This unique book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct culture: the 1500-year history of the Jews in Germany. Through texts, pictures, and contemporary accounts, it follows the German Jews from their first settlements on the Rhine in the fourth century to the destruction of the community in World War II. Using both voices and images of the past, the book reveals how the German Jews looked, how they lived, what they thought about, and what others thought of them. Ruth Gay's text, interwoven with passages from memoirs, letters, newspapers, and many other contemporary sources, shows how the German Jews organized their communities, created a new language (Yiddish), and built their special culture--all this under circumstances sometimes friendly, but often murderously hostile. The book explores the internal debates that agitated the community from medieval to modern times and analyzes how German Jewry emerged into the modern world. The earliest document in the book is a fourth-century decree by the Roman emperor Constantine permitting Jews to hold office in Cologne. Among the last are poignant letters from Betty Scholem in Berlin, writing during the Nazi years to her son Gershom in Palestine. In between are accounts of a ninth-century Jewish merchant appointed by Charlemagne to a diplomatic mission to Baghdad, a thirteenth-century Jewish minnesinger, a seventeenth-century pogrom in Frankfurt in which gentiles helped to save their Jewish neighbors, and the nineteenth-century innovation of department stores, palaces of consumerism. The book tells a story--moving, terrifying, and exhilarating--that must be remembered.

It portrays the existential struggles and downfall of an entire people, the Burgundians, in a military conflict with the Huns and their king."--Jacket.

Excerpt from The Minnesinger of Germany Long before Chaucer had fathered English poetry, and Spain and Italy had developed their languages to that purity which alone makes possible great achievements in the literary arts, Germany had passed through a period of splendor in the art of poetry, which even the period of the last century has not surpassed, and in some respects scarcely equaled. It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, under the glorious reign of the Hohenstauffens, amidst the turmoil of the Crusades, and whilst the sublime conceptions of the cathedrals of, Strassburg and Cologne were being wrought out, that there sprang up in Germany, as if by magic, that wonderful craft of Minnesinger, which lasted throughout a century and then gradually expired the grace and beauty of their singing appearing no more in German literature until Goethe struck anew the old tone, and thus heralded the dawn of the second brilliant period of German poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.