How the New Right subsumed older conservatisms is a critical theme in modern German history. The populist forms of authoritarian, racist, and antisemitic political agitation that swept away earlier outlooks on monarchy, Germandom, state service, and the military made possible the radical sea change that was National Socialism. In an astute, well-researched study, Philipp Nielsen situates Jewish conservatives within the evolving landscape of the political Right in the pivotal decades between 1890 and 1935.

Because conventional narratives emphasize the cosmopolitan liberalism of German Jewry, Nielsen's subject is compelling. Jewish participation in Weimar conservative politics, he notes, might now be “seen as deluded aberrations at best, or as self-hating Jews at worst,” yet these actors and their political choices were “quite unremarkable” (19, 21). Prior to the revolution of 1918–1919, few questioned “the possibility of a German Jew to be on the Right,” a political choice that offered the chance to “integrate into a nation constructed not only on rights but also on feelings of community and belonging” (21). Drawing on state and private papers from numerous archives and libraries in Germany, Israel, and the United States, Nielsen provides the granular details of the social milieus, evolving value systems, and the political enclaves that enabled Jews to embrace conservatism. His study injects a poignant historicity into the question of how notions of biological difference incrementally penetrated conservative practice, whereby “another German on the Right” became the “quintessential non-German” (21).

The study follows dozens of middle- and upper-middle-class men (few women appear in this account) and their abiding loyalty to the German nation-state. Nielsen weaves together their careers, the public causes they espoused, and their varied political values to portray how bourgeois conservatives negotiated the structural antisemitisms of the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras. The book's protagonists were businessmen, rabbis, civil servants, academics, and more: Fritz Rathenau, a Prussian state councilor from a prominent family (his father headed the AEG, the electrical giant, and his brother Walther was the later-assassinated Weimar minister); Karl Süssheim, an expert in Islamic history whose Bavarian royalism remained firm in spite of antisemitic attitudes that hindered his career; Leo Löwenstein, a chemist and veteran of World War I who founded and presided over the Jewish veterans’ organization, the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten; Aron Tänzer, a Habsburg Jew who studied in Berlin and became a rabbi in Göppingen (Swabia), whose devotion to the German empire and to his field service as a military rabbi formed his social identity as both patriot and Jew; and even Hans-Joachim Schoeps, the journalist most prominent after World War II, who in the early 1930s strove to reconcile his Jewish self with a romanticized view of fascist mass mobilization.

Five chapters chronicle these men's attempts to balance old and new prejudices with patriotism and social ambition. The first two chapters cover the German empire and World War I and present Jewish aspirations to normalcy. The themes of agriculture, Germandom, and military service frame the default mode of bourgeois Jewish conservatism. Jews, too, were swept up in the themes of Heimat, returning to the land, and belonging to a national community. For Nielsen, the Association for the Promotion of Agriculture (Verein zur Förderung der Bodenkultur unter den Juden Deutschlands) among German Jews exemplifies how Jews contributed to conservative causes and policies. Created in 1893, the organization provided Jews of lesser means with the training and the land needed to become farmers. Although the organization no doubt believed in the redemptive qualities of agriculture, its founders also strove to dispel clichés about the unhealthy urbanism of the deracinated Jew. Responding to Germandom's cultural mission in the east, the association envisioned assimilating Jews from East Europe into German settlements. It toed a fine line to situate its mission within the New Right's ethnic nationalism, which included an anti-Slavic animus. The association did not produce impressive results.

The army loomed paramount for conservative Jews and their sense of national belonging. As the so-called school for the nation, the military possessed the capacity to integrate and unify. Despite prejudice and discrimination in its upper ranks, the German army appealed to many Jews. Nielsen underscores the “appeal that military service and the chance of promotion had for the sons of the Jewish bourgeoisie” (53). The monarchy and a strong German state were conservative institutions that won over many bourgeois men—and Jews were no exception.

