Amos Elon (1926–2009)

"The Pity of It All" is a masterful accomplishment of scholarship, insight and tone. It describes the world and history of German Jews before the Holocaust in ways that illuminate the catastrophe that follwed, but with a wise restraint that holds back from glib or pat theories. For instance, Elon is careful to insist that the outcome for Germany's Jews was not inevitable, and that although virulent, persistent anti-semitism was widespread in German culture, Hitler's and Nazism's rise also benefitted from the blunders and complacency of competing politics, and from other random hazards. In focusing on and describing the preceding two centuries of rapid development of a German Jewish community of prosperity and accomplishment, Elon gives these people back their identity and dignity as something other than doomed or pathetic foreshadows of predestination. While the book provides valuable food for thought about the Holocaust, it also, and predominantly, honors and rewardingly brings to our awareness the rich and fascinating parade of Jewish life and individuals in Germany from the mid-18th century forward.… (more)

Review by: JEFFERSON S. CHASE

Review by: JEFFERSON S. CHASE

"...To be fair, Elon did not set out to explain the attraction of Nazism. The Pity of It All is written with the primary aim of rescuing a body of cultural achievement from Gold- hagen's best-selling, if ham-fisted, thesis about the inherent anti-Semitism of all Germans - and its implicit assumption of Jewish self- hatred, or at least stupidity. Insofar as this book stimulates American appreciation for writers like- Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, and Kurt Tucholsky, it is to be warmly welcomed. But Elon is too concerned with Goldhagen's overhyped and much-criticized argument, and as the book's rather bathetic title sug- gests, he perhaps identifies too closely with his subject to keep perspective. There are other, equally readable, works - Ritchie Robertson's The 'Jewish Question" in German Literature, to name one - that treat German-Jewish cultural history more persuasively. The Pity of It All is ultimately like a painting of a crowd in which individual faces are quite clear but the background is left unfinished."

Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 72, No. 1 (WINTER 2003), pp. 145-147… (more)

הסיפור של יהדות גרמניה הוא בלי ספק סיפור מרתק שראוי לטיפול. עמוס אילון עושה את מלאכתו ביסודיות ובנאמנות גם אם לא בהצלחה מלאה. אולי ההצלחה הי בלתי אפשרית, כי אי אפשר לספר את הסיפור של יהדות גרמניה מבלי לספר את סיפורה של גרמניה, סיפור שהוא כל כך גדול ומורכב ובחלקו כל כך מוכר ובחלקו כל כך לא מוכר שקשה לעשות את שתי המלאכות בספר אחד בן 400 עמוד. התוצאה היאר ספר שלפעמים מרתק, אבל לפעמים מאוד לא ממוקד שקו הסיפור שלו מנותק ובלתי רציף.… (more)