At the beginning of the twentieth century, antisemitism was openly espoused everywhere in the Western world, even in the most respectable circles, to a degree that cannot easily be appreciated today. In consequence, Jews throughout Europe and the United States lived in a state of uncertainty, usually "tolerated" but seldom fully accepted. In the course of the following forty years, European and American Jewry would experience radically different fates. Nazi Germany would attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, and would succeed in killing some six million of them. At the same time, American Jews would move more nearly into the mainstream of national life than perhaps any other Jewish community in the Western world. The following discussion will compare the dramatically divergent experiences and fates of the Jewish communities in Germany and the United States in the period from 1940 till the Second World War.
Had someone living in the year 1900 been told that within half a century, a major European country would embark on a systematic effort to exterminate European Jewry, it is rather unlikely that the person who heard this grim prophesy would have guessed that the country would be Germany. The likeliest suspect at that time would have been Russia, where popular antisemitism was intense, and was reinforced by official Tsarist policy; it was the Tsarist secret police who forged the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the great source of twentieth-century Jewish-conspiracy theories. France, too, would in 1900 have seemed far more likely to descend into radical antisemitism than Germany. The notorious Dreyfus case (in which a Jewish officer in the French army was framed on an espionage charge), divided French politics and society for decades; while the issues went beyond antisemitism, the Dreyfus affair thrust the status and identity of French Jews into the heart of the deepest tensions in French society. French society in...