When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the countrys premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertzs discovery of these records, theJudenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries.
The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlins evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.
Deborah Hertz is Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, University of California at San Diego, and the author ofJewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin. She lives in La Jolla, CA.
The social and cultural history of Jews in 20th-centuryGermany is currently one of the hottest areas of academic inquiry and Deborah Hertz is one of its stars. This is confirmed by the lively clarity of her account of conversion and assimiliation in Berlin,How Jews Became Germans. The Jewish Chronicle
In this very readable book, Hertz continues her probing into Jewish-Christian relationships, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries. She describes how Jews at that time might have converted to Christianity for reasonlsV
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