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History of the German Jews

By (author) Amos Elon

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Beginning in 1743, with the arrival of a young Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin at one of the two gates reserved for Jews and ""other undesirables"", and ending in the autumn of 1933, with the young Hannah Arendt fleeing Berlin for Prague by night train, after being incarcerated in a Gestapo jail, this book charts the exclusion, acceptance and destruction of the most assimilated Jewish population in Europe. At the end of the 18th century, there lived in the German-speaking lands a small number of indigenous Jews, numbering no more than a few thousand. They were shop keepers, money-lenders, wandering peddlers or cattle dealers. Their ancestors had settled in the region in the early-Middle Ages, although some had arrived in Roman times. The unique thing about this small group was that all of the males (and virtually all of the females) were literate. This book aims to shed new light on why Europe's most sophisticated and assimilated Jewish population was annihilated in the Holocaust.