1. Moses, S., “Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 1 (1956): xiii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Ibid., xi–xvi. The phrase “rough outline” appears on p. xiv.

3. This problem has beset the writing of German-Jewish history throughout the twentieth century. For early articulations see, for example, Taeubler, Eugen, “Zur Einfuhrung,” Mitteihmgen des Gesamtarchivs der deutsctien Jnden 1, no. 1 (1908): 1–8Google Scholar; and idem, “Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden,” Mitteilungen des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden 3 (1911–1912): 64–75Google Scholar; and Strauss, Raphael, “Zur Forschungsmethode der jüdischen Geschichte,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte derjudcn in Deutschland 1 (1929): 4–12.Google Scholar

4. On how some of these methods might be applied to German-Jewish history see the suggestive essay by Moyn, Samuel, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41 (1996): 291–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Moses, , “Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany,” xiii.Google Scholar

6. Katz, Jacob, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Cooperman, Bernard Dov (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. An earlier English edition had inaccuracies and lacked the scholarly apparatus. See, Tradition and Crisis (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. The Hebrew original, Masoret u-Mashber, appeared in 1958. Katz reiterated the argument of this volume in his larger study of emancipation, Out of the Ghetto (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. For a critique of this approach see Sorkin, David, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (London, 2000) 1–9.Google Scholar

7. Shohat, Azriel, Im Hilufei Tekufot: Reshit ha-Haskalah be-Yahadut Germanya (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1960).Google Scholar

8. For this criticism of Shohat see Immanuel Etkes, “On the Question of the Precursors of the Haskalah in Eastern Europe,” (Hebrew) in Ha-Dat veha-Hayim: Tenant ha-Haskalah ha-Yehudit be-Mizrah Europa, ed. idem (Jerusalem, 1993), 25–26.

9. Habermas, Jürgen, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Darmstadt, 1962)Google Scholar did not gain wide influence in the US until it was translated into English in 1989 (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [Cambridge, Mass., 1989]Google Scholar). See Calhoun, Craig, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).Google Scholar

10. For a similar passage see (1:293); “… Mendelssohn was able to gather around himself the maskilim who agreed with him on his new Jewish self-understanding and supported him in the task of creating a secular sphere of life within Jewish society.” Other contributors echo this view. In volume 2 Michael Meyer speaks of the Haskalah “sparked by Mendelssohn” (2:90) and of the maskilim as “Mendelssohn's disciples” (2:94), and sees “Mendelssohn, some of his contemporaries, and his disciples,” as the first to “break out of the confines of the medieval Jewish cultural world” (2:112). Later in the same volume Michael Brenner speaks of the, “sixty years between Mendelssohn's death and the failed German revolution,” and of German Jewry collectively as “Mendelssohn's heirs” (2:275).

This view of Mendelssohn can be traced back at least as far as Hemrich Gnetz. See his History of the Jews, 6 vols. (Philadelphia, 1895) 5:292–93Google Scholar. The German original, in eleven volumes, appeared between 1853 and 1876. For a recent critique see Feiner, Shmuel, “Mendelssohn and ‘Mendelssohn's Disciples’: A Re-examination,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 40 (1995): 134–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. On this point see Sorkin, David, “The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method.” New German Critique 77 (Winter 1999): 7–28.Google Scholar

12. Altmann, Alexander, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, 1973), 223–34.Google Scholar

13. For a recent exchange on this issue see Michael, Reuven, “The Haskalah in the Age of the French Revolution — the End of the ‘Berlin Haskalah’?” (Hebrew) Zion 56 (1991): 275–98Google Scholar and the reply by Feiner, Shmuel, “Between the French Revolution and Changes in the ‘Berlin Haskalah’,” (Hebrew) Zion 57 (1992): 89–92.Google Scholar

14. Samet, Moshe, “Mendelssohn, Wessley ve-Rababei Doram,” in Mehkarim be-Toldot Am-Yisrael ve-Erelz Yisrael 1 (1970)Google Scholar, ed. A. Gilboa, and idem, “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism 8 (1988): 249–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Katz, Jacob, “R. Raphael Cohen, Mendelssohn's Adversary,” (Hebrew) Tarbiz 56 (1987): 2:243–64Google Scholar. In contrast to Graetz, Michael Meyer distinguishes between a “more adaptive traditional Judaism,” “an unyielding self-conscious Orthodoxy” (Moses Sofer) and a “more flexible” German orthodoxy (2:126).

15. Ettinger, Shmuel, “The Beginnings of the Change in the Attitude of European Society Towards the Jews,” Scripla Hierosolymitana 7 (1961): 193–219Google Scholar; Salo Baron, , “Newer Approaches to Jewish Emancipation,” Diogenes 29 (1960): 56–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the introduction Michael Brenner would seem to endorse Baron's view (2:2).

