A close friend from my oldest days sent me this book, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, in paperback form as a Chanukkah gift. Amos Elon (1926-2009), a liberal Zionist for much of his life, who became disillusioned with the Zionist project for its becoming too nationalist and proving its colonialist roots, is the author.
I am about 60% or so through the book. What has struck me is this book is an unusual history of Germany and Prussia, German unification, and the development of German nationalism through the early 20th Century through a lens that may be called "Critical Religion Theory." It is stunning to me how Elon wrote this history, which, whether intentionally or not, shows the centrality of Jew hatred which runs parallel through German and Prussian political history, the rise of German (and Prussian) unification, and German nationalism, as well as Germany's philosophical pluralism and development of German art, music, literature. If anyone wishes to see why it is so important to embrace the original--not propagandistic versions--of Critical Race Theory, this book will reveal the way in which such a framework, and I prefer Critical Race Framework, is so illuminating.
The book also provides an illumination of how Jews in Germany were so wanting to be deemed "German" and how those who supported German unification, German political reforms, and German wars against France over Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck even at his most autocratic, and later Germany in WWI, were of the view that holding tight to a unified Germany and German nationalism would allow the vast majority of Germans to finally see Jews as part of the ideal German cultural and political fabric. Elon is elegant in his description of these Jews, and how their hopes were so often dashed, even if there were moments of hope.
Where I have quibbled with Elon is his anti-Socialist bias and particularly the way he cites Marx's "Jewish Problem" essay from 1844. Elon never lets readers know Marx wrote the essay in response to a German philosopher and theologian, Bruno Bauer, who was truly anti-Jewish (the word anti-Semitic does not show up until 1879), saying Jews should not have political rights, and stay in their economic rights lane. Marx, admittedly using some anti-Jewish tropes about Jews' God being money, though in a Dave Chapelle-like way, that says, "Okay, you Jew haters, I'll accept that for a larger point..." responded by saying Jews deserved political rights and are ultimately no different as people than anyone else. He said, if Germany can move toward Socialism or Communism, it will become abundantly clear why this is the case. Yet, Elon only cites to Marx's tropes without any of the context he brings to his other capsule biographies of German/Prussian/Austrian born Jews. Elon treats Marx, whose family converted to Christianity, as just another self-hating Jew. Elon treats the other Socialists better than Marx, but still not with the same reverence he has for the German Jewish or converted Jewish liberals/capitalists. Had Marx supported Bismarck in the darkest days, Elon would have had a field day, but he tries to find subtlety for those who did. I am great with that subtlety, of course, but he could have been far more fair to Marx, and he was not.
Nonetheless, this is an extraordinary book thus far (and I sneaked a read of the European historian par excellence Gordon Craig's very positive review of the book in the NYRB), and appears to promise more greatness as the book winds it way to 1933, which Elon fairly properly sees as the end of a relatively normal life for Jews in Germany for the next decade or two--and perhaps beyond, as I am not sure how secure Jews should feel in Germany in a rising tide of international fascism. Again, though, this book is really Critical Religion Theory/Framework, and shows, again, its usefulness in illuminating various aspects of a society other frameworks may easily miss.
I should add, as a final note, how this book dovetails into a remarkable memoir by the former NPR and still SiriusXm classical music radio personality, Martin Goldsmith, about his classical musician parents coming of age in the time of German Nazi madness, and their dramatic escape from Germany to the United States in the last days before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. The book, The Inexhaustible Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany, is a remarkable read overall, which also proves Elon's point about how the German Jews, only 1% of the overall population were nevertheless overrepresented in the arts, and providing non-Jewish Germans with a way to see their best selves. It is even more so than Jews in the entertainment industry of our our nation, and the way in which I shocked my students yesterday, as I rattled off so many Christmas songs which those of Jewish religious heritage wrote. What Germany lost, as a people and nation, in the anti-Jewish madness exhibited over centuries, and definitely over the 1930s and 1940s, is remarkably tragic. That nearly 70% of German Jews escaped from Germany during the 1930s and dawn of the 1940s (many to the US, where FDR did work to manipulate European quotas for Jews, despite major hostility from Congress and his own State Department) is a story too many Jews, as well as others, have surpassed in the tarring of FDR, but that is another story.