During the Great War, Jews served as soldiers, rabbis, intelligence officials, and administrators, and many believed that their sacrifices would strengthen the bond between Jews and the German nation. When wartime rumors of Jewish shirkers instigated the Jewish census of 1916, the official survey signaled a national distrust of its Jewish citizens. But many Jewish soldiers rejected the census as an accurate reflection of social attitudes; instead, they blamed the civilian government and remembered their war experience as one of “active participation and recognition” (105). Despite the positive experiences of Jewish soldiers in the community of the trenches, protracted war and traumatic defeat generated stronger impulses of racialized national belonging.

The chapters on the Weimar Republic and the Nazi years up to the Nuremberg Laws offer new insights into a familiar story. If conservative Jews found it difficult to accept and adjust to a German republic, the growth of virulent antisemitism in conservative and nationalist circles compounded their troubles. The impact of antisemitism, however, differed with each person, blurring lines of acceptance and exclusion. While one Jewish veteran was rejected by his commanding officers, another was integrated into his hometown veterans’ community (166). Old and New Right sensibilities comingled in the early 1920s, allowing both camps to agree on their aversion to socialists and parliamentary democracy. Whereas social class and a shared history once united various strains of conservatives, after 1924 the radical Right's obsession with ethnic purity allowed for no special exceptions for Jews. The populist impact on institutional and electoral culture took its toll. The Stahlhelm, the country's largest veteran organization, introduced an Aryan paragraph into its bylaws in 1924; leading conservative politicians such as Paul von Hindenburg tolerated antisemitic rhetoric in elections after 1925; and the völkisch wing of the DNVP, once the political bastion of the Old Right, introduced an Aryan paragraph in 1926. Fritz Rathenau found solace in preserving Germandom's land settlements in the east, but attempts to “retain soil rather than blood as a marker of national identity” became increasingly tenuous (179).

As the racialized Volksstaat displaced the ethnically neutral Ordnungsstaat in political discourse, conservative Jews still attempted to adjust to the new conditions. Max Naumann, the founder of the Association of Nationalist German Jews, deployed the concept of Volksstamm to liken the Jewish “tribe” to such ethnic strains as the Saxons or the Bavarians (194). “Even before the Weimar Republic was engulfed in crisis,” notes Nielsen, “the shrinking space for Jews on the Right revealed the radical change underfoot in the republic's political landscape” (209). Various forms of Jewish blindness and denial in Weimar's final years make for excruciating reading. Even after connections to Jewish groups had long become toxic for conservatives’ electoral strategies, the industrialist Arnold Feige harbored hopes in 1932 for a German conservatism “not fully tainted by antisemitism,” just as Leo Löwenstein averred in February 1933 that the anti-Jewish elements of the Nazi revolution could be overcome (225, 243). Hence, even before Hitler took office, “Jews on the Right were well on their way to becoming entirely marginalized” (228). From the völkisch denunciations of Jewish revolutionaries in 1919, to Aryan paragraphs in conservative organizations in the mid-1920s, to the Nazi antisemitic laws of 1933 and 1935, the continuities that reduced German Jews to second-class citizens are clear to see.

Nielsen's soundings of right-wing Jewish elites expose the blind spots of Jewish conservatives and periodize decades of Jewish participation in conservative movements, which enables the author to calibrate the degrees of tolerance and acceptance extended to them. In mapping the shrinking social space for Jews who cleaved to king, homeland, and the army, Nielsen never loses sight of their confidence in the German state and in the belief that the Right's better nature would prevail. The author admirably keeps in play the contingencies of the late Weimar era. The empathy Nielsen lends to his glosses on Jews seeking accommodation with the New Right is analytically effective.

Two criticisms attend this positive review. First, a comprehensive sociological analysis of the Jewish Right is missing. What were its numbers and its sociopolitical depth? Were these conservative Jews a proxy for a larger social group and to what extent did these actors alter the broader contours of the Jewish-German dialogue? Quantifying this social group's size, regional distribution, and political import would have helped readers grasp the argument's parameters. Second, the book's late entry into the long nineteenth century prompts questions about previous decades of Jewish-German relations, such as why Jews harbored such positive attitudes toward the German state. The successes and failures of Jewish acculturation in previous generations inflect the story at hand, hence a succinct overview, however brief, would have helped readers. That history only heightens the tragedy of twentieth-century Jews caught between Heimat and hatred.