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FROM FRANKFURT TO JERUSALEM To be sure, the Jews attempted a dialogue with the Germans, starting from all possible points of view and situations, demandingly , imploringly, and entreatingly, servile and defiant, with a dignity employing all manner of tones and a godforsaken lack of dignity, and today, when the symphony is over, the time may be ripe for studying their motifs and for attempting a critique of their tones. 1 From the time of Moses Mendelssohn until the Nazi catastrophe , the Jews of the German-speaking lands entered and participated with extraordinary vigor in their newfound German culture. In less than two centuries, they became both shapers and victims of that culture, both architects and sacrificial offerings of modern Europe. "Sacrifice" need not evoke the ultimate horrors of the final period from 1933 to 1945. A kind of sacrifice began in the Mendelssohnian era itself. What the Jews lost in the process of the 1 FROM FRANKFURT TO JERUSALEM To be sure, the Jews attempted a dialogue with the Germans, starting from all possible points of view and situations, demandingly , imploringly, and entreatingly, servile and defiant, with a dignity employing all manner of tones and a godforsaken lack of dignity, and today, when the symphony is over, the time may be ripe for studying their motifs and for attempting a critique of their tones. 1 From the time of Moses Mendelssohn until the Nazi catastrophe , the Jews of the German-speaking lands entered and participated with extraordinary vigor in their newfound German culture. In less than two centuries, they became both shapers and victims of that culture, both architects and sacrificial offerings of modern Europe. "Sacrifice" need not evoke the ultimate horrors of the final period from 1933 to 1945. A kind of sacrifice began in the Mendelssohnian era itself. What the Jews lost in the process of the 1 2 FROM KANT TO KABBALAH Emancipation and acculturation was what Gershom Scholem calls "Jewish totality.,,2 Isaac Breuer, in similar language, often called it "the Torah's claim to totality" (Totalitiitsanspruch del Thora). The change in civil status the Jews experienced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about the dismantling of the allencompassing religious civilization of medieval Judaism, which already was in decline from internal upheaval and external change; the dismantling occurred with the full complicity of the Jews themselves. The rich inscape of the traditional culture and its structured society of legal and communal institutions could not compete with the new social and economic opportunities offered by a society undergoing a process of secularization. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the last legal disabilities hindering the Jews had fallen in Germany, but the work of articulating a suitable religious and national identity-indeed, the search for a new form of all-embracing community-had hardly begun. Henceforth, whether the Jew opted for Heinrich Heine's or Abraham Geiger's, Samson Raphael Hirsch's or Leopold Zunz's, solution, he was faced with a problem. Judaism, which unlike the disabilities did not disappear, had to be related to German culture, to Deutschtum ; indeed, to modern humanity as such. Judaism had to both fit into a context and become a fit context. As Scholem points out, the "Jewish symphony" played in Germany seldom if ever became a German-Jewish harmony, a German-Jewish dialogue. Not that the Jews ever failed to be passionate about finding a conception of and a role for their Judaism in the German scheme of things, nor that individual Germans rose to an appreciation of Jews as Jews. Rather, a genuine willingness by the one people to accept the other people as an equal was never apparent. Individual dialogues never became a national, historical dialogue. "Whether they sell pants or write books," the historian Theodor Mommsen wrote, "it is their duty to put aside their peculiar ways and, with a determined hand, to remove the obstacles between them and their fellow citizens.,,3 In the Jewish attempt to work out an appropriate relationship between Judaism and German culture, between Judentum and Deutschtum, the two terms of the relation were entirely open to novel definition. 'Judaism' need not bear any relation to what, for centuries, the Jew had understood his tradition to be. Nor need Deutschtum, for that matter, have anything to do with the German sociocultural reality. That one could adduce a parallel be2 FROM KANT TO KABBALAH Emancipation and acculturation was what Gershom Scholem calls "Jewish totality.,,2 Isaac Breuer, in similar language...

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