Amos Elon - Acclaimed historian and social critic,
Amos Elon is the author of eight widely praised books on Germany, Jewish
history, and the Middle East, including Founder: A Portrait of the First
Rothschild and the New York Times bestseller Israelis: Founders and Sons.
He has appeared repeatedly on the Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes,
and has been interviewed by Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters. A frequent
contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books,
Amos Elon divides his time between Jerusalem and Tuscany .
Amos Elon's newest book, THE PITY OF IT ALL: A History of
the Jews in Germany , 1743-1933 (Metropolitan Books) will be published in
November 2002. Writing with a novelist's eye, Amos Elon takes us back to the
beginning, showing how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering
peddlers built themselves into a stunningly successfully community of writers,
philosophers, scientists, tycoons, and activists. In literature alone German
Jews accounted for such luminaries as Heine, Borne, Kafka, and Kraus; in the
sciences, Ehrlich, Einstein, and Freud; in music, Mahler, and Mendelssohn. And
in politics, they were the midwives or founders of most of Germany 's parties.
Writing with a novelist's touch, Amos Elon peoples his account with dramatic
figures such as Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin in 1743 through the gate
reserved for Jews and cattle and went on to become the great philosopher and
religious reformed nicknamed both the "German Socrates" and the "Jewish Luther."
THE PITY OF IT ALL traces how a minority--never more than nineteen
percent of the population--transformed into the elite and came to be perceived
as a deadly threat to national security. A collective biography, full of depth
and compassion, Amos Elon's THE PITY OF IT ALL summons up a splendid
world and a dream of integration and tolerance that, despite all, remains the
essential ennobling project of modernity.
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