Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.

• Author: Mills, III, Edward Jay
• Position: Book Review

Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. New York: Picador, 2002. 446 pp. Paper, $15.00.

Amos Elon's The Pity of It All is a splendid book. Elon's historical research and sensibilities are perhaps only surpassed by his ability to write a book both packed with data and eminently readable. This reviewer learned a great deal from this book about topics of which I already had general knowledge and also--if one can enjoy the sadness of what the author narrates--enjoyed reading the book.

Elon's work tells the compelling and sad story of the two centuries of the rise, flowering, and demise of German Judaism in ten chapters: "Ancient Renown" "The Age of Mendelssohn," "Miniature Utopias," "Heine and Borne," "Spring of Nations," "Hopes and Anxieties," "Years of Progress," "Assimilation and Its Discontents," "War Fever," and "The End."

The author uses a wonderful literary device to bind his work together. Elon begins with the story of the impoverished fourteen-year-old Moses Mendelssohn's entry to Berlin in 1743 and ends it with Hannah Arendt's flight from Germany in 1933. Between these important events he chronicles the often precarious, often erratic, growth of a Jewish presence in the manifold German-speaking states and cities of the eighteenth century, the eventual rise of the Jewish Golden Age in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, and its ultimate demise in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century, ending in the abyss of Nazism. Elon tracks the upward social path of German Judaism through its early steps toward freedom in the Enlightenment in Germany, its mixed successes in the wake of German Romanticism, and its demise in the mixture of patriotism, capitalism, feudalism, militarism, and anti-Semitism that was Junker Germany in the twentieth century.

One notable historical quirk in the history of Judaism in the German lands that Elon ably elucidates is that, to a very large degree, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century flourishing of German science and the arts was brought about by a core of German Jewish intellectuals. Non-Jews were involved in this renaissance, but Jews were part of it in far greater numbers than their numerical minority would have suggested. In return for this gift to the German people, against all its best interests, in the drive to purify blood and Reich the Germans purged this enormous brain trust. Surely this was one of history's greatest examples of...