ABSTRACT
The author's aim is to expand our thinking about radical assimilation the desire and effort to obscure one's Jewishness, and to add aestheticism to the list of ideologies, orientations, behaviours and outlooks that potentially served as vehicles. In the German states, for example, it quickened the influx of Jews into the universities and their flight from Jewish occupations into the professional, artistic and bureaucratic middle class, to which Bildung, rather than wealth, was the ticket of admission. The logic underwriting this flight was straightforward: what better way to demonstrate one's freedom from and transcendence of the materialism of Jewish life than to turn one's back on buying and selling and devote oneself to the pursuit of science, art, music, literature, philosophy and the like. Such reasoning was attractive in states where emancipation and integration were partial and incomplete, and Jews who desired a larger arena in which to shine were compelled to demonstrate their difference from other Jews.
