Jüdisches Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main im 19. Jahrhundert (review)

Book Reviews 137 Weisberger's book, I feel obliged to add, could have benefited from a better copy editor. Names-such as Frankel and Carlebach-are spelled incorrectly. The index contains a number of printed question marks, Le. "Hegel, ? ... Parsons, ? ... Radek, ?", suggesting that no one bothered to look up the given names of a number of prominent individuals mentioned in the text. The bibliography is not as consistent as it should be, containing, for example, an entry under the heading "Helmut Hirsch, ed." and another entry, later in the bibliography, under the heading "Hirsch, Helmut (Hrsg)" (and other bloopers). Attention to technical details is a virtue in academic writing. I look forward to evidence that Professor Weisbergerhas devoted appropriate attention to such matters in his future works. Jack Jacobs Department of Government John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University ofNew York JUdisches BUrgertum in Frankfurt am Main im 19. Jahrhundert, by Andrea Hopp. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997. 301 pp. n.p.1. This sober and well-supported social history of the Jews of Frankfurt belongs to the expanding list of contributions made by a new generation of German scholars to the study of German Jewry. Typical of this genre, Hopp's work brings to bear a sound knowledge ofGerman history, a consistent attention to methodology, and an intensive use ofunpublished archival material. Hopp does much better than average in avoiding the usual flaws in this genre. She has paid adequate attention to scholarship produced outside Germany, clearly understands the rudiments of Jewish practice, and, less tangibly but most important, never misses the big picture or portrays the Jewish middle class as some exotic lost species from the distant past. The heart ofthis work is based on family archives, supplemented by published and unpublished memoirs. Hopp's focus on the family network brings an important prosopographical approach to the German Jewish middle class. Hopp acknowledges the limitations ofautobiography as a bourgeois genre and as an historiographic source-this reader found her use of this material consistently judicious and well' tempered by a consideration of the secondary literature. Hopp has read widely in all the relevant secondary literature German and Anglo-American; ifthere is anything to criticize here, it is that the work does little more than confirm what we already suspected. The families that Hopp investigates seem typical of the German Jewish middle class in their settlement and employment patterns, their attitude toward emancipation, their attitude toward marriage and kinship, and their multigenerational version ofDeutschjudentum. 138 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 Strangely, although Hopp notes that Frankfurt has often been regarded as "a mirror of Gennan history" (p. 25), she does not ask whether Frankfurter Jewry typifies Gennan Jewry at large. Hopp emphasizes the structural realities of Frankfurt Jewry. The families Hopp researched tended toward traditional Jewish occupations such as trade and fmance. The legal restrictions that obtained until emancipation forced Jews into riskier-but also potentially more lucrative-financial undertakings. The cohesion ofthe family network played a large role in this economic success through preparing capital, insuring support in times of crises, and encouraging multigenerational businesses. Hopp divides the political development ofFrankfurter Jewry into three stages. Before 1848, the removal of legal disabilities served as the primary focus ofactivity, led by bankers and salesmen in semi-shtadtlan style. In the second phase, the Forty-eighters broadened Jewish politics to include a pan-Gennan agenda as members ofthe free professions came to the fore. Finally, in the Kaiserreich, the crisis ofliberalism and the rise ofantisemitism led to mass politics, a proliferation of organizations (137 in 1911), and a reorientation toward specifically Jewish concerns. Hopp's discussion ofthe Epstein-Koch family's religious practices confinns that a serious ebbing away of traditional Judaism had taken place in the course of the nineteenth century. When a Jewish family is divided on issues like cremation and the abeyance ofcircumcision, when funeral orations contain no discernible Jewish content, then one is, by definition, talking of a family whose traditional practices have waned greatly. Still, as Hopp notes, the mandatory Yom Kippur visit was widely observed, and Hopp seems to agree with Marion Kaplan and others that women preserved the spirit ofreligiosity...