Searching for a Secular Legacy
SORKIN, DAVID
Searching for a Secular Legacy The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 By Amos Elon Metropolitan. 446 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by David Sorkin Professor of history...
...I am tempted to locate this book instead in an Israeli setting, as part of an internal dialogue about the search for a secular legacy...
...He chooses to celebrate German Jewry, and does so by recycling the materials and ideas that previously made up the integrationist view: "There has rarely been a confluence of two cultural, ethnic or religious traditions that proved so richly creative at its peak...
...For example, women played a central role in the construction of a bourgeois Jewish identity, yet they are hardly present in Elon's account, aside from the usual suspects (Rachel Varnhagen, Bertha Pappenheim...
...Elon felicitously characterizes the German Jewish experience as "a predicament that eventually became a kind of identity," the "duality of German and Jew-two souls within a single body...
...He would also have had to include those Jews who have usually been ostracized from the conventional tale...
...For the last two decades scholars have been telling us that such tolerance had already emerged in the 18th century in such places as Amsterdam, London, Bordeaux, and Trieste, among others...
...Elon excludes the Orthodox by definition, yet to a surprising extent they joined their secular coreligionists in embracing emancipation and German culture...
...At first glance one might take it to be a post-Zionist rehabilitation of diaspora Jewish life-the negation of the Zionist "negation of the diaspora...
...He asks whether the "creative confluence" was an illusion, but then affirms that in any case it had "a grandeur of its own...
...had never existed in Germany or any other European country before...
...He admits, in passing, that "The vast majority never hid the fact that they were Jews...
...and there modern anti-Semitism was devised and turned most lethal...
...He writes, for instance, that the cultural mixing in Berlin's salons at the turn of the 19th century was due to a "climate of tolerance which...
...But Elon ignores the scholarship that disputes his clichéd view...
...What he admires in them is their "outsider's sharpened sensibility and wakefulness...
...Elon criticizes German Jewish intellectuals for their one significant lapse in this regard, namely, falling prey to the general enthusiasm for World War I, but he also chronicles their quick recovery and growing criticism of the War...
...In Israel today there is no potent heritage for liberal secularists, since labor Zionism (which Elon explored to great effect in Israelis: Founders and Sons) is defunct...
...there intellectuals of Jewish descent played a prominent role in the larger culture...
...WHY THIS BOOK, and why now...
...What is most striking about Eton's treatment of German Jewry is that it could have been written in 1945 or, indeed, 1933: There is precious little here that the integrationist school itself did not produce...
...This portrait gallery is connected by an account of background events in order to offer a description of German Jewish history from Mendelssohn's entrance into Berlin (1743) to Hannah Arendt's exit (1933...
...Finally, Elon unquestioningly reiterates the stale Germanocentric view of modern Jewish history...
...Does he think that Israelis need this detachment lest their present "predicament...
...become an identity...
...They adapted German culture to their own needs as a minority group, using it "with a difference...
...most were unswerving in their attachment to the country of their birth...
...Reviewed by David Sorkin Professor of history and Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin Amos Elon's new work is a vividly written, carefully constructed, fast paced account of some two centuries of German Jewry's history...
...Scholars have tried to recast the terms of debate by suggesting that German Jews maintained their distinctiveness through their very appropriation of the German language and culture: What seems to have made them German in fact made them German-Jewish...
...The author has an eye for telling detail and lively quotation, and his subject is undeniably central to Jewish self-understanding...
...What Elon emphasizes about his German Jewish intellectuals, following the late George Mosse, is their consistent effort to "civilize German patriotism," to temper nationalism with a humanity grounded in culture (Bildung) and detachment...
...there the processes of emancipation, assimilation and the formation of bourgeois Jewish life were most intense...
...Furthermore, he perpetuates old myths about his male luminaries...
...If that were the intention, then there is no better example than the supposed epitome of assimilation, German Jewry...
...Is Elon looking for a usable past in order to "civilize" Israeli patriotism...
...The conventional wisdom is that German Jewry was the ideological laboratory of Jewish modernity...
...The debate veered between celebration and castigation...
...To the Orthodox, Zionists, Bundists, and autonomists it represented the nadir of religious or national betrayal, if not self-hatred or self-denial...
...His narrative consists of a gallery of familiar male luminaries or "emblematic" figures: Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne and Ludwig Bamberger, Berthold Auerbach and Gabriel Riesser, Walter Rathenau and Martin Buber, Theodor Herzl and Bernard Ballin, Albert Einstein and Fritz Haber, Theodor Wolff and Theodor Lessing...
...Elon disappointingly does not change the terms of debate...
...He praises German Jewry by comparing its accomplishments with those of the Spanish "Golden Age"-a favorite comparison of German Jewish thinkers who strove to legitimize themselves with an illustrious precedent...
...To borrow contemporary parlance, German Jewry epitomized a subculture or "hybridity...
...Else Lasker-Schüler, Hannah Arendt...
...a neutral stance was impossible...
...Consequently, German Jewry became the touchstone for attitudes toward Jewish life...
...His celebration is, thankfully, not unalloyed: He is aware of faults and shortcomings and skillfully avails himself of historical hindsight...
...He tells the "story"-his book is a narrative, not an argument-of that "long line of assimilated German Jews who worshiped German culture and civilization and whose enterprise, two centuries later, would come to such a horrendous and abrupt end...
...There the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), the academic study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) and the modern forms of the Jewish religion (Reform, Conservative and NeoOrthodox) were invented...
...Some were more gifted than others, some not gifted at all...
...To integrationists it was the acme of modernity, a model for emulation...
...Mendelssohn was instead try ing to restore knowledge of Hebrew, as demonstrated by his many Hebrew works (Elon relies on a 19th-century edition of Mendelssohn's works that did not include the Hebrew writings...
...Moreover, their emancipation marked them off from their neighbors, giving them a distinct Left-Liberal political profile in tension with their increasingly bourgeois socioeconomic status...
...He says of the Gentian Jewish intellectuals: "The best among them tended to be indifferent to all religion and to view both their Jewish and their German heritage with detached irony...
...Yet I was left wondering: Why did Elon write this book at this time...
...He has Mendelssohn translating the Bible to promote knowledge of German...
...Liberal secularists are threatened not only by religious orthodoxy and the political orthodoxy of revisionism but, more fundamentally, by the problems the Palestinian conflict poses for Israeli patriotism and democracy...
...To utilize this scholarship and present a more complicated view, Elon would have had to cast his nets beyond "emblematic figures"-who are, after all, only emblematic of what we already knowto the prosaic majority...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
