History: Unusually, Amos Elon starts his portrait of the Jews in Germany prospectively, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, rather than the standard retrospective view from the catastrophe of the Holocaust to a rosier, but arguably doomed, past, writes Julia Neuberger.
Of course, one cannot disregard what happened two centuries on; Elon does not hesitate to point out the degree to which anti-Semitism was central to much German intellectual and cultural life of the period. Nevertheless, the picture Elon draws is alluring, a world of high culture, based on the German bildung, the refinement of the individual self and character "in keeping with the ideals of the Enlightenment", as defined by Goethe.
Those first sons and daughters of the wealthier German Jews were keen Goethe fans. They took the words of Moses Mendelssohn seriously, learning the German language instead of speaking Judendeutsch, and absorbing German culture in the process. Mendelssohn was the key to all this. From the poor young scholar who came to study in Berlin, he became renowned as a great philosopher, and as a friend of scholars and writers, portrayed by the playwright Lessing in Nathan the Wise. He was a true believer in - and exponent of - the 18th-century concept of the brotherhood of man.
Looking forwards to the 19th and 20th centuries, Elon takes issue with Mendelssohn's view. To be a Mensch - a decent human being - is not enough. It does not deal with the political realities of nationality, ethnicity, race, borders. Yet the brotherhood of man is what many Enlightenment Jews believed in, as they moved into the professions, ran the literary salons of Berlin, converted to Christianity to ease the way, and left the world of the ghetto behind them.
Four of Mendelssohn's six children converted, and his grandson, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was renowned for his church music. The great poet, Heine, converted - and mocked others who did, particularly those who took on the titles of the aristocracy. Elon suggests that the rash of conversions gradually deprived the poor and the petit bourgeoisie of their thinkers and wealthier co-religionists, abandoning them to their fate. But that fate was two centuries away, and inconceivable at the time.
In any case, Elon tells us little about the poor. His is the story of the wealthy and successful, of literature and science more than art and music. More significantly, he barely describes those who remained Jewish, whose attitudes to the faith of their ancestors were different to those of the converts. Some of these "German citizens of the Jewish faith" abandoned orthodoxy for Reform Judaism, whilst others became a new kind of orthodox Jew, more formal, more germanicised. Germany was the cradle of non-orthodox Judaism, now the largest grouping within the US Jewish community. Germany produced much fine Jewish liturgical music, and considerable Jewish scholarship, though Elon discusses only one section of it, the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums, or science of Judaism.
The 20th-century revival of Jewish "culture" gets short shrift, though it was a wonderful phenomenon, reaching its peak in Franz Rosenszweig's Lehrhaus, the free Jewish house of learning, a sort of Jewish Open University. Elon is rushing to the end now; an examination of that revival, arguably unrelated to the rise of 19th-century anti-Semitism in Germany, is too difficult a subject when the story suggests that the Jews were missing the doom-laden signs.
This book is a wonderful read, but it is not the whole story. My family is German Jewish on both sides. Elon depicts neither the petit bourgeoisie of much of my mother's roots (insignificant wine-growers and merchants, a few scholars, a rabbi or two, ardent service in the German army in the first World War), nor the world of my father's wealthier but more orthodox family (composers of liturgical music, goldsmiths and silversmiths, bankers, the solidly educated and religious middle-class). Yet these were the bulk of German Jewry. Not everyone converted. Many did not become Zionists. The richness of Jewish culture allowed them to learn if they wished to, and, latterly, to enter the professions and remain Jewish or not as they chose.
The anti-Semitism was always there. Germans became increasingly obsessed with the idea of blood, and the romantic view of an older, more noble Germany. But Jews believed in blood too - wrongly - and Jews felt the new nationalism too, for where else did Zionism come from if not from thinking about national identity?
By the end, as the great scientists and artists, musicians and writers, bankers and rabbis were spread worldwide - if they were fortunate enough to leave - one undoubtedly recognises the pity of it all. But where are the people of no international renown, such as the teachers - my father's aunt and uncle, for instance, who perished, or my bedridden great-grandmother, deported in her bed from Frankfurt? Country Jews and town Jews, religious Jews and atheist Jews, long-converted Jews and modern orthodox Jews have no presence here. Yet this is their story too.
The pity of it is that the greatest western European centre of Jewish civilisation was destroyed, and half of its Jews with it. The idea of Aryan blood and race, blaming the Jews for the deprivations after the first World War and sensing horror at Jewish penetration to the heart of the German establishment, dominated any serious opposition. In memory of all those who perished, that is the pity of it all.
Rabbi Julia Neuberger is the chief executive of the King's Fund, London, and is currently working on a book on the moral state we're in
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of German Jews 1743-1933. By Amos Elon
Allen Lane, 446pp, £25