A Leap of Faith The Story of the Jews

This is the story of an immense leap of faith,

made on a promise of equality and toleration.

It would carry the Jews of Europe from the certainties of tradition...

..and from the ghettos enforced by ancient prejudice,

and expose them to the opportunities

and to the threats of freedom in a world transformed

by revolution, technology, mass culture and nationalism.

It would begin in a world of aristocratic libraries,

temples of learning.

It would culminate in a world of metropolitan magnificence,

department stores, palaces of plenty,

concert halls, capitals of culture.

From the ghetto to the salon,

from the hallowed past to the promised future,

this was one of the greatest human journeys

in the shortest space of time ever made.

And the consequences would be world-changing

as hopes, born on the pages of books,

died in the flames of hatred and destruction.

It was in the 18th century that the world of Gentile learning,

and the world of the Jews finally came face to face,

finally came to engage with each other.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment held that everyone,

Jews included, guided by the light of reason,

could sweep away the inherited prejudices of centuries.

So they made the Jews a special bargain -

come out of your mental ghetto,

expose yourself to modern languages, to learning, to science,

and then you will become useful members of society.

And when that happens, we will embrace you

fully and legally in civil rights, and you will become something new.

You'll become a citizen who happens to practise the Jewish faith.

Well, it was a noble idea.

For that matter, it still is.

The question is, would it work?

Embracing the new was never going to be easy for the Jews.

They had survived long centuries of exile and persecution

by cleaving to their traditions.

Any challenge to those traditions seemed to threaten survival itself.

Baruch Spinoza, a 23-year-old merchant and precocious thinker

from a religious family, posed just such a challenge,

which is why, in 1656, in the synagogue on the Houtgracht Canal,

he was cast out of Amsterdam's community of Jews.

"We ban, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza

"with the consent of God,

"cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night.

"Cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up.

"The Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven,

"and the Lord shall separate him unto evil.

"None shall contact him by mouth, or by writing,

"nor stay under the same roof as him,

"nor read anything he wrote."

In the eyes of the Amsterdam community, Spinoza was a heretic,

undermining through soulless logic and wild speculation

Jewish faith and Jewish identity.

Miracles were myths, the soul was not immortal,

the Bible was the work of men, not God.

"The revelation of God can only be established

"by the wisdom of the doctrine, not by miracles,

"or, in other words, ignorance."

It wasn't just the Jews whom Spinoza risked outraging.

The Protestant Dutch, who had given the Jews a refuge

following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal,

identified with the biblical children of Israel,

founded their faith on the Old as well as the New Testament.

Spinoza's attack on Jewish tradition was an attack on Christianity, too.

And a threat to the new Jerusalem

the Jews had been allowed to build in Amsterdam.

Was what Spinoza said so shocking?

Well, it was shocking enough for him to be accused of atheism

by both Jews and Christians,

but Spinoza was no atheist.

He believed in God, all right,

but it wasn't the God of the Hebrew Bible.

No, Spinoza's God was nothing less,

but nothing more, than the whole of created nature itself.

The logical end of Spinoza's reasoning was toleration.

Still a challenge in some parts of the world now, explosive then,

because under a God identical with all of nature,

no one religion could claim a monopoly of wisdom.

All very well, but it robbed the Jews,

not just here in Amsterdam of course,

but everywhere, of their own special identity,

their sense of divine election,

their sense of being the chosen people.

It was that character that had sustained the Jews

through generations of difficulty, hardship and calamity,

and what was this God,

who was also nature, of Spinoza's, offering instead?

Well, in Spinoza's mind it was offering to bring the Jews

together with the rest of humanity -

Jews, Christians, and anyone else for that matter, who could share

the same common space -

and Spinoza thought, what was not to like about that?

Spinoza challenged Jew and Gentile alike

with his philosophy of toleration.

Two generations after his death, that challenge was taken up here,

in the Prussian capital of Berlin.

Berlin then was enclosed by a city wall.

