From where is it derived that ten people who pray, God is with them? As it is stated: “God stands in the congregation of God,” (Psalms 82:1, as quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 6a)
Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All is more than a history of German Jewry, it’s a tragedy in slow motion. Tracing nearly two centuries, from the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust, Elon tells the story of Jews who gave their talents and loyalty to a country that would ultimately betray them.
It begins in the 18th century, with Moses Mendelssohn’s dream of fusing Jewish identity with the universal ideals of the Enlightenment. Over the decades, Jews became indispensable to German life. Brilliant minds like Heine, Mahler, Einstein, Kafka, Arendt, Adorno, and Benjamin reshaped Europe’s cultural and intellectual landscape. They saw themselves not as outsiders but as proud Germans of the Mosaic faith. Educated and refined German Jews distanced themselves from Eastern European Jews. Yiddish-speaking immigrants were poor, backwards and embarrassingly foreign. German Jews feared these newcomers would jeopardize the progress they had made. As Elon writes, they regarded Eastern Jews with “condescension and alarm.”
Zionism became a dividing line. For assimilated Jews, it felt like a rejection of everything they’d worked for. To be German, to be universal, was to transcend tribalism. Ost-Juden saw Western Jews as naïve, foolishly clinging to a nation that would never fully accept them, much less protect them.
One of the writers on the Western Jewish side, was Hannah Arendt who wrote that the Western Jews who had given up all religious and emotional ties with their own people were particularly convinced of the danger posed by the Eastern Jews, whom they regarded as the chief source of antisemitism and the greatest obstacle to their complete assimilation. She argues that the inability of German Jews to recognize Jewish solidarity contributed to their political weakness and isolation when antisemitism turned genocidal.
Growing up in South Africa, I knew nothing about this. My grandparents were Shtetl Jews from Latvia. Together with Jews from Lithuania, Jews from Baltic states make up close to 90% of where South African Jews are from.
Before 1930, Jews from Latvia and Lithuania poured into South Africa. The Quota Act closed that door. From 1930 till the 1970s, immigration ceased to be a factor in the development of the Jewish community in South Africa. It was a closed shop with very little coming from the outside to influence the people living on the inside. In the world I grew up in, there was no Internet, no TV and no idea of what was going in the rest of the Jewish world. No ideas went out or came in. We were not inheritors of German Jewish Enlightenment ideas. We thought all Jews were like us, descendants of Litvak Jews who had arrived in the 1920s. We didn’t know it, but it turns out we were a rare phenomenon, like a small insect in Baltic amber frozen from another time and the last surviving living relic of a culture that would be largely erased.
When I came to the UK from South Africa, I found a synagogue that embraced me. Although my friends were almost entirely South African like me, in synagogue, I broadened my circle. I got to know British Jews, and I was impressed with how lovely they were, so enlightened and how warm. They seemed to like me too. I loved my synagogue community, and I hoped it would be my forever spiritual home. I still do.
There was only clue about the fracture that would lie ahead. It was a mistake really. In 2012, I volunteered to write a short piece celebrating the four congregants honoured for Simchat Torah. I sent them drafts of what I wrote for their approval. One of them, meaning to send a comment to his wife, mistakenly emailed it to me.
I was shocked when I read it. I instantly deleted it. In his unfiltered description of me, he saw me as unrefined and alien. He saw me as loud, uneducated and uncivilized. It felt like he saw himself as a class above me, which I hadn’t up till then felt at all. I’m sad that I deleted his email now, because I want to look at the words he had written that shocked me so, but at least I had kept the piece that I had written about him. The answer was in the first line. His mother was German Jewish who had escaped Nazi Germany. (She was also a psychoanalyst) and I hadn’t understood what that meant because I was raised in a bubble of South African Shtetl Jewry, and he was raised in a bubble of enlightened German Jewry. His mistake was a window for me. That exchange was more than a decade ago, and we have long since reconciled. I am grateful for what I learned.
On October 7, 2023, I came to shul, shaken by the emerging news of the massacres in Israel. I was shocked and I thought everyone at shul would be feeling what I was feeling. After a few months, I learned otherwise. And since then, I’ve been trying to understand why that response isn’t universal, even within my own community.
This is what I understand so far, and it seems so obvious when I write it here. Jews are not all the same. We use the same terms, and we attribute different meanings to them. We all face Jerusalem when we pray, but we all believe and feel different things because we come from different places.
I have not assimilated into British culture. I didn’t go to Cambridge. I don’t listen to Radio 4 or read the Guardian. I am the kind of person who is moved more by singing Hatikvah than by singing German Lieder. I am a product of the Litvak bubble I grew up in, where you helped out your Lanslayt, your community, the people who come from your world. I believe in reciprocity. The giving and taking in your chosen community in a finely calibrated and often invisible system of mutual obligations that binds you together. In the whisky club on Shabbat morning, you buy whisky when it’s your turn and you don’t just take. In the world that I come from, you help your own people. You show up for them. You mourn with them. In hard times, you don’t abandon them.
I thought that rule was for Jews everywhere. But it isn’t. There is a schism in my shul today, that has been forced to the surface since October 07, 2023. As the waters of antisemitism warm up again globally, the schism becomes more visible as we all boil in it.
Once again, as in the 1930s in Germany, the schism is about Zionism. In my synagogue, there are some Jewish people who want the Israeli state to fail. There are some who want to hang posters of suffering Palestinians alongside posters of the hostages. There are some who support BDS. There are some who don’t feel the gravitational pull of Zionism. My wonderful synagogue is a broad tent.
There are some who believe Israel is the chief cause of antisemitism in the diaspora. There are some who still want to be part of the world that is entirely committed to fighting racism, sexism, global warming and poverty. There are some who believe in universalism so fervently; they have no room left for particularism. There are some believe in appeasement at any price. There are some who stand with every oppressed group, except their own, because now I understand they don’t see ‘us’ as their own. They see the upholders of German Enlightenment Liberal values as their own, which I have learned through a mistakenly sent email, does not include me.
Maybe Amos Elon was right. Maybe the pity of it all is not just historical. Maybe it’s also happening right now in front of our eyes. Our failure to find Jewish solidarity is contributing to our political weakness and isolation at a time when it is most needed. Maybe it’s the enduring tragedy of Jews who forget their own people, trying to be loved by a world that never will.
