A One-Sided Love Affair

...Because of its nearly 300 illustrations, studying The Jews of Germany is, curiously enough, a gratifying esthetic experience...

...with the blood libels of the 13th and 15th centuries...

...They were not the only ones, either, who began to realize how precarious life had become...

...Following the founding of the German Reich in 1871, Jews were finally granted full civil and political rights...

...At that point some readers might indeed welcome the cool, understated style of Ruth Gay's running commentary on her illustrations...

...However, the social setting of the German violence against Jews is powerfully evoked in the 277 black-and-white photographs, drawings and documents, plus 20 color plates, that Ruth Gay chose for her book...

...the "Jewish question" was solved with finality...

...Intermarriages and conversions became more frequent among the Jewish creme...

...she ends it not with stories of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but with accounts of their arrival and subsequent settlement in what is now Israel...

...At six in the morning the Poles relented and allowed them temporary entry to a makeshift detention area...

...It is a history of extraordinary achievement...

...By the 14th century Jews could be found all over Germany...

...The number had dwindled to 250,000 in 1938, when large numbers of solidly middle- and upper-middle-class Jews decided it was time to leave...

...We see Lippold's half-quartered body, about to be sundered by the next strike of the axe...

...Admired it too much to have been driven from it in this way...

...it is the juxtaposition of Jewish docility and the violence Gentile perpetrators felt entitled to, as if it were a natural right...

...Thus the nightmare that began with the train ride ended happily at least for the thousands who were permitted to return to Germany...

...Interspersed are depictions of Jewish daily life in Germany, pictures of synagogues, cemeteries, a ritual bath, and a slaughterhouse...

...she never wonders how they might hang together in the psyche of the perpetrators...

...Encapsulated between these dates of exile and return, as between the linen covers of Gay's book, is the history of the Jews in Germany...

...The 14,000-18,000 Jews holding Polish passports, whom the German Reich was determined to ship back, got a foretaste of things to come...

...Everyone knows what happened a la longue...

...Edicts of tolerance and decrees of emancipation issued by enlightened aristocrats and liberal politicians created an urban Jewish elite that began to move into German society by embracing its high culture...

...Suddenly, too, what constitutes the real outrage in German-Jewish relations becomes clear: It is the juxtaposition of the Jews' desire to be model citizens and the perfect equanimity with which German intellectuals and plebeians alike assumed that the Jews were less than they, possibly less than human...

...and with other acts of harassment and humiliation...

...And was Scholem right in 1966 when he called the German-Jewish symbiosis an illusion, and the German-Jewish dialogue a soliloquy in which a chorus of Jewish voices addressed no listeners...

...Similarly, we would not know from her words that during the Weimar Republic Jews produced a culture—in theater, music, journalism, literature, photography, etc.—that was as (secularly) Jewish as it was German...

...they had developed their own language (Yiddish), literature (religious, liturgical and secular), and communal government...

...Why, one wonders, did the Jews so love Germany...

...The Jewish world in Germany comes alive if one leaves the text and falls into these pictures...

...She begins her narrative in the year 70 CE, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and forced the Jews into exile...

...we see a half-clothed Jew taking an oath while standing on a pigskin...

...Anti-Semitism as a factor in the formation of the German national identity is mentioned once (in connection with the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the father of German gymnastics, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn...

...They were interacting with Germans on a business basis, but lived apart until the onset of the Enlightenment in the 18th century...

...Most stood until dawn in the cold autumn rain, caught in the no-man's-land between the two countries...

...Unaware of the flimsiness of the German love for the "other," and propelled by the crisis that shook up all religious systems during the first truly modern century, Jews moved deeper into German culture...

...with the Hep-Hep Riots of 1819...

...Under the generous rule of Charlemagne Jews became important traders...

...We have left Germany behind us," his memoir continues, "it pains my soul because I loved that country more than I wanted to believe...

...Jews settled in a colonial outpost of the Roman Empire, and by 321 were successful enough to be squeezed for money by the Emperor himself...

...Over the next 50 years (which also saw anti-Semitism achieve popular prominence), Jews unfolded a mind-boggling energy and creativity within German finance, industry, politics, science, and the arts...

