Reflecting on German-Jewish History

Summary

The history of modern German Jewry is of exceptionally great interest to scholarly as well as more general intellectual audiences. This exceptionality is obviously connected with the tragic end of German Jewry in the course of the Holocaust. True, other European Jewish communities suffered no less than the German Jews, some of them even more. The Polish Jewish community, for example, lost a higher percentage of its members during the German occupation than its German counterpart did under the Nazis. One thinks of German Jewry as having been partly saved through emigration. Yet, as I explained on another occasion, the fate of Polish Jewry at the hands of the Germans was unconnected with its previous history. Its misfortune was brought upon it by external forces. Polish Jewry's doom, therefore, did not create an impulse to trace its earlier history. Not so in the case of German Jewry. Although its doom was likewise unforeseen and unpredictable, the experience of the German-Jewish community was part of a continuous evolution that can be traced, stage after stage, phase after phase, starting with the integration of ghetto dwellers into state and society in the wake of emancipation, continuing with the vicissitudes of its integration, and ending with the fateful turn it took in the Nazi era, leading to its destruction as a community.