However crazy you think the Germans are about the Jews, they run at best a distant second to how German-speaking Jews think of the Jews. I’m reading two amazing books on this topic: one is S.S. Prawer’s book on Heine, the other is Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus. These are old-style intellectual histories, the kind where a single author and their texts give you the largest possible window on the larger culture and society of which they are a part. No one writes intellectual history like this anymore, which is a shame. (Prawer, by the way, you might know as the author of that excellent book on Marx’s literary references and culture. His Heine book, if you can believe it, is even better.) Anyway, it seems like Germany, or German culture, really drove these two Jews absolutely insane about who they were, what their relationship was to the German language, and how to reconcile their admiration and loathing of Jewishness. Both were converts to Christianity. I can’t think of another national culture that produced such a problematic relationship of Jews to their own Jewishness; I know nothing like it among French Jews, British Jews, Italian Jews, or American Jews. (Frankly, the only plausible comparison I can think of is to Israeli Jews.) And it’s hardly because Germany or German culture was especially stigmatizing of the Jews, at least not before the Nazis. But something about its sense of itself really drove the Jews insane. When I was in graduate school, I spent the summer in Freiburg, and I remember reading Gordon Craig’s book The Germans. It had a first-rate chapter in it on Germans and the Jews, how similar they were, and all the problems that created. I think it bears re-reading.