Inside, some 2,000 privileged and protected Jews

were permitted to live.

Elsewhere in Prussia, they were confined to provincial towns,

inward looking, closed off from the Gentile world around them.

But then a young Jewish scholar,

his first name weighty with historical significance,

walked to Berlin, following his religious teacher.

Moses Mendelssohn, unprotected, unprivileged,

he somehow made it into a city world rich with new possibilities.

In 1743, the lad, Moses Mendelssohn, barely out of his Bar Mitzvah,

stood before one of these heavily guarded city gates in old Berlin,

on the brink of a great cultural adventure

that would transform not just his life,

but all of the relationships and encounters

between Jews and Gentiles.

Of this mighty destiny he could have had very little inkling.

He had lived all of his young life amidst religious Jews like himself.

He spoke just two languages - Judeo-German,

otherwise known as Yiddish, in his daily rounds,

and Hebrew in the synagogue, in prayers and studies.

He would end his life

as the embodiment of the Jewish Enlightenment,

able to speak and write, and read every language you could think of -

French, English, Latin and Greek.

He didn't know what was in store for him,

but it was an extraordinary opening,

not just in these city gates,

but the entire history of the Jews and those who met them.

Mendelssohn may have come to Berlin to pursue his religious studies,

but soon he was reaching well beyond the Talmud,

exploring new worlds of secular knowledge,

dipping into dangerous Spinoza.

He wasn't trying to escape his Judaism, though.

He would live, marry and raise six children, all within the faith.

At the Jewish Museum in Berlin there is something that captures

his ideal of vigorous new growth, deeply rooted in long tradition.

It's a masterpiece of synagogue art,

made from Mendelssohn's wife's own wedding dress.

This is a Torah ark curtain

which was given to the Berlin Jewish community

by Moses Mendelssohn and his wife, Fromet.

And both their names are on it, and it was dedicated by them.

And what I think is particularly special about them,

-the names are in parallel, that seems like equality.

-Yeah.

Yeah, that is a very Enlightenment thing.

'Spinoza would have loved this.

'If you had to make something that says "God is nature",

'this is surely it.'

-What's particularly unusual here is that you actually have...

-Flowers.

..the flowers and the grass and it's all alive

-and it's a real landscape.

-Yes.

-Yes.

-That's very, very unusual.

-Yeah, it is, isn't it?

And that the flowers, you can actually tell which kind of flowers

-they are, that you can find.

-What have we got?

We've got roses and we've got lilies.

-We have carnations.

-HaSharon. We have carnations.

And we have... Goodness, those beautiful blue flowers.

This whole sense of botanising

being part of the 18th-century mind,

that you catalogue the wonders of nature

and you can have two views about that.

You can have the kind of non-religious view

that nature is its own thing.

Or you can have the view that nature is absolutely proof,

not just of God's existence, but of His genius.

So a sense, actually, of the deep past

made beautiful by the possibility of a flowering present

is all in the object.

Nourished by the ideas of the Enlightenment,

there were other flowers that bloomed for Mendelssohn -

close and enduring friendships made with non-Jewish writers.

It seems so obvious, so easy now, sharing culture,

without being asked to sacrifice your identity,

but then it was almost incredible.

His closest friend was the poet and playwright, Gotthold Lessing.

They played chess together, walked in their gardens,

Mendelssohn even came round for dinner,

bringing his own kosher food.

Lessing honoured their friendship in his play, Nathan The Wise.

Nathan, a Jew, expresses in a few resonant words

the high hopes of the Enlightenment promise.

It is enough to be "ein Mensch", a man.

And the man who had been the inspiration for Nathan

wanted other Jews to share in that promise.

He began to think about the problem, the issue, of language.

You could not be an aspiring 18th-century philosopher

and not think about the relationship between language and identity.

That was at the heart of a great deal of the discussion

of which he was part.

And the relationship between the language of the Torah, Hebrew,

and the language of his adopted country,

the language he knew his children would grow up speaking, German.

