The pity of it all : a history of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 / Amos Elon.

1. Ancient Renown -- 2. The Age of Mendelssohn -- 3. Miniature Utopias -- 4. Heine and Borne -- 5. Spring of Nations -- 6. Hopes and Anxieties -- 7. Years of Progress -- 8. Assimilation and Its Discontents -- 9. War Fever -- 10. The End.

"The Pity of It All is a passionate and poignant history of German Jews, tracing the journey of a people and their culture from the mid eighteenth century to the eve of the Third Reich." "Writing with a novelist's eye, Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons and activists. He peoples his account with dramatic figures : Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin in 1743 through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle and went on to become 'the German Socrates'; Heinrich Heine, the great lyric poet who famously referred to baptism as the admission ticket to European culture; and Hannah Arendt, whose flight from Berlin in 1933 signalled the end of the German-Jewish idyll. Elon traces how this minority - never more than one per cent of the population - came to be perceived as a deadly threat to national integrity, and he movingly demonstrates how the devastating outcome of their fate was uncertain almost until the end."--BOOK JACKET.