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Title: The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 by Amos Elon ISBN: 0-8050-5964-4 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The past made relevant for today
Comment: We have come to expect absorbing and well-written works from Elon, and this one is not disappointing. The author helps us understand two questions: first, how a small and harmless group which contributed so much to European and world civilization could still be so intensely despised, and second, how some of modern history's worst crimes against humanity were cheerfully committed by a nation which had one of the most well-educated and intellectually respectable citizenry in history.
This book is more than a glimpse of some interesting but irrelevant period of history. Anti-semitism, for example, is as alive today as ever, and no one believes that if the Jews or Israel were in mortal danger today, they would not be happily abandoned by everyone (except perhaps by the US). Civilized people continue to abandon not only the Jews, but many other minority groups around the world (including the Palestinians, by the way, who are effectively despised by many of their so-called brothers). This book helps us understand why it happens and how "intellectuals" and political leaders of the left and the right continue to acquiesce or collaborate. Elon helps us understand how humanity continues to have a "dark side," despite the advances of modern civilization. It is unlikely this situation will change much when the Chinese take over world leadership, either, given their traditional xenophobia.
I would recommend this book to anyone who seeks to understand why productive minority groups continue to have such a difficult time in this so-called "inclusionary" and globalized world.
Rating: 5
Summary: A powerful story
Comment: This is a heartbreaking story about a people who tried to shake their pariah status and, although sometimes things got better sometimes worse, ultimately they failed and failed horribly. Told in a series of sketches against the backdrop of European and German histories, this book combines the best of fiction and non-fiction in a seamless and utterly readable whole.
It is refreshing too that there are neither demons nor saints in these pages. The Jews portrayed here (from Mendelsohn to Arendt) are simply people who try to convince themselves that they too can be German. And for a while they succeeded not in becoming German (for the Germans never regarded them as anything but pariahs) but in convincing themselves that they had achieved that much-coveted status.
And when they had convinced themselves they forgot that "the step-child must always be on his best behavior," forgot even that they were step-children; so heady was the illusory promise of Emancipation, so wondrous was Kaiser's pledge that "he no longer knows any parties, [he knows] only Germans" that the Jews allowed themselves to be deceived. During WWI, they were "as conformist" as all others, forgetting that in war hatred abounds and that the fastest way to get hold of an ideology is to declare that they hate someone. And that the easiest group to hate is a minority that had always been persecuted.
The reminder (a Jew census to determine how many Jews served on the front lines) was a shock but it was not a big enough shock to make the Jews flee Germany. A place where they had lived for thousands of years; where they had lived before the Germans arrived. For, as Amos Elon makes clear, there was noting inevitable about the Holocaust. Even at the very end of the Weimar Republic, there was a paradox of surging Nazism and increasing assimilation, of growing anti-Semitism and growing Jewish prominence for Jews in every field in Weimar culture." For the Jews this meant that they could cling to the belief that they could yet become German; for the Nazis this meant that the Jews were increasingly prominent and therefore so much easier to hate.
The end we know.
But there was so much more to the German Jewry than their horrible and tragic end. This is their story, beautifully told. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best works on German Jewry I've read
Comment: "The Pity of it All" is on par with Peter Gay's works in terms of the elegance of the writing and the delicate evocation of its period. Elon's work is thoroughly researched but does not bury its reader in needless detail the way so many historians, eager to show off their research, do. Nor does Elon wring his hands over the genuinely difficult question: "How could Germany's Jews not have known they were hurtling torward disaster?" Elon answers this question, in a sense, by avoiding it and instead carefully evoking a very particular place and time. Once he has done that, the question evaporates--or, at least, no longer seems separable from understanding that place and time. Elon's work is studded with mini-biographies of important historical players (Moses Mendelsohn, Walter Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Chaim Weizmann, Hannah Arendt, to name just a few), which keep the reader's interest; they are empathetic portrayals but never hagiographical. Overall, a great read.
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Title: The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz ISBN: 047146502X Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time by Amos Elon ISBN: 0670868574 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 by Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann, Michael Bienert ISBN: 0393051676 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 02 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town by Helmut Walser Smith ISBN: 039305098X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Herzl. by Amos. Elon ISBN: 003013126X Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: January, 1975 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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