Hebrew, he thought, in some way, while magnificent and noble,

had actually been lost in esoteric debates in the Talmud.

And if these young Jews, who were simultaneously Prussians and Jews,

were going to feel the Bible and the Torah as a living thing,

they were going to need to read it in the new language, too.

But, and this is the crucial point,

the only translations into German available at that time

were essentially the achievements of Christian Bible scholars.

So it needed a Jew somehow to actually translate

that supple Hebrew into a German which faithfully reflected

its richness and strength.

And there was only one person who could do that - himself.

So he gets to work.

And here it is, right from the beginning,

the Book Of Genesis, the beginning of the beginning.

And it is extraordinary to read, on one side of the page the Hebrew,

very familiar to all of us who went to Hebrew school,

and the other side, incredibly unfamiliar to me, in Hebrew letters,

this is the halfway house, exactly the same verse.

How does the Bible begin?

All of you out there will know this, won't you?

Possibly not in Hebrew. Here is how the Hebrew sounds.

HE READS IN HEBREW, THEN ENGLISH "In the beginning,

"God created

"the heavens

"the earth."

And moving my eye over to the difficult bit, in German,

where it says, "Im Anfang schuf Gott..."

"At the beginning, God created

"die Himmel - the heavens,

um..." und Erde - and the earth."

And I am stumbling over it, because it is so difficult for me.

I can see him really thinking about exactly how the Hebrew letters

would perfectly fit the German.

And there is something deeply moving in its linguistic

and cultural optimism about this, seeing German alongside Hebrew,

as though they were naturally kindred spirits to each other.

Mendelssohn's Bible was the bridge over which generations of Jews

would cross from the Jewish world to the German world,

from the religious to the secular.

They could read Isaiah in the morning and Goethe in the afternoon.

But Mendelssohn expected them to cross that bridge as Jews,

and to stay that way.

"Adapt yourselves to the morals and constitution

"of the land to which you've been removed," he advised,

"but hold fast to the religion of your fathers."

To his friend, Gotthold Lessing,

Moses Mendelssohn was simply "ein Mensch", a man,

but growing fame as scholar and philosopher made him a prize

for those who believed intellectual enlightenment was simply

the first step towards the ultimate enlightenment of Christianity.

Swiss theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater

publicly challenged Mendelssohn,

"To do what wisdom, the love of truth and honesty must bid him."

In other words, to convert to Christianity.

But Mendelssohn replied,

"I declare myself a Jew, I shall always be a Jew."

The prophet of the Jewish Enlightenment died in 1786.

For Mendelssohn's children and grandchildren,

things would be very different.

In 1789, revolution came to France

and, soon after, revolutionary armies began marching through Europe

tearing down ghetto walls

in the name of "liberte, egalite and fraternite".

It was assumed that the Jews would happily shrug off

their separate identity

in exchange for something they'd never enjoyed before -

equal citizenship.

Some did, some didn't,

but when the Emperor Napoleon was finally defeated,

it was assumed, just as mistakenly,

that every Jew must have been a dangerous Bonapartist.

So those new-won liberties were constantly threatened,

pushed back, reversed.

For Moses Mendelssohn's children, the road to Jewish emancipation

now seemed clogged with barriers.

Now they had to prove that a Jew could also be a good German.

One of Moses's children, Abraham, was a banker.

He and his wife, Lea,

threw themselves headlong into German culture.

Judaism took a back seat.

And their road into German acceptance would be through music.

Their children, Felix and Fanny, both became prodigies.

'Music critic Norman Lebrecht is in no doubt

'about their formidable talent.'

They both have a prodigious gift.

At the age of ten,

Mendelssohn was writing music

that was far in advance

of anything that had been seen...

Of anything that Mozart was doing at that age.

This boy was an absolute whizz!

He's the grandson of the great philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn,

the first who actually creates a dialogue between Jews and Christians

in Western Europe, who marks the beginning of the thaw,

and now, suddenly, his grandson is the new Mozart.

