That the word Judentum was negatively construed in modern Germany is a given. The early studies of Jacob Toury and Jacob Katz on the emergence of Die Judenfrage, Dietz Bering's Der Name als Stigma, and Paul Lawrence Rose's Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to Wagner all make this point. In his seminal study of Die Weltbühne, Istvan Deak commented that this phenomenon extended to the opponents of anti-Semitism as well: “Jewishness indeed was determined not so much by one's enemies as by one's friends, and it was a source of humiliation, for all the hypocritical assertions of the courts of the Weimar Republic to the contrary Jew was a pejorative word” (Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals, p. 25). But Thomas Pegelow Kaplan has added two important dimensions to this inquiry. First, he quantitatively tabulates the appearances of the terms “Jews” and “Germans” in four principal journals: Völkischer Beobachter (VB), Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ), CV-Zeitung, and Jüdische Rundschau (JR). Second, he uses diary and memoir literature, both published and archival, to impart a personal element to what had generally been a discussion of political rhetoric alone. Pegelow Kaplan traces the use of these terms over a twenty-year period (1928-1948) and persuasively shows the way key categories of Germanness and Jewishness changed over time in their frequency and in their meaning.

Pegelow Kaplan uses “Germans of Jewish descent” as his focus group as professing Jews, Mischlinge, and converts to Christianity were all tainted by the stain of Jewishness and subject to various degrees of persecution. Although Pegelow Kaplan pays lip service to “Foucauldian ideas” and “bricolage” in his introduction, the work is a sober history of journalistic discourse. I am thankful that his study is not over-theorized, because the middle-brow material that he adduces does not require an overly subtle approach. The choice of journals may be obvious but deserves mention: the VB was the Nazi party's official mouthpiece and waged war on behalf of separating German from Jewish even in its Weimar period. After the Nazi takeover, the VB radicalized its language, and during the war it displayed both extreme aggression and, as defeat loomed, a return to the paranoid language of Jewish power with which it began. The liberal FZ opposed the Nazis, but demonstrated from the onset a willingness to accept Jewishness and Germanness as distinct categories (p. 31). As the Nazi years wore on, the FZ, originally founded by Leopold Sonnemann, a German Jew, took up the völkisch language of its erstwhile adversaries (p. 133).

The CV-Zeitung, a merger of the earliest German-Jewish paper (Ludwig Philippsohn's Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and the organizational Im deutschen Reich), represented the Jewish mainstream. Not surprisingly, the CV-Zeitung initially “emphasized its own construction of a dual German-Jewish identity” (p. 82). By 1935 the CV-Zeitung had developed a post-assimilatory identity, heeding Nazi directives to cease use of the term Germanness altogether. More aggressive was the Zionist JR, beginning with the famous post-boycott essay by Robert Weltsch, “Wear It with Pride—The Yellow Badge” (April 4, 1933). The JR had less reticence about using the language of race, though, as Pegelow Kaplan carefully notes, following George Mosse, its usage abjured advocating racial hierarchies. In late 1938 the Nazis shut down the Jewish press altogether. For the war years, Pegelow Kaplan does a remarkable job with the court petitions by Mischlinge, “with tens of thousands confronting officials of the Reich Kinship Office alone” (p. 276). Pegelow Kaplan rightfully sees this as another indicator of resistance to the Nazi co-optation of language as well as a survival technique.

Pegelow Kaplan uses Walter Tausk's, Willy Cohen's, and Victor Klemperer's diaries to best effect, but the many archival memoirs are also employed judiciously. Pegelow's decision to include the immediate postwar years added a helpful dimension. The bibliographic essay is excellent, although it excludes some works I would deem central to his topic (Nathan Stolzfuss, Resistance of the Heart, for one). This reviewer would have appreciated a more consistent deployment of gender as a rhetorical category, especially as it played such a large role in earlier anti-Semitic rhetoric and the author is clearly aware of the issue (p. 167). Pegelow Kaplan's mastery of primary and secondary sources is exemplary and his lexometric analysis breaks new ground. Despite minor flaws, this book takes the study of public discourse and successfully shows both its debasement of language and insidious role in forwarding the Nazi's genocidal agenda.