ABSTRACT
It was inevitable that the Nazi catastrophe would cast a lasting pall over efforts to make sense out of the Jewish experience in Weimar Germany. At the outset of the author's survey it was noted that the persistent liberalism of German Jews might be interpreted in one of three ways: as self-deception, as compulsion born of a lack of alternatives, or as a clear-eyed choice. The first of these has been popular among those who approach the problem from the standpoint of the historian of mass psychology. The second interpretation of the Jews' loyalty to liberal assimilationism portrays them as being preoccupied with money rather than wish-fulfillment. Adolf Hitler would destroy the German Jews for racialist reasons, or perhaps as symbols of whatever it was that tortured his disturbed psyche. He may have sensed that the Jews could have no place in totalitarian Germany because they were the enemies, not just of his racialism.