So there are huge hopes for him,

and now suddenly people are talking and recognising that Jews make music.

He becomes the favourite composer of the establishment.

In England, he becomes close, very close, personally,

to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

-And Prince Albert?

-Yes.

'The Queen's diary entry on first meeting him was,

'"He is short, dark and Jewish-looking."

'But appearances were deceptive - in fact, Felix was a Christian.

'When he was just seven years old,

'his father, Abraham, had had him baptised,

'hoping to ensure his future prospects.

'But perhaps Felix Mendelssohn's conversion was never complete.

This is a composer who is living in the age of Romantic nationalism,

where everybody is looking for a label

and everybody is keen on identity.

Mendelssohn never refers to his Jewish background.

Mendelssohn is in denial.

But, when it comes to his most famous work...

..there is a Jewish imprint on it.

-Take a look at the Violin Concerto In E Minor...

-Yeah.

..and tell me why that is not a Jewish work.

It's exploding, it's coming...

It is coming out of...out of the composer and out of the violin.

It can't... It's an unstoppable force.

It's so over-the-top.

it speaks of suppressed emotions and suppressed ideas,

and...and a suppressed society

and a suppressed identity, in Mendelssohn's case.

When it actually comes to the performance,

Mendelssohn can't conduct it.

He goes into a hissy fit - he's not feeling well.

-He leaves it to someone else.

-That's so Jewish!

-He sort of says...

-Exactly.

-.."I've got a headache."

-Exactly.

-"My arm won't move!"

-"I can't do it. I can't,

"can't do it - it's too personal, it's too close to me."

So did success require a baptismal sprinkle?

The story of another Berlin family suggests not.

The Beers were just as self-confident and ambitious

as the Mendelssohns,

but they wouldn't abandon Judaism to make it in German culture,

instead, they would bring it into the modern world.

Judah Beer had made his fortune in the sugar business.

But it was the voluptuous, raven-haired Amalia

who ruled the clan.

Her childhood name, after all, had been "Mulka", the queen,

and her pedigree was as close to royalty

as you could get among the Jews -

learned rabbis and bankers.

Queen Amalia stayed true to both by being socially dazzling

and resolutely religious.

She opened the doors of her elegant salon at Villa Beer

to the cream of Berlin society -

scientists and poets who vied with each other

for the privilege of sipping chocolate

and polishing their witticisms in her regal presence.

And at the same time, she and her husband led a campaign

among German Jews for a modern, enlightened brand of Judaism.

Leading by example, they built a synagogue inside their own home,

with services held in German as well as Hebrew

and, shock, an organ...

..a choir!

CHORAL MUSIC AND CHOIR SINGING

We all think of Jews and music in the same sentence,

but even though music did become the royal road for Jews

into the heart of German culture, it was a little surprising.

Singing, much less instrumental music, was really not

part of the world of the community or the synagogue,

but upwardly mobile Jews took to music like ducks to water.

So music was always going to be very important

to an ambitious family like the Beers.

If the first generation was all about the raw power of money,

for the second, what was crucial was the display of cultural refinement

in an elegant salon like this.

And the third generation was always

going to be about cultural performance.

And there was no performer more dazzling than the nine-year-old son

of Judah and Amalia Beer, little Jacob, who at that tender age

managed to pull off such a sensational performance

of Mozart's D minor Piano Concerto,

that it wowed Jews and Gentiles alike.

Now, that little boy was going to grow up to be Giacomo Meyerbeer.

And this is Giacomo's travelling piano.

He was not only the man who was going to reinvent

the entire form of opera,

he would also become an international superstar,

a celebrity.

And for such a superstar,

it was always going to be a case of, "Have piano, will travel".

And so, Jacob travelled.

In 1816, he left Berlin for Italy to study opera,

and it was there he changed his first name to Giacomo.

