Searching for a secular legacy

Searching for a Secular Legacy The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 By Amos Elon Metropolitan. 446 pp. $30.00.

Professor of history and Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin

AMOS ELON's new work is a vividly written,

The conventional wisdom is that German Jewry was the ideological laboratory of Jewish modernity. There the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), the academic study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) and the modern forms of the Jewish religion (Reform, Conservative and NeoOrthodox) were invented; there the processes of emancipation, assimilation and the formation of bourgeois Jewish life were most intense; there intellectuals of Jewish descent played a prominent role in the larger culture; and there modern anti-Semitism was devised and turned most lethal.