This volume brings together Shulamit Volkov's essays of the past thirty years, whose thinking was originally laid down during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those mainly intellectual histories were then revisited some ten years ago when earlier versions of this collection were prepared in German and Hebrew. Sandwiched inside that chronology during the late 1980s and early 1990s were additional essays on the social history of Jewish emancipation and assimilation before 1914, understood as a process of “becoming bourgeois” (the English usage of “bourgeoisification” or embourgeoisement remains a clumsy and unsatisfactory [non] translation of the German Verbürgerlichung), the original studies for which occurred under the auspices of the Bielefeld project on Bürgertum in nineteenth-century Europe. The result is a survey in three uneven parts, each of which bears strongly the imprint of the original times of writing. In addressing the views of Jewish intellectuals about their German circumstances, the first and shortest part of the book, “Interpreting the Danger Signs” (52 pages), jumps sharply from the fin de siècle to the crisis of Kristallnacht. The second part, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code” (88 pages), presents an interpretation of anti-Semitism under the Kaiserreich that essentially recapitulates the argument of the 1978 essay of the same name for which Volkov is probably best known, further bolstered by discussions of the SPD's relationship to anti-Semitism, the differing ideological valencies of anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, and a comparison with anti-Semitism in France at the time of Dreyfus. The final part on “The German-Jewish Project of Modernity” (127 pages) grounds this commentary rather uneasily in a series of social historical case studies focusing on Jewish upward mobility; on the demographics of the Jewish presence in German society; on Jewish educational attainment, especially in the natural sciences; and on some of the ways in which immigration from the east and the figure of the Ostjude troubled the progress of Jewish assimilation. These social histories draw on original research on the Jewish Gemeinde in Altona.

These essays' strengths come from a lifetime of careful immersion in the debates, historiographies, and complicated diasporics of German-Jewish history. By now, that field's preoccupations have become extremely familiar, and if this particular volume perhaps adds little that is exactly new, it does a valuable service in gathering Volkov's contributions together, not least because of her role in originally charting our knowledge. In this regard, she frames the volume between two personal essays that do much to deepen one's understanding of the intellectual-political standpoint from which she writes. An opening reflection called “My Father Leaves his German Homeland” (pp. 1–9) movingly makes use of her father's letters of the 1930s to adumbrate the painful ambivalence of German Jews arriving in Palestine, simultaneously alienated from their history yet returning to it. An equally brief Epilogue, “Closing the Circle” (pp. 287–97), using the well-tried case of Walther Rathenau, reflects on the complexity of Jewish circumstances under the Weimar Republic, whose political climate sharpened Jewish discomforts while enabling an optimism about their resolution. Here Volkov evokes Weimar as a kind of “golden age” when some Germans and Jews had “dreamt of a different kind of world.” She closes the book as follows: “That dream turned out to be an illusion, but it never lost its value: the dream of men and women of different backgrounds and cultures living together, and a democracy that is capable of providing the range of prerequisites for a genuine cooperation among them. It is a worthy dream; many of us still hold on to it” (p. 297). The inescapable contemporary resonances are explicitly indicated by the parallelism of Rathenau's 1922 assassination and the killing of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. More such contextualizing would certainly have added to the volume's meaning. (In this respect, see Volkov's recent essay, “Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism,” The Journal of Israeli History 25 [2006]: 51–62).

What can be said of the book's central arguments about anti-Semitism? First, the central purpose of the “cultural code” thesis, which was to break the teleology of the history of German anti-Semitism between the Kaiserreich and the Nazis and to complicate its linear continuities, remains as vital as ever. By explicating those distinctions, the book's second part successfully renders the early twentieth-century optimism of German Jews intelligible. The anti-Semitic rhetorics of the later nineteenth century had a specificity defined by the particular context of the Kaiserreich, Volkov argues, in which antipathy for the Jew worked as the complex signifier for a wider ensemble of attitudes and values that she calls “anti-modernism.” The latter entailed an “ideational syndrome,” for which anti-Semitic ideas delivered the glue. As a primary motivator, paradoxically, anti-Semitism receded in prominence when measured by the strength of organized party-based anti-Semitism before 1914, but as something suffused through society more broadly it became a vital marker of affiliation. For those who subscribed to the ideas, anti-Semitism connoted “a common ethos, a basic pattern of ideals, an unmistakable culture” that coalesced around a politics of the radical nationalist Right; conversely, for the adherents of “modernism” in whatever form, rejection of anti-Semitic beliefs provided an equivalent source of coherence. In that way, anti-Semitism turned into a “cultural code.” It became “a symbol of the struggle not only between two political camps, but also and perhaps primarily between two styles of thought, between two cultures” (p. 117). Crucially, this symbolic context of Wilhelmine anti-Semitism was not the same as the political context forged by the Nazis. Under Nazism anti-Semitism lost its vicarious indirection: it no longer stood in for other things, but became a distinct and leading goal of policy in itself. For Volkov this was the vital disjunction. If the anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century was itself a novum, distinguished from older anti-Jewish ideas by its figuration of the anti-modernism/modernism opposition, then the Nazi targeting of the Jew was different again. Anti-Semitism under the Kaiserreich was not a “rehearsal for destruction.” The force of Volkov's “cultural code” thesis in this way was to allow the specificity of Nazi anti-Semitism to emerge properly.

