Memorial Day Blowout! Entire Store On Sale! 10% Off Orders Up To $100 | 15% Off Orders Over $100
Good through 5/27/13, excludes Books, Wine, Nambe, Michael Aram, Sales Items, Sukkahs & Schach, Ketubot, Tefillin and Shipping Costs.

Need Help?

Paper Shoppe

Top Stores

Top Categories

Wedding Glass Judaica

Jewish Holidays

Tisha B'Av Mon. Eve Jul 15

Rosh Hashanah Wed. Eve Sep 4

Yom Kippur Fri. Eve Sep 13

View Larger Image

How Jews Became Germans

The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin
By Deborah Hertz
(288 Pages)Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

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 country s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, 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 Berlin s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Related Items



Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp $29.95	How Jews Became Germans $38.00	The World Must Know $40.00	Hitler Of History $14.00	A Woman in Berlin $23.00	Encyclopedia of Jewish Life $199.00	Shorshei Minhag Ashkenaz $22.49	Holocaust Sites of Europe $25.00	Holocaust Years $27.95