'But while he Italianised at one end, he Judaised at the other,

'adding his grandfather's first name, Meyer, to his surname,

'emerging as Giacomo Meyerbeer.

'He could have returned to Berlin and made a musical career there.

'But if you wanted to make it big time,

'there was only one place for that...

'..Paris.'

1831 - they are packing them through the turnstiles

here in the Paris Opera House.

And what are they coming to see? They are coming to see

an opera called Robert The Devil,

by somebody called Meyerbeer, but his first name is Giacomo.

Well, does he think he's Rossini or something?

He's a Jew, we know he's no Donizetti, no Rossini, no Bellini.

So what's he doing with this Robert The Devil thing?

Answer - medieval Renaissance extravaganza.

Orgiastic nuns rising from the tomb

to do "ooh-er" things with their shrouds.

A tormented hero on the rim of hell, and rather liking it.

OPERA PLAYS - "Robert The Devil"

It's Les Mis in chain mail.

It's spectacle, it's colossal production numbers,

it's tonic for the turnstiles.

And it seems to presage an entirely new phase in the history of opera.

This is, in every sense, grand opera, big opera.

No, it is not Mozart, it is not Beethoven.

HE LAUGHS

But if you think of it in terms of fantastic entertainment,

taking all those things which got the voltage whirring

and stirring in the minds of people in the 1830s -

ruins, the Christian soul, heaven and hell -

then this was absolutely perfect.

The public, Paris, all of Europe

could not get enough of Giacomo Meyerbeer.

From now on, in opera, he was the man.

OPERATIC SINGING

But despite his international fame, and despite his appointment

as musical director to the Prussian Court, Meyerbeer discovered

there were still some places where the "King of Opera" still smelled

a bit too much of chicken soup to be asked to the tables of society.

As he noted in his diaries in 1847, "It's the same old story.

"The ambassador held a dinner tonight,

"and invited all the Prussians, but not me."

Successful Jews had to deal with snubs of this kind all the time.

However high they climbed, there were always those

who thought they could see the gabardine inside the frock coat.

But, for Meyerbeer, there was something much more menacing

than a dinner invitation that never came.

In 1850,

when Meyerbeer was very much still king of the opera in Paris,

an essay of extraordinary violence appeared,

which, although it didn't personally name him,

made it very clear that he indeed was the target.

And the reason was there in its title,

because it was called Das Judenthum In Der Musik, Jewishness In Music.

And what that Jewishness was,

according to its particularly hostile author,

was the corruption of high art by sordid commercial popularity.

That author was Richard Wagner.

What made his onslaught on Meyerbeer and the other Jews in music

so ferocious and almost psychotic

was that Meyerbeer had been Wagner's patron.

He was biting the hand that fed him.

Ten years before Das Judenthum In Der Musik appeared,

it was Meyerbeer who read Wagner's early opera Rienzi,

Meyerbeer who had written a letter of recommendation,

Meyerbeer who had enabled the opera to be performed

both in Paris and back in Germany.

And at that time, Wagner could not possibly have been more obsequious.

"I must work so I will be worthy of you,"

Wagner wrote cringingly to Meyerbeer.

"I am your property," he even said.

Ten years on, when he had a little fame and just a little money,

Wagner was already thinking, as is clear, in a very different way.

"The Jew speaks the language of a nation in whose midst he dwells,

"but he speaks always as an alien.

"The Jew has stood outside the pale of any such community,

"stood solitary with his Jehovah, in a splintered, soil-less stock.

"In his art,

"the Jew truly cannot make a poem of his words,

"an artwork of his doings."

At this point, for him,

art was all about the spiritual depth of nationhood.

It was about tribe, about race,

about myth, about blood,

about territory, about soil.

And how could the Jews know anything about that?

They who were wanderers, they who had no country.

Wagner's poisonous tract sounded an ominous note

for the fate of the great Enlightenment hope

of toleration and sweet reason.

That has always been an urban hope,

the place where ancient suspicions would melt into city life.

