Endpapers. Alexander Wolff

As it happens, rabbinical law and Nazi ideology both hold that a child born to a Jewish mother is a Jew, regardless of any subsequent event. And the persistence of the epithet “baptized Jew” in nineteenth-century Germany shows how conversion from Judaism hardly made it socially so. The writer Heinrich Heine, who grew up in the Rhineland as Harry Heine, once vowed never to convert, yet in 1825 did so in hopes of purchasing what he called “the admission ticket into European culture.” He came to bitterly regret having “crawled to the cross,” for it left him “hated by Christian and Jew alike.” Heine embodied a paradox that the German Jew came to know well. To be “the arriviste who never arrived” left him “mocked by the elites, vilified by the rabble,” writes the German-born historian Fritz Stern, himself the son of “baptized Jews” who escaped to the United States before the war. “Lamentable efforts at being accepted made him the object of backstage malice. . . . [And] his putative power made him the ideal target for the rising anti-­Semitism of the 1870s.”

      For all the complications this duality posed in the private realm, its effect on public life would be dazzling. Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown. By the middle of the twentieth century they had achieved distinction in the sciences (Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, Fritz Haber, Richard Willstätter, Nobel Prize winners all); music (Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill); philosophy (Hannah Arendt, Theodor Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn—the composer’s grandfather); and literature (from the Kurt Wolff catalog alone, Else Lasker-Schüler, Walter Mehring, Carl Sternheim, and Arnold Zweig, as well as writers with roots in Vienna or Prague like Kafka, Kraus, Roth, and Werfel). Yet, amidst the nativism, militarism, and Christianity-­infused nationalism that would carry Germany off into three successive wars of aggression, German Jewish accomplishments touched off resentment. Antisemitism draws strength from stigmatization of the alien “other”; in nineteenth-­century Germany, it also fed off a desire to punish Jews for their prosperity and acculturation, regardless of what they might have contributed or overcome.

      Kurt’s ancestors on his mother’s side, men like Salomon and Moritz von Haber, traced precisely this kind of bootstrapping but perilous path. The first to settle in Germany were rabbis from Bohemia, Galicia, and Italy. One, who became the chief rabbi of Trier, was also a forebear of the social theorist and Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx. During the eighteenth century another Jewish ancestor, a Jesuit-educated doctor named Moses Wolff (unrelated to Kurt’s Protestant, paternal Wolff forebears), served as personal physician to Clemens August and Maximilian Friedrich, two of the Rhineland electors who chose the Holy Roman emperor. Ancestors like Moses Wolff sat on local Jewish boards and councils. At the same time, their prosperity and collections of paintings and books signaled how invested they were in German society and culture.

      Yet even the most distinguished German Jews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived precarious lives, as the trials of Salomon and Moritz bear out. And now here was Kurt, on the run, as vulnerable as any von Haber.