite a few myths on the way.

A Broad Sweep With Many Faces
Taking beginning of modern German-Jewish history with Moses Mendelssohn, this treatment of the Jewish frustration with German history is a concise and informative view of the difficult, arms- length relationship between Germany and her citizens of the Jewish faith. Having made clear to them that Jews were not regarded as Germans, the story is thus one of those "outside" trying their best to gain addmission. German society was in response, resistant and then a certain governmnet undertook a plan to expell them for good. Poignantly, the book ends with the escape from Berlin of Hannah Arendt, taking exactly the same route that Mendelsohn took all those years before.

Strong on individual details, Mr Elon shows his weaknesses within his strengths; what we are given is little more than a string of (very good) biographies played out against the backcloth of German histroy, but sadly, he makes little attempt to interweave the two. Thus we rattle from Heinrich Heine and 1848 through to Walther Rathenau and modernity, without appreaciating how exactly Germany changed within theis period, and how anti-semitism altered from a social prejudice to a would-be scientific race theory. Although we are treated to a brief summary of the change from Treitschke to count Gobineau, without a real consideration of the quauzi- darwinian notion of race theory, the mid-twentieth century attempt to exclude Jews from the German cultural sphere can not be understood fully. Jews were tolerated earlier, because even out of the ghetto, they could be ostracised. After Gobineau, it was seen that the "Jewish race" (Judaism was seen no longer as a religion) would, unless removed, somehow "undermine" "ayrian Germany." Thus expulsion, culminating in murder, was for the racialists, a necessity.

In the light of this, the collection of biogrpahies, whilst informative, and often enlightening, does not really explain a great deal.