...Even the author's plot structure has a certain esthetic appeal...

...In his poignant Introduction to The Jews of Germany, Peter Gay (born in Berlin in 1923) points out that the writing of this book was sparked by a wish to reassess Scholem's bleak view that seems to blame the Jews for having allowed themselves to be duped...

...After negotiations, 7,000 of the detainees were accepted in exchange for a small number of Jews holding German passports who had been living in Poland...

...They may have gone back to the cities, streets and houses they had left, but "home" was a changed place...

...Ruth Gay's study—unlike Nachum T. Gidal's similar 1988 enterprise, Die Juden in Deutschland: Von der Romerzeit bis zur Weimarer Republik—does not do this period justice...

...I don't think the smoothly written text quite fulfills the expectations raised by the Introduction...

...The author's detached narrative reduces these heinous events to isolated acts of violence...

...portraits of rabbis, businessmen and intellectuals...

...In the early 19th century, with German Romanticism in full swing, the salons of exotic Jewish women became a magnet for German literati...

...Reviewed by Susanne Klingenstein Author, "Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940" "What will happen...

...we see Jews riding on a pig, sucking its milk, and drinking its urine...

...Before long, 180,000 German Jews were murdered by the Nazis...

...In the 10th century, when most Germans were still praying to trees, Jews built communities along the Rhine of extraordinary administrative, judicial, intellectual, and moral sophistication—later ransacked by the crusading mob...

...The descendants of Moses Mendelssohn, the essayist Ludwig Borne, the poet Hein-rich Heine, the three salonieres Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Schlegel, as well as untold others tried to escape the constraints of being Jewish by dipping into the baptismal waters...

...He calls her book "history as a rescue operation...

...a young Zionist wondered on October 28, 1938, as German police and soldiers pushed him along with a trainload of expelled Jews toward the Polish border...

...In the end she cannot refute Scholem, and she presents what Peter Gay, himself a scholar of German and German Jewish culture, said ought to be avoided, namely a depiction of German Jewish history as "an unrelieved sequence of outrages.' In Ruth Gay's retelling, though, these "outrages" remain singularly bloodless...

...with the elaborate hanging of the court Jew Jud Suss in 1738 (later the protagonist of a Nazi propaganda movie...

...The Jews of Germany is a beautiful but ultimately inadequate gravestone commemorating, in the words of Peter Gay, "a long story, moving, terrifying, and exhilarating, a story now over...

...The pleasure is enhanced by the fact that the 8.5x11-inch book is magnificently printed on semi-glossy paper that gives the reproductions a superb quality, and is excellently laid out, with broad margins and intelligent use of empty space...

...I am not sure of precisely what this lavishly produced "rescue operation" is rescuing, since in addition we do not get a sense of what Jewish (thought) culture imparted to German culture (if anything), or of what German Jews achieved Jewishly...

...with the drawing and quartering of the court Jew Lippold in 1573...

...One wishes the text, too, brought that story to life...

...She confronts us with the massacres of the Crusades...

...I left my beloved German homeland," wrote the chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Richard Willstatter, "which had given me everything and was everything to me...

...What the Berlin-born scholar Gershom Scholem called a "one-sided and unreciprocated" love affair was coming to an end...

...Visas were immensely difficult to obtain, suicide was rampant, and the departure of those who received their papers was heart-wrenching...

...But on that particular night, Ruth Gay reports toward the end of her book, the Polish border was closed...

...Two or three pictures per double page break the text, yet are an integral part of it...

...But somehow we do not get furious...

...with the Fettmilch insurrection of 1614, a welling-up of middle-class discontent that led to a pogrom in the Frankfurt ghetto...

...In the winter of 1935-36, there were 400,000 Jews living in Germany...

...and reproductions of peaceful domestic scenes painted by Moritz Oppenheim...

...Peter Gay suggests that Ruth Gay's lusciously illustrated volume will not simply rehearse the facts of the Jewish presence on German territory since the Roman occupation, but also exonerate the Jews by examining the mixed signals of welcome they received and by describing the quality of Jewish life in Germany...