Introduction

This is a study of the Jewish response to that approaching nightfall. For the Jews of Germany, as for the rest of Europe's Jews, the modern age began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and with the French Revolution. No attempt to explain the behavior of the Jews in Weimar Germany can afford to ignore any major aspect of their position. Their place in German economic and social life; their understanding of and responses to anti-Semitism their attitudes toward religion, patriotism, and ethnicity; their confrontation with rival versions of Jewish life. Above all, the sources and strength of their commitment to the liberal credo. In October, 1916, the Prussian war ministry responded to this agitation by ordering a census of Jews in the army for the first of November. When the census was actually taken, there were so many irregularities in compiling the statistics that it provoked a storm of protests from Jewish, liberal, and socialist.