Metropolitan Jews now dressed like everyone else,

shopped like everyone else,

applauded in the concert halls with everyone else.

The promise had been realised.

But then, with Wagner providing the seductive mood music,

German culture took an unexpected turn away from that urban future,

back towards the dark shadows

of a mythical Christian Teutonic past where Jews had no place.

'There are always going to be those who fear the future.

'The more the Jews became identified with that future,

'the more danger they would run if its progress stalled.'

You can see what fed the paranoia.

German Jews had made the greatest leap

that any minority has experienced in modern history.

By 1870, Berlin, home to a mere 3,000 Jews

in Moses Mendelssohn's time,

now had 36,000 Jewish citizens.

An educational revolution was under way -

Mendelssohn's dream realised more completely

than he could ever have imagined.

Jewish children were four times more likely

to go to high school than Gentiles.

And those children would go on

to become captains of the new industries -

shipping, chemicals, electricity,

mass-circulation newspapers and publishing -

and masters of the professions - law, medicine and science.

They had good reason to believe

that the prejudice against them was a dying vestige of the past.

They were patriots,

their destinies closely entwined with the destiny of the new Germany.

And they expressed their confidence the way Jews always did...

..by building a synagogue.

A really big synagogue!

3,000 could get inside this one on the Oranienburger Strasse,

the New Synagogue,

but it was a big synagogue for a big year

in German and Jewish history, 1866.

Just three months before this gorgeous monster opened,

the Prussians had defeated the Austrians

to ensure that the drive for German unification

was now going to be led by Prussia.

And from Berlin,

from what had already become a city

in which the Jews had an immense part to play.

So it was natural then

that Otto von Bismarck himself, the Chancellor,

who had managed to win the war through the help of money

loaned from his personal banker, the Jew Gerson Bleichroder,

was actually here in attendance with all the Jewish good and the great.

So those two big moments,

those two histories converged

at the inauguration of the New Synagogue

in September 1866.

The new Germany had taken a bet on the loyalty of the Jews,

and the Jews had certainly thrown their lot with German power.

It was a marriage that seemed to be made in heaven,

between modernising Jewish history

and the power of the new Germany.

Not a cloud on the horizon,

not yet, anyway.

And in France, the story was the same.

Only a dyed-in-the-wool Jewish pessimist

could have worried about cloudy skies here.

Like their German cousins,

French Jews had made a place for themselves

at the heart of urban prosperity.

And most successful were the Rothschilds,

the Paris branch of a dynasty

that had begun in the Frankfurt ghetto.

I wonder how many of the commuters

who come and go every day here in the Gare du Nord

know that it was a project of the French Rothschild family.

We usually think of the Rothschilds as masters of international finance,

supporting government debts and sometimes wars.

But, especially here in France,

there was a strongly practical side to their enterprises too.

Baron James, the great patriarch of the French Rothschilds,

thought of himself above all as a patriotic Frenchman,

invested, in both the emotional and the financial sense,

in the modernisation of classical France

into an industrial superpower that could compete on equal terms

with Britain and Germany.

So railways were very important to him.

This station connected the other industrial pulses

of northern Europe,

particularly Belgium and Germany.

Now, the Rothschilds were not in this for charity.

They made a packet of money out of the railways,

and that opened them to a certain amount of resentment and envy.

But one has to say about France,

the tide of anti-Semitism hadn't yet crashed on the Rothschilds

and the other great Jewish families.

Really, in the middle of 19th century,

they were embedded in the project to modernise France.

They were as strong as one of Baron James's iron rails.

'The Rothschilds could afford to ignore anti-Semitic growling.

'They moved into an urban palace on the Rue de Monceau

'and filled it with great art.

'And where the Rothschilds went, other wealthy Jews followed.

'Among those Monceau families was a great Sephardi dynasty,

'the Camondos.

'They had come all the way from Istanbul,

'where the patriarch, Abraham, had created a banking fortune.

