If this book were a building, I would hesitate before the entrance. There are two very strange animals waiting at the doorstep: first, a dedication (“to the activists in the Israeli peace movement, who defend the true honor of the Jewish people in our day, as the ghetto fighters did in the darkest Nazi times,” v) that seems completely out of proportion, and second, the author's concept, central to the introduction, of history and the writing of history as “a huge therapeutic space” (ix). Excuse me? Surely there is some kind of personal quest or even agenda behind many of the things we do in our academic lives—but the idea of therapy takes this a bit far. There is, however, in the very same part of the introduction, a beautiful and poetic thought that lures one into the house after all. Deborah Hertz asks what positive or negative consequences might be connected to the “immersion in a cohesive culture,” in this case Judaism and/or Christianity, and she writes, “I feel lucky to have found in the German-Jewish past a historical landscape filled with individuals, movements, and institutions which help me work through this universal dilemma” (ix).

I think that, one way or another, we all find ourselves in a similar situation. The historical reconstructions of Jewish worlds (or worlds of relations between Jews and non-Jews) in Germany, Poland, and Palestine, on whatever sources they might be based, do indeed open up imagined landscapes, constructions of our very own wishes, hopes, and fears, and it might make (epistemological rather than psychological) sense to ask ourselves from time to time why we are doing what we are doing. Hertz discovered her main source years ago in a church archive in “West Berlin” (another vanished place). The notebooks that contained documentation about Berlin Jews who had converted to Protestantism between 1645 and 1933 are witnesses of the national-socialist project to create a “racially purified Germany”—and the task Hertz set to herself was to “redeem the records from the evil system that had created them” (1), again, one could argue, an unusual kind of strategy. But once we move inside the house that is being constructed from this source, we learn that it is indeed possible to partially recreate the lives of Berlin Jews and their identity struggles between the Jewish and the Protestant life worlds in the city, not really based on this source—it vanishes somewhat out of sight in the course of the book—but inspired by it. It is also possible to take a fresh look at the notion and the meaning of, as well as the many individual motives for, conversion from Judaism to Christianity.

The introduction discusses these questions in the shadow of German antisemitism and the Holocaust, illustrating the importance of the topic with the example of Victor Klemperer, “one non-Aryan Christian,” who in his diaries “agonized at the contrast between how he saw himself and how the Nazi state saw him” (10). For Klemperer, the existence of “thousands [of] ‘half’ and ‘quarter’ Jews” was evidence of the fact that, before 1933, “German Jews were entirely German,” and Germany was, in Hertz's words, “still seen as a positive place for Jews to live” (12). The book then explores the lives “of the grandparents and the great-grandparents of the partial Jews who suffered horribly during the Nazi era” (10). It is divided into five periods: 1645–1770, 1771–1810, 1811–13, 1814–19, and 1820–33. The story seems to begin with my namesake, Joachim, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Court Jew Lippold, who “made himself useful to Elector Joachim by funding his expensive alchemy experiments and arranging his trysts with his mistresses” (18). It is, throughout the book, this lightness of touch and tone that helps the author to present us with a series of interesting acquaintances—some we have known quite well already, others new and sometimes surprising.

After the elector's death, Lippold was accused of having poisoned him and was burned to death on January 28, 1573. For several generations, there would be no Jewish families in Berlin and Brandenburg, until Friedrich Wilhelm, the so-called Grand Elector, invited first one family, in 1663, and some years later, in 1671, a group of two extended families from Vienna, to settle in the city (it never becomes clear why the notebooks start in 1645). From here, a narrative unfolds, that of a slow and often hurtful process of integration, the struggle for emancipation, the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, the German–Jewish encounter that is, in many parts, quite a familiar story. The second period's heroine is Rahel Levin (and she will keep that role throughout the book, which comes to a close with the year of her death, 1833). We meet her “and her friends” in salons, clubs, and reading societies, discussing the question about where alienation from traditional Judaism would lead them. The third period treats “Emancipation and War,” and we meet Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn and many other descendants of the early families; they discuss Fichte's lectures and Turnvater Jahn's gymnastics in the Hasenheide public park. The fourth period presents “High Culture Families and Public Satire” and discusses a wide range of topics, from the new Reform temple built in 1815 to the infamous one-act play Unser Verkehr.Footnote ¹ Finally, the last chapter presents a discussion of the notion of Heinrich Heine's “entrance ticket to European Civilization,” Eduard Gans's university career, and the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. And we keep meeting many people. “We depart the year 1821 with the image of the Beers and Heine drinking hot chocolate at the Café Josty” (179): “One day in January 1822, a group of prominent middle-age Berliners gathered at the home of General Job von Witzleben” (179). The foundation of the Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews on that day initiated what Hertz terms “careerist conversions” (180). It would have been worthwhile to leave Berlin for a moment and contextualize this with the London Society (founded in 1809) and contemporary Christian, especially Catholic, efforts to convert Jews in Lithuania and Poland.

Hertz's investigations uncover, as she writes, the “harsh reality” of how converts were perceived by their contemporaries, and how hostility toward Jews continued to affect them. At the same, time, she adds, we can “empathize” with those who wanted “distinguished careers, loving marriages, a bountiful social life, and an inner identity as Germans” (216) and therefore chose to convert. This is interesting, but perhaps not such a revolutionary insight. I am also not sure whether the total number of 4,635 cases of conversion between 1800 and 1874, shown in some graphic charts and tables at the end of the book, is high or low. In the end, I think this book is most valuable as a contribution to the history of “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” Berlin. The “opportunities Berlin provided” are possibly the main actors or driving forces for those who were looking at conversion “to functionally achieve emancipation” as well as for those who looked out for “a new version of Jewish practice” (218). Salons and clubs, theaters, and university lecture halls emerge as arenas of identity negotiations, and the city of Berlin as the central site of the co-construction (David Biale) of German Jewish identities and relations between Jews and non-Jews make the strongest impression among the many actors we encounter in the pages of this book.