Second, though, Volkov constructs too simplistic and misleading a binary for conceptualizing German politics before the First World War. Proceeding essentially from what had seemed to be an emerging historiographical consensus of the later 1960s and 1970s, she suggests that we can “split the social, political, and, above all, cultural world of Imperial Germany into two major camps. Accordingly, two subcultures coexisted at the bosom of this society and anti-Semitism served to draw the dividing line between them” (p. 111). If one such camp were the “modernists” who embraced various versions of a progressive industrial future, the other consisted of our old friends the German “anti-modernists,” who “rejected liberalism and capitalism on the one hand, and revolutionary or even moderate socialism on the other,” bitterly opposing democracy, while sharing “a sweeping imperial dream, an enthusiasm for an imminent war, and loyalty to a pre-industrial moral code” (p. 112). Yet in arguing that this “arsenal of the anti-emancipatory, nationalist culture … had already been forged by the late 1870s,” Volkov misses all the dynamic dissonances and tensions separating the “old” from the “new” Right, which only began to develop during the 1890s and were essential to the radicalization that eased precisely the embrace of the more coherent anti-Semitic commitments Volkov associates with Nazism. A more virulent and sharper-edged anti-Semitism materialized during the last few years before 1914, which began to look more like the racialized foregrounding of the issue she reserves for the Nazis.

Third, theoretically speaking, the master concept of a “cultural code” remains far too underdeveloped and thin. It relies on a loose adaptation of the idea of “ideology as a cultural system” associated with the early Clifford Geertz, which ignores the wealth of other approaches to theories of ideology already flourishing across the disciplines when the 1978 essay first saw the light of day. Here, the elaboration of Volkov's argument seems disconcertingly frozen in that same historiographical moment of the mid 1970s, when George Mosse's “crisis of German ideology,” Fritz Stern's “politics of cultural despair,” the West German Sonderweg school's emphasis on “authoritarian pre-industrial traditions,” and Rainer Lepsius's “milieu thesis” straightforwardly set the terms of possible understanding. Yet that older intepretative framework has long ceased to provide the ground from which historians of the Kaiserreich are mainly inclined to think. The hoary old modern/anti-modern binary has long been deconstructed and reimagined, so that German “modernities” now afford a very different analytical and historiographical space for Wilhelmine historians in particular to do their work. More extreme antagonisms were certainly developing in Wilhelmine politics during the run-up to 1914, moreover, but even the Kartell der schaffenden Stände hardly accomplished a straightforward polarization of domestic political life of the kind Volkov imagines. Her claim that two broad camps had already emerged during the later Bismarckian years seriously misdescribes the fluid and volatile spaces through which German politics began developing during the 1890s and beyond.

Finally, the gap between the late Kaiserreich and the 1930s creates a serious imbalance in the structure of Volkov's overall account and the forms of interpretation it can sustain. A very strong claim is made about the openness of the Weimar Republic as a field of possibilities, for example, and the persuasiveness of the arguments would certainly have benefited from some more sustained discussion of the 1920s. Still more severely, the neglect of the First World War makes it impossible to evaluate the force of the cultural code thesis with respect to the rupture supposedly represented by Nazism. How exactly did this transition occur? How were the terms of anti-Semitic belief and affiliation reconfigured during the war years and their revolutionary aftermath? How was the capacity for violence generated in the structures and practices of anti-Semitic militancy? Without some discussion of this kind, the concept of the cultural code will have to remain unproven.