Towards Normality?
Acculturation & Modern German Jewry

Edited by Rainer Liedtke & David Rechter
November 2003
Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3-16-148127-5
364 pages, 6 1/4" x 9 1/4"
$120.00 Hardcover


The present volume is the latest in a distinguished series, published under the auspices of the London Leo Baeck Institute that addresses the issues of emancipation, assimilation and acculturation. It presents the work of an international group of scholars who approach these topics from a variety of innovative perspectives. The thread running through the diverse contributions, as indicated by the volume's title, is that of normality, clearly a close relation of emancipation and acculturation. Throughout the period from the Enlightenment to the 1930s, it can be argued that German-speaking Jews endeavored to be like those around them, to become - in a (loaded) word - normal. While the term has not generally been employed by historians of European Jewry, the search for the normal can provide an interesting perspective from which to examine the diverse modes of German Jewish acculturation and integration, or lack thereof.

Judaism
Schriftenreihe Wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts No. 68

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