Die Familie Mosse: Deutsch-judisches Burgertum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (review)

This is the first major study on the Mosse family, the great German Jewish family of publishers, professionals, scholars, and scientists. This scholarly work, based on a Habilitationsschrift (or second dissertation), places biographies of members of the Mosse family in the context of the larger questions of social history and Jewish history. The author has problems in linking story and analysis, resulting in occasional jarring discon tinuities in the narrative, which does not rise to the literary heights to which the author aspires. Nonetheless, this is an important work about a remarkable family, a family which preserved values and habits that set it apart from much of German society: political liberalism, a sense of public service, and a self-confident sense of Jewish identity.

In the age of Jewish emancipation, the family patriarch, Markus Mosse (1808–1865), changed his name from Moses to Mosse, fathered fourteen children, and laid the foundation for the family’s future successes. A small-town doctor of modest means, he managed to provide two sons with a university education, and to inculcate all his children with values and a sense of family solidarity that helped them to achieve a great deal. More negatively, Markus Mosse was a domestic tyrant, one whose Enlightenment belief in the malleability of children led him to exclude his wife from the education of their offspring, reducing her in the estimation of the author to the status of a servant. However, Mosse was also a son of the Enlightenment in much more positive ways. His liberal and pro-Polish activities during the 1848 Revolution earned him a months-long stint in prison. He gave his son Salomon a history of the French Revolution for his Bar Mitzvah in 1850. Though religiously observant and active in the Jewish Gemeinde (community), his was a Jewish identity compatible with the spirit of the Enlightenment. He set a course that was followed rather faithfully by his 14 children, 35 grandchildren, and 22 great-grandchildren.

Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920), Markus Mosse’s son and the most important member of the second generation, enjoyed a meteoric career which bestowed upon him one of the great fortunes of the imperial period. A pioneer in the field of marketing, he founded the Berliner Tagesblatt, perhaps the most important left-liberal daily newspaper of imperial Germany, in 1872. Started as a commercial venture, an “advertisement plantation,” this paper nevertheless followed an unerring liberal course, and was one of the most important voices in imperial Germany that opposed aggressive nationalism. A patron of the arts and a major philanthropist, Rudolf Mosse was also active in Reform Judaism. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the author asks to what extent this biography can be explained in terms of Jewish identity. Not surprisingly, she concludes that while Rudolf Mosse’s innovativeness was a personal characteristic, his successes can also be attributed to rational and intellectual components which are, indeed, typical of German Jewry. Such characteristics can also be seen in Rudolf Mosse’s brother, Albert (1846–1925), a judge who made a contribution to legal reform in Japan in the era following the Meiji Restoration. Albert personified the “interdependence of Jews and the law, which in Germany was so close, so problematic, and ultimately so fateful, and which made belief in the law into a second religion” (p. 239).

The Great Depression and the Nazi take-over overshadowed the lives of the “third” and “fourth” generations of the family, some of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis, while others fled into exile, particularly to the United States and Britain. (The Mosses were not Zionists.) This section of the book unfortunately sinks into a genealogical Who’s Who of somewhat hagiographic character. Certainly, the successes of the Mosses are remarkable: one worked on the Manhattan Project, one received a Nobel Prize in medicine. But many of the biographical sketches are very sparse. Evidently the author...