Language:
German
Year of publication:
1989
Titel der Quelle:
Modern Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
9,2 (1989) 141-150
Keywords:
Jews History 1500-
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography
;
Jews Historiography
Abstract:
Examines the reasons for the overwhelming quantity and superior quality of modern historical research on German Jewry compared to that on Eastern European Jewry (an exception being present-day research on the Holocaust). Points to the fact that, intellectually, American and all diaspora Jewries are heirs to the German-Jewish tradition of adaptation to the prevailing society and cultivation of historical consciousness through scholarly study of the Jewish past. In America, the struggle for equal rights and against antisemitism resembled the German Jewish pattern of life rather than the East European. Regarding non-Jewish historians, they are drawn by the gradual destruction of German Jewry (as opposed to the sudden destruction of the rest of European Jewry) to ask why it happened, going back to the history of antisemitism and Jewish-Gentile relations. Concludes that German Jewry embodied the classical tragic figure who brings about his own downfall, their tragic flaw having been overreacting in an attempt to integrate in a national body not their own.
Note:
Appeared in German in his "Zwischen Messianismus und Zionismus" (1993).
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink