It is not by chance that this book, which is dedicated to the history of Jews in modern Germany, reaches its main topic only in the third part. After all, the special interest that many of us have in this topic is usually related to the bitter end of these Jews, and from this point of departure antisemitism almost naturally gains primacy. I, too, have started by dealing with it. Stressing antisemitism when thinking about Jewish history, however, may be misleading in the end. Salo Baron, one of the outstanding Jewish historians of the last half-century, argued, in fact, that the undue stress on Jew-hatred and the Jewish suffering throughout the ages have tended to turn their history into a “lachrymose” tale. The events comprising it were all too often made to fit a mere chain of calamities. In particular, when writing German-Jewish history, even historians who are not primarily preoccupied with antisemitism place great emphasis on analyzing the relationships between Jews and non-Jews and study what may be termed “the seam lines” between the majority and minority while often neglecting the so-called internal aspects of the narrative. In the introduction to one of Jacob Toury's works on German Jewry that covers the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Toury makes explicit his intention to avoid any discussion of Jewish internal history, focusing instead on the areas of contact between them and the Germans, or on what he termed the process of their “Germanization.”