ABSTRACT
The Jews in early modern Germany had seemed a social group permanently outside the order of society, possessing, in the view of their Christian neighbours, immutable and unacceptable characteristics. A change in the environment and the legal status of Jews would inevitably, it was declared, modify their national character and habits. In Germany and in Central Europe generally there had long been a correspondence between economic difficulties and natural disasters and the Jews. The dilemma, indeed the tragedy of the liberal Jews in Germany was this: the hunger for education characteristic of the ghetto Jews of the eighteenth century had been directed into rabbinical studies. Memoirs of Jews written long before Hitler recall numerous instances of physical violence as well as occasional abuse at school, and that it generally went unpunished. The story of the German Jews in the years between the end of the Empire and the First World War is on the whole one of remarkable achievement.
