Christian Bailey's "German Jews in Love"

Christian Bailey is Assistant Professor of History at Purchase College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, German Jews in Love: A History, and reported the following:

As it happens, page 99 is not a bad page to read to get a flavor of my book. This caught me somewhat by surprise: a cliché about historians’ books is, after all, that while the intro and conclusion are supposed to neatly summarize the book’s arguments and its significance, the middle bits are all too often skimmed and used rather than really read. Well, what do we find on page 99: a paragraph on Jewish and Christian intermarriage that profiles the kind of people who married in and married out, and then a section on motherhood. The argument in this page, and the chapter from which it’s taken, is that Weimar Germany – that apparently tumultuous, raucous and ultra-modern experiment in German democracy – wasn’t all that different from the pre-WW1 era in terms of attitudes towards how married women should behave. As the page’s closing paragraph tells us, experts and politicians of (almost) all ideological stripes stressed women’s abiding maternal mission.

In at least one way the page illustrates a goal of the book: to explore how the dramatic shifts in Germany’s political history affected individuals’ and families’ everyday lives. This is a book about Jewish history so it’s clear that some political changes such as the Nazi takeover of the German state had a profound effect on Jewish Germans’ private lives. But, at other times, it wasn’t so obvious that the lives and values of individuals and communities shifted in sync with regime changes. This is one aspect of the broader question that’s at the heart of a book that ranges from the 1870s to the 1970s: how did Jewish women and men gain and preserve a sense of self during arguably the most turbulent century in German history. While their feelings of religious, political, national and ethnic belonging informed these Jewish Germans’ identities, I argue that by falling in love and marrying partners they loved, they gained a durable if malleable sense of who they were. This sense of self helped them to cope as they experienced social and geographical mobility, and social exclusion and forced migration. Yet, as the later chapters describe, the total invasion and destruction of private life during the Third Reich compelled many German Jewish families to rethink who they were and where they belonged.

Learn more about German Jews in Love at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue