ABSTRACT
It is commonly assumed that the history of the Jews in Germany is the continuous story of a single homogeneous community living within the confines of Bismarck’s German Empire. Each period of this history is regarded as issuing naturally from its predecessor, the modern Jewish population of the country is seen as the lineal and spiritual descendant of its medieval Jewry, and the House of Rothschild an outgrowth of the Mendelssohn era. No types, regional or otherwise, are delineated. It is the thesis of this paper that such an approach is erroneous and that there is no such thing as a distinctive and unified German-Jewish history. 1 What is usually so described is actually a series of disparate chapters belonging properly to the Jewish history of such contiguous areas as (in chronological order) France and the Rhineland, Bohemia and Austria, Hungary and Galicia, Poland and Lithuania. Interwoven with the story of Germany in a variety of ways, among all these different chapters there has been neither uniformity nor conformity until recently; while both the German and the Jewish elements have undergone significant mutations and transformations, fusing and blending into the most complex and diversified patterns.