'They spoke Judaeo-Spanish at home,

'but Abraham's grandsons, Nissim and Abraham Junior,

'had been educated in French

'and were drawn irresistibly to French culture.

'So they moved their bank and its fortune to Paris,

'and their splendour to the Rue de Monceau.

'There, they went completely native.

'Their Monceau mansion owed nothing

'to the rich culture of Ottoman Turkey -

'not a Turkish rug in sight.

'The Camondos had committed themselves heart and soul

'to being French.

'They took the Declaration Of The Rights Of Man at face value,

'and assumed it included their rights too.'

It looks here, doesn't it, as though they have been here for generations,

urban aristocrats in Paris,

but in fact, the Camondos were Johnny-come-latelys.

They only came here in 1869.

But in some sense, the family always felt they belonged to France.

It's been said of them that they thought of France

as their Promised Land,

and Paris as their Jerusalem. And there was a good reason for this.

They saw in France a place, after all,

where Jews had been emancipated for the first time in Europe,

a place where Jews could prosper and thrive

at the heart of high society.

And once they did come here in the 1870s, they built themselves,

along with all the other great Jewish families

on this street in the Rue de Monceau,

a place of sumptuous refinement.

They began to collect the furniture,

they began to become great connoisseurs of fine art.

And the hope was that they'd somehow settle into this world

as a natural piece of the period of the Belle Epoque.

And to a large extent, they did,

but in some ways also their timing was really awful,

because it was exactly at the time when this house was going up,

when they were filling it with their extraordinary artistic collection,

that French nationalism was changing,

from a broader, more cosmopolitan character,

to something narrower, more strident and more visceral.

And to those who embodied this narrower, more tribal view

of what it meant to be French,

the Camondos were not an admirable,

magnificent instance of everything that French culture could do.

They were simply Jews with a lot of money.

Defeated nations are dangerous nations,

prone to paranoia,

and that's exactly what happened

when France was defeated by Prussia in the war of 1870.

The war was followed by a global stock market crash,

and the financial panic triggered an outbreak of anti-Semitism.

All the medieval cliches

about blood-sucking Jewish moneylenders resurfaced.

The witch's brew of modern anti-Semitism coagulated

around the demonic figure of the Jewish banker,

locked in his vaults,

undertaking machinations that might control the European economy.

Now, of course,

there were, in fact, Quaker bankers,

Presbyterian bankers,

to say nothing of the Catholic bankers to His Holiness the Pope.

But somehow, as global capitalism became wired

to speculative businesses like mining and railways,

and the booms and busts of the world of finance became sharper,

those who were the victims of the crashes

thought that their predicament had to have come about

because there were certain people in the financial world

whose loyalty was to each other,

rather than the nations in which they happened to reside.

And who, I wonder, could those certain people be, except the Jews?

'The term anti-Semitism itself was an attempt

'to make Jew hatred appear rational and even scientific.

'Anti-Semites held that Jews were bound to each other,

'not by their adopted countries,

'but what lay beneath their skin,

'their Jewish blood.

'The runaway bestseller in late 19th-century France

'was also the most vitriolic -

'Edouard Drumont's La France Juive,

'Jewish France.

'So when it was revealed in 1894

'that someone had been passing military secrets to the Germans,

'that someone, of course, had to be a Jew.

'34-year-old army captain Alfred Dreyfus

'was a model of Jewish-French achievement.

'His family had been pedlars in rural Alsace.

'Dreyfus had risen through the ranks of the French army,

'which, uniquely at that time, allowed Jews to serve as officers.

'But his dreams of service and advancement were shattered

'when he was accused of sending military secrets to the Germans.

'Dreyfus was a victim of convenience.

'The handwriting evidence on which he was convicted was bogus,

'the identity of the real traitor covered up.

'Dreyfus's public degradation,

'which took place here at the military academy in Paris,

'brought to the surface anti-Jewish hatred,

'in speeches and in print, of the most primitive kind.'

"His face is grey, flattened and base,

"showing no sign of remorse,

"a wreck from the ghetto."

Parisians have always loved a good public spectacle -

ugly punishments as well as joyous moments.

So the humiliation of the Jewish officer

was bound to be a crowd pleaser.

Almost 20,000 people packed themselves into this great courtyard

ready to shout, "Death to the Jew!

"Traitor! Judas!"

as the sorry figure of Dreyfus was marched in

promptly at nine o'clock in the morning.

He must have felt a terrible sense of turmoil.

The Ecole Militaire, after all,

was the place which stood most for the honour and glory

of France's military past,

the place which must have meant most to him in his life.

And here he was, right in the dead centre,

ready for this formal, ceremonious degradation.

At the critical point, he stood absolutely stock-still.

The commanding officer read out loud to him,

"You are no longer worthy of bearing the arms of France."

And then the really tortuous stuff began.

His epaulettes and buttons were ripped from his uniform,

a sword which had been shaved through

so that there would be no comical mishaps

was broken over the knee of the officer.

There was the sorry figure at the centre of it all,

and then he did something, maybe for the first time in his life,

that broke the rules.

He was supposed to remain silent while the mob howled.

But Dreyfus did not.

He said, "An innocent man is being degraded,

"an innocent man is being dishonoured."

And then the most tragic things

that could have come out of his mouth,

"Vive La France!" - long live France.

"Vive L'Armee!" - long live the army.

And then he stepped over the debris

of what was not just his own personal career,

but the debris of a noble dream,

the possibility of being a patriotic citizen,

Frenchman and a Jew.

More was at stake than just Dreyfus's personal tragedy.

Whether the Jew was a traitor or was the victim of atrocious prejudice

became the touchstone for the entire fate of democratic justice.

And there were other, equally troubling questions.

Not everybody in the crowd at the Ecole Militaire that January day

was baying for Dreyfus's blood.

There were some among them

who were acutely moved by his plight, his torment,

and that was because they were themselves Jews.

And one of those Jews was a young journalist from Vienna,

Theodor Herzl, acutely conscious

that perhaps the assimilation route

of being a Jew in modern Europe was never going to work out.

Something snapped in Herzl

as that sword was broken over the officer's knee.

Something which told Herzl there had to be another future,

another way for Jews to survive in the modern world.

Weeks after the degradation,

Herzl left France and returned to Vienna, sunk into a deep pessimism.

'As a boy, young Theodor Herzl had been taught to believe

'the axiom of the Jewish Enlightenment -

'that a wholehearted commitment to secular society

'would sweep away all the old prejudices.'

All his life, Herzl had abided by the conventions -

don't make too big a deal of your Jewishness,

and Vienna will open its arms to you,

embrace you, give you a career or a reputation.

In Herzl's case, that of a lawyer

who was also an aspiring author, a journalist, a playwright.

But now, in the middle of the 1890s,

Vienna was becoming a very different place.

Anti-Semitism was a toxin at the centre of municipal politics.

The mayor, very popular Karl Lueger,

was an intensely demagogic anti-Semite.

Vienna regularly sent anti-Semitic deputies to the parliament.

So Herzl was having a profound change of heart.

He was coming to the conclusion

that anti-Semitism could not be cured or defeated,

you just had to get out of the way of it.

And the problem for the Jews

was that they were a nation without a home.

So, in 1895, he wrote his little book,

a booklet, really, called Der Judenstaat -

The Jewish State - and this is what he said in it.

"We have sincerely tried everywhere

"to merge with the nations in which we live,

"seeking just to preserve the faith, the religion, of our fathers.

"But this has not been allowed to us.

"It's been in vain that we've tried to enhance the fame

"of our countries in arts and sciences.

"It's in vain that we've tried to increase

"its wealth by commerce and trade.

"We are still, in the place where we've lived for centuries,

"decried as aliens, and often by people who were not even here

"when the sighs of our fathers had been heard for centuries."

