The Atlantic Review recently had a post about Germany’s growing and vibrant Jewish community. That is very encouraging, but it is but a pale reflection of what it was a century ago. Amos Elon’s wonderful book The Pity of It All. A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933 (released in German as Zu einer anderen Zeit) chronicles the unrequited love of a people for a language, a culture, and a national identity.
Here Elon muses about what was behind the astonishing achievements of German Jews in the first quarter of the 20th century, when Germany led the world in scientific and cultural advancements:
"The contribution of the Jews to this preeminence was enormous; in some fields, it was overwhelming. The reasons for such an outburst of creativity in so many different fields has long been a matter for speculation. They may have been social or psychological rather than religious since there was little if any religiously Jewish content in the works of Einstein, Freud, Mahler, Zweig, Werfel, Husserl. Hofmannsthal, Ehrlich, Willstaetter, Mauthner, or even Kafka. Nor could the reasons have been "ethnic" – what is "Flemish" in Flemish art, what is "German" or "Jewish" in mathematics, physics, chemistry, music, or medicine? What, then, was behind this prodigious output? Was it self-conscious marginality? The stimulus of suffering and blows? The interplay between challenge and response? Tribal pressure? If "ease is inimical to civilization", as Arnold Toynbee has claimed, adversity was not without its rewards. Within a relatively short time, families once on the margins of established society, outside the general culture and language, produced a surprisingly high number of outstanding men and women in the arts and sciences."
