Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, And Crisis, 1770-1830; Author: Lowenstein, Steven M.; Hardback; Book

Author: Lowenstein, Steven M.
Studies in Jewish History (Oxford Hardcover); Hardback; Book; 8 Pp Halftones, Maps, Tables, Bibliography
312 pages
Published: July 1994
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195083261

Berlin Jewry was the first major Jewish community to undergo the process of modernization which has since swept most of world Jewry. The process of adaptation to the cultural, linguistic and political life of the majority culture first proposed by intellectuals of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) was accompanied by a thoroughgoing crisis of Jewish identity. Berlin Jewry was soon facedby patterns of illegitimacy, marital breakdown and conversion to Christianity on a scale never witnessed before. Scholars have long debated the severity of the crisis of Berlin Jewry as well as its connection to the philosophy and practice of the Jewish Enlightenment. The Berlin Jewish Community endeavors to settle much of the debate through a collective biography of all 3,500 Jews in Berlin at thThis study investigates the relationship between the forces of Jewish modernization and the forces of assimilation and dissolution in the first major Jewish community to undergo the process. It presents a biography of the entire Jewish population of Berlin at the turn of the 19th century.