Aliyah Book Club
- Ariel Avidar
- Apr 14
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
We had a lot of feedback last time saying we should do more talks on Aliyah. Now, I don't want to be the Aliyah guy because I don't think you're going to listen to me. I don't think you're going to listen until they start burning down buildings.
Now, as you can see, we've changed the venue from our last talk. We have a more welcoming and relaxed environment since the feedback said that I was aggressive and angry and screaming. Yeah, that's accurate.
So, what we're going to do is a good old-fashioned book club. And the book we're going to discuss today is called The Pity of It All. It details German Jewry from the time of the 7th century until the Weimar Republic, the 1930s, which we all know, of course, preceded the Nazis.
It discusses the times of the Jews in, particularly in the Weimar Republic, where they were diplomats and judges and authors. They were the forefront of German culture. The famous German phrase, of course, is the Jews were more German than the Germans.
Now, the relevance to today's United States screams at us on every page. In today's United States, we've seen quotes such as "Zionists don't deserve to live." We've seen Jewish students on campuses having to shelter in place from mobs. And in England, a yarmulke was deemed provocative. And when you combine all of this with an understanding of Jewish history, this is a big deal.
We think never again is new. But in Germany, they said never again about the pogroms in Europe. And in Eastern Europe, they said never again about the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. And in Spain and Portugal, they said never again about England and France and the Crusades and the Romans and the Greeks and Babylonians. There's always an again.
And people say, why do you have to yell? Why do you seem so agitated? In an emergency, you yell. You ever hear a fire alarm? You're in an ambulance? Rocket sirens here? They're loud. They're obnoxious. What's the word that they use when they want to blame everybody else for what they do? Trigger. I've been triggered.
So let's get to some of our quotes from our book club. What's a book club without a book?
399. "Fifty thousand Jews left Germany in 1933, thirty thousand in 1934, twenty thousand in 1935. The rest remained, at least for a while, unwilling or unable to leave. Some who left even returned. Although nothing went more agianst the spirit of the new regime, intermarriage was more prevalent in 1933 than ever before, reaching the astonishing figure of 44 percent. In 1934, it fell to 15 percent and was soon outlawed. The exodus continued.
The rich had the fewest problems. Certainly, they had to abandon or sell their properties at drastically reduced prices; the Nazis further ecimated their wealth by charging draconian "departure taxes.""
400. "That so many Jews stayed in the country of their birth reflected not so much lethargy but the lingering conviction that the horrors were transitory. Baffled, incredulous, shocked, many refused to believe that the nearly two-thousand-year-old Jewish presence in Germany was coming to an end. Max Liebermann felt he was too old to leave. He wrote to the mayor of Tel Aviv that "regretfully, regretfully," he had awakened "from the beautiful dream of assimilation" to a nightmare. Not long afterward, he died. Before his widow was picked up for deportation, she committed suicide "to be able to at least die here, in this city."
Victor Klemperer, a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden, felt more "shame" than "fear," shame for Germany; it hardly occured to him to leave the country. Like many other war veterans (some of whom now bravely flaunted their medals in the hope of protecting themselves from harassment), Klemperer trusted that he was safe. "I am German forever, a German 'nationalist.' ... The Nazis are un-German," he declared. Second thoughts came only in 1935, after his expulsion from the university. "My principles about Germany... are beginning to wobble like an old man's teeth." A year later, Kelmperer bought a car to tour the beautiful Thuringian countryside with his wife. He was likely the only German Jews who invested his savings at that late date in a little villa overlooking Dresden. Three years later, he would be thrown out of the house and confined with his wife to a tiny room in Judenhaus in downtown Dresden, saved from deportation to a concentration camp only because his wife was "Aryan." On May 11, 1942, he noted: "I am German, the others are un-German.