16. Rürup, Reinhard, “Jewish Emancipation and Bourgeois Society,” Leo Bacck Institute Yearbook 14 (1969): 67–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Meyer's account is also an example of the discontinuity between contributions. Meyer does not adequately highlight the deep roots of this process in the practices of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century absolutism which Breuer discussed in volume 1 — with the obvious exception of the erosion of judicial competence as early as the Prussian Judenreglement of 1750 (2:100–1). For example, even the ban had largely disappeared prior to emancipation: in most German states rabbis had been deprived of this power in the course of the eighteenth century as part of the process in which the state divested all ecclesiastical authorities of such powers, and even where the power existed in principle the authorities made its implementation difficult if not impossible in practice. For the growing limitation of the ban see Stern, Selma, Der preussische Staat und die Juden (Tübingen. 1962–1975), 1,1:113–14; 3, 1: 120–26Google Scholar. For the last ban issued in Berlin (1770) see Meisl, Josef ed. Protokollbuch der jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin (1723–1854) 256 (Jerusalem, 1962): 260–61Google Scholar. For the complaint of a Christian scholar of ecclesiastical law (circa 1760) who pointed out the odd situation of some Jewish courts having the power of the ban that Protestant courts did not see. von Mosheim, Johann Lorenz, Allgemeines Kirchenrecht der Protestanten (Helmstaedt, 1760), 407.Google Scholar

18. Meyer, Michael A., Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), 9, 17, 104, 144, 193–95, 225.Google Scholar

19. Goldscheider, Calvin and Zuckerman, Alan S., The Transformation of the Jews (Chicago. 1984). 63–75.Google Scholar

20. Sorkin, David, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

21. It is curious how little the authors use the memoirs published under the auspices of the Leo Baeck Institute. See Richarz, Monika ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1780–1871 (Nördlingen, 1976).Google Scholar

22. A telling passage is found at 2:239, where, on the basis of Graetz's and Steinthal's attitude to Boerne, Meyer generalizes about the political attitudes of “most German Jews.” Brenner points to the fact that the writers and other articulate notables are not in fact representative of most German Jews (2:267).

23. Kaplan, Marion, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. For a review of the scholarship to 1990 see Maurer, Trude, Die Entwicklung der jüdisclten Minderhcit in Deutschland (1780–1933) (Internationales Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, Sonderheft 4) (Tübingen, 1992), 143–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For scholarship in the past decade see Kaplan, Marion, “Where We Have Come From and Where We Have Come To,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 45 (2000): 215–18.Google Scholar

24. Hyman, Paula, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle, 1995)Google Scholar. Richarz reiterates some of these ideas at 3:70–72.

25. This view is reiterated by Avraham Barkai in the final volume (4:66). Paul Mendes-Flohr recognizes the existence of a “secular Jewish culture” that flourished in Weimar but had roots in the early nineteenth century (4:151). For an especially evocative assertion of this view see Shulamit Volkov, “Jüdische Assimilation und Eigenart im Kaiserreich,” in idem, Jüdixlies Leben mid Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990), 131–45.Google Scholar

26. Two recent studies that convincingly argue for other motives in the development of Jewish organizations are: Liedtke, Rainer, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester, c. 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Pickus, Keith, Constructing Modem Identities: Jewish University Students in Germany, 1815–1914 (Detroit, 1999)Google Scholar. For a major reevaluation of these issues, as well as of the question of integration, see Rahden, Till van, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstatdt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen, 2000).Google Scholar

27. For an important consideration of this myth see Frankel, Jonathan, “Assimilation and the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe: Towards a New Historiography?” in Assimilation and Community in European Jewry, 1815–1881 ed. Frankel, J. and Zippenstein, S. (Cambridge, 1992), 1–37.Google Scholar

28. See, for example, the fascinating study of name changes by Bering, Dietz, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812–1933 (Ann Arbor, 1992)Google Scholar. The German original appeared in 1987.

29. The categories of “marginality” and “double alienation” are somewhat worn. More interesting, for example, are the notions of “axiological insider” and “outsider” proposed by Mendes-Flohr, Paul in, “The Study of the Jewish Intellectual: Some Methodological Proposals,” in Essays in Modem Jewish History: A Tribute to Ben Halpern, ed. Malino, F. and Albert, P. Cohen (Rutherford, N.J., 1981), 142–72.Google Scholar For scientific achievement the social-institutional analysis of Shulamit Volkov is suggestive. See, “Soziale Ursachen des Erfolgs in der Wissenschaft,” in idem, Jüdisces Leben und Antiseimitismus, 146–65.

30. For two recent studies of these issues see Efron, John, Defenders of the Race (New Haven. 1994)Google Scholar; and Hart, Mitchell B., Social Science and the Politics of Modem Jewish Identity (Stanford, 2000)Google Scholar. For a recent discussion of the issue of urbanization see Lowenstein, Steven, “Was Urbanization Harmful to Jewish Tradition and Identity in Germany,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 15 (1999): 80–106.Google Scholar

31. François Furet has made this sort of argument about the unprecedented nature of the “consciousness” that developed during the French Revolution:

The French Revolution is … the matrix of a new type of historical action and consciousness, related to, but not defined by, a specific situation.

See, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 23.Google Scholar

32. For the concept of “backshadowing” see Bernstein, Michael, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley, 1994).Google Scholar

Barkai is notably sensitive to the confusion and disorientation, deception, and terror experienced by the victims. In dealing with the Jewish leadership, for example, he carefully distinguishes between the process (”top communal officials had entered a blind alley from which there was no exit” [4:357]) and the end result (”Knowingly or unaware, they thus became accomplices of the murderers” [4:359]), and does not hold them accountable (”who can pass judgment on them today?”).

33. For a lucid exposition of these issues see Marrus, Michael, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N.H., 1987).Google Scholar

34. On this issue see the important work of Friedlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, 1995).Google Scholar