David Cesarani
A Chronicle of Suffering and Spirituality
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of German Jews 1743-1933
By Amos Elon
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 446pp £25 order from our bookshop
The Jews of Germany have always fascinated historians, Jewish and non-Jewish. For those with a Zionist inclination the trajectory of German Jews proved the folly of assimilation and the illusion of integration. For German and German-born Jewish scholars who emerged from the wreckage of exile the question that begged for an answer was, How did this happen? Their tortured, often self-tormenting enquiries have caught the imagination of successive generations obsessed by questions of identity and belonging, especially since the 1960s.
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