Volume 32, Number 10 · June 13, 1985
Outsiders
By Gordon A. Craig
German Jews Beyond Judaism
by George L. Mosse
Indiana University Press/Hebrew Union College Press, 98 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The German Jew: A Synthesis of Judaism and Western Civilization, 1730–1930
by H.I. Bach
Oxford University Press (for the Littman Library), 255 pp., $24.95
In the years following Germany's unification in 1871, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke devoted much of his abundant energy to detecting and attacking what he considered to be forces of particularism and dissent which threatened the frail national consensus. Although by no means an unconditional enemy of the Jews (he praised the Prussian Jews who had fought for liberation in 1813 and was an admirer of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, whom he described as a 'German from top to toe'), he came to believe that the present generation of Jews resisted assimilation and was an alien element in society by its own choice. In November 1879, in an article in the Preußische Jahrbücher that became notorious and helped to feed the fires of anti-Semitism in the empire, he wrote that 'the Jews are our national misfortune,' adding that Mendelssohn's achievement showed that they could win respect and recognition only if they submerged themselves wholly and unconditionally in German life.
Review, 2848 words
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