In 1743 a Jew entering Berlin had to pay the same tax as a head of cattle or pig. Jews could not own real estate, practice most professions, or even live inside the city walls without a permit from the government. Many Jews were itinerant salesmen, scavengers, beggars, or thieves. There was a small elite of court Jews: bankers, minters, and industrialists who were given dispensations to live outside the ghettos of the major German cities. Even then, their wives and children were often forced to leave their homes (and their cities) when the family patriarch passed away. In most towns, Jews were forbidden to build a communal synagogue. Yet almost all Jews were literate, even if mainly only in a bastardized Hebrew.
Moses Mendelsohn was not the first Jew to break through this glass ceiling, but he was the most impressive of the 18th century. Although Frederick II never warmed to him, he was well received by Goethe and other German intellectuals. He tried to be a German and a Jew, to bridge two worlds that had been kept apart by both sides. His goal was to inculcate the younger Jewish aristocracy with German literature and culture. He set off two trends that he had never intended. The first was the fight for Jewish emancipation (or equal rights) within Germany. The second was that the younger Jewish generation, especially the wealthiest, became so enmeshed in German culture that many converted to the Christian faith, chief among them most of Mendelson’s own children. In the age of rationalism and the enlightenment, faith was secondary to reason anyhow. This would have tragic consequences in the age of Romanticism, which spawned vehement nationalism. A Jew, even one who renounced his faith, was still an outsider to the Aryan masses. He could not escape his birth (even up to three generations after conversion). Where the anti-Judaism of the previous generation was a fear of the unknown of the other, the Romantic hatred of German Jews came from an increased intimacy and socializing. It was a reaction to Jews trying to become too German.
Some German Jews did become zionists, refusing to integrate into the Volk (or perhaps understanding better than most that they would always be excluded), while most others pressed on for greater emancipation. There were sporadic anti-Jewish riots over the decades, but nothing comparable to the pogroms in Russia. German Jews from Alsace, annexed after the Franco-Prussian War, thanked their lucky stars when the Dreyfus Affair highlighted the brutal Jewish discrimination still within France. Yet, the term anti-semite was coined in Germany near the turn of the century and Jews were still almost completely barred from serving as officers in the Kaiser’s Army and were strictly limited as professors in German universities.
World War I was to prove a turning point, as Jews across the political and economic spectrum dropped their cosmopolitanism in support of the Kaiser. Previous pacifists, democratic socialists, communists, republicans, and zionists were all swayed to the nationalist hysteria. Jews even returned from Palestine to fight in the Kaiser’s army. As the war dragged to its bitter end, however, most Jews became disillusioned as they were made into the scapegoats of the German defeat, culminating with an Army census that implied that most Jews were war profiteers, serving behind the front lines, when, in fact, 80% of Jews had served at the front. The final chapter of the book is, appropriately, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party as the Weimar Republic collapses. Astoundingly, this also was a period of great integration of Jews into the highest echelons of society in politics, industry, and the arts. This, indeed, was the pity of it all.
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