The Invisible Wall is one man's quest to understand the failure of the German-Jewish relationship and to explain the character and attitudes of Germany's assimilated Jews over a three hundred-year period. He found rich and remarkable stories in the lives of six Blumenthal ancestors--all of whom happened to be major figures in German-Jewish history. Jost Liebmann, an itinerant peddler of trinkets and cheap jewels who became court jeweler to the Brandenburg nobility; Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, whose Berlin salon was the meeting place of Prussia's intellectual elite; Giacomo Meyerbeer, a celebrated composer of grand opera who dealt with the antisemitism he encountered by ceaselessly striving for success; Louis Blumenthal, a respected businessman and founder of his town's bank; Arthur Eloesser, a scholar and literary critic in the heyday of Weimar; and Ewald Blumenthal, the author's father. Once a decorated soldier in the Kaiser's elite guards, he was later a prisoner at Buchenwald. By recounting the stories of these individuals within the historical context of three centuries, Blumenthal presents a portrait of German Jews from the birth of Christianity to the eve of the Holocaust, revealing how Jews of various generations tried but failed to pierce the prejudice that separated them from other Germans. Werner Michael Blumenthal is a German-born American business leader, economist and political adviser who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1979. The Invisible Wall Germans and Jews, a Personal Exploration By W. Michael Blumenthal Counterpoint Press Copyright © 1999 W. Michael Blumenthal All right reserved. ISBN: 9781582430126 Chapter One ORIGINS 1 If someone had asked my parents where their families came from, thereply would have been Brandenburg or perhaps, reaching further back,East Prussia. My mother, a touch self-conscious, might have mentionedthe province of Posen (now the Polish Poznan), making sure to add thather family had moved to Berlin long ago, when Posen was still a partof Prussia--and that Posen was not like Galicia. In the circle of myparents, the distinction between longtime residents and recentarrivals--the largely Galician Ostjuden--was important to the formerfor their sense of status and identity. More distant roots? That question would have been met with blankstares. When I was young, many assimilated German Jews had grownquite hazy about their remote origins. The history they remembered wastheir history in Germany, beginning about where this book begins--thelast part of the seventeenth century or the early part of theeighteenth. But that, of course, is not the whole story. The distant past ofGermany's Jews--indeed, of all Ashkenazim--can be traced back muchfurther, all the way to classical times. There are some historians, infact, who believe that the key to understanding Germany's Jews--theirspecial character, who they were, and what they thought and did--liesprecisely in that faraway past. That, however, although it providesintriguing Insights, is a subject for a book in itself and too farremoved from the scope of this one. For our purposes, a fewsignificant highlights and events suffice to put what came later intoappropriate perspective. In the beginning there were no Ashkenazim or Sephardim, only aSemitic people who came to be called Jews, named after the tribe ofJudah, the Hebrew Yahudi. There is much that is unique about theJews, above all, perhaps, that they have survived at all. They are,after all, the only biblical people to have endured intact to thepresent day. Given their fateful, often bloody history and theirunending trials and troubles, that in itself is little short of amiracle. What is equally remarkable is that over much of theirrecorded history, they survived as a largely dispersed people. Eversince their Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E., more Jewshave lived outside their homeland than in it. Most of the early details are uncertain and shrouded in the mistsof the past. But we do know that well before the time of Christ therewere large, flourishing Jewish communities throughout the Middle Eastand in the major Mediterranean cities. There were Jews in Babylon,Mesopotamia, and Phoenicia, in the Persian Empire, in Egypt, along thecoast of North Africa, and later on in Greece. After the rise of theRoman Empire, large numbers of Jews lived in Rome and throughout muchof the rest of Italy. From the beginning, a great many were outside the homeland by forceof circumstance rather than choice. A large part of the Jewishpopulation had been exiled to Babylon six centuries before Christ.Later, when Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E. and again, in theaftermath of the Bar-Kochba revolt sixty years later, as many as ahalf million Jews or more are said to have been carried off to Rome asslaves. Yet not all who left their homeland did so involuntarily. Jews,along with Syrians and Greeks,