401. "Among those who stayed, suicides were rampant. Following the noycott of Jewish businesses, Robert Weltsch became a cult figure among Jews, especially Zionists, for an article in Judische Rundschau entited "Wear It with Pride, the Yellow Patch!" The article was credited with saving many from suicide. Weltsch later regretted it and especially its headline, which he said should have read instead: "Pack Your Bags and Run!" Suicides were also common among exiles. Among well-known writers, Kurt Tucholsky took his life in Sweden, Stefan Zweig in Brazil, Ernst Toller in New York, and Ernst Lissauer in Vienna."
259. "At the turn of the century, middle-class German Jews prospered. A few grew rich. of the two hundred wealthiest Prussian families, forty were said to be Jews. In Berlin the constituted 5 percent of the population but paid more than 30 percent of the city's taxes."
270. "German Jews were shocked but not entirely surprised by the ferocity of the Russian pogroms of 1881. A veritable flood of frightened, penniless Jewish refugees streamed across the eastern border in search of safety."
271. "The repulsion felt by native-born Jews at the sight of the Easterners - the Ostjuden - reflected a lingering fear of being identified with them. The newcomers embarrassed the assimilated by reminding them of their forebears. Gustov Mahler wrote to his wife from Lvov (Lemberg) that Polish Jews "run about this place as dogs do elsewhere... God almighty, and I am supposed to be related to them?" Rathenau had already fulminated against this "Asiatic horde." With their earlocks, unkempt beards, and seedy caftans, they conjured up the old ghetto."
288. "But the sharpest attacks came from Reform rabbis. "As long as the wrote in Hebrew, the Zionists were not dangerous," warned an official statement. "Now that they write in German, they must be resisted." Abraham Geiger, one ofthe founders of Reform Judaism, declared: "Jerusalem is a noble memory from the past and the cradle of our religion; but it holds no hope for the future. No new life can begin there. Let us not disturb its rest."
289. "Of the 207 delegates who attended the first Zionist Congress in 1897, only sixteen came from Germany, and most of these were Russian or Polish Jews. Protests against holding the congress in Munich were so vehement that Herzl was forced at the last moment to move it to Basel in Switzerland."
207. "By 1867, 14.8 percent of high school students in Berlin were Jews, three or four times the total percentage of Jews in the city's population. Thousands of sons of shopkeepers, innkeepers, cattle dealers, and peddlers attended universities and entered professions. The rythms of their lives, especially in Berlin, no longer followed the Jewish calendar; they followed the German. For Christmas, according to Oppenheim, "nearly all Jewish families have fragrant wax candles glimmering on richly adorned fir trees. They consider Christmas a historical and national holiday; they commit this petty heresy to avoid excluding their children from the general festivities or alienating them from their Christian friends."
"Three generations after Moses Mendelssohn, Jews were Germans in language, dress, and national sentiment. In name, too. Siegfried and Sigismund were such common names among Jews that non-Jews began to shy away from them. ...Itziks changed their name to Hitzig, Cohens to Kahn, Levis to Lau. ...At midcentury, only four of Moses Mendelssohn's fifty-six descendants were still Jews. When the last died, many of the Mendelssohns attending the funeral witnessed a Jewish rite for the first time in their lives."
208. "The key to social integration lay in assimilation through Bildung and religious reform. The movement for reform was growing by leaps and bounds. Reformed Jews no longer worshipped in Hebrew. They affirmed their Jewishness through revised prayer books and their Germaness by discarding the traditional prayer for the coming of the messiah "in our days." They no longer desired to be led back to the Promised Land. Germany was their beloved home."
211. "In October 1873, a stock market crash changed this state of affairs in one blow. The economy had heated to the boiling point, a result of billion in French War reparation payments. ...The crash provoked a wave of anti-Semitic agitation unlike anything in Germany - or France - had seen since the Crusades or the Black Death. Jews were said to be "inferior" and "immoral"; their success over the preceding two or three decades were due entirely to devious, even criminal manipulations. It was not an accident that so many stockbrokers happened to be Jews. At whose expense had they been enriching themselves?
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