German Jews Beyond Judaism

This slim but information-dense book is an impressive overview of German Jewish intellectual history. As the title suggests, Mosse focuses on secular Jews, but his real focus is a secular idea, Bildung, or education. German Enlightenment thinkers argued that everyone can and must cultivate his mind, and so education rather than ancestry or group membership should determine success. Jews ranging from Orthodox to irreligious fell in love with this idea; they who were only recently granted equal civil rights saw a path to achievement that didn’t penalize their longstanding social exclusion. But precisely as Bildung became a bedrock of German Jewish identity, this meritocratic idea lost favor among other Germans. Enterprising show more individualism felt like an inadequate philosophy with which to face the social and economic issues that assailed Germans after World War I. German Jews’ failure to see that their intellectual worldview was no longer widely shared blinded them to the coming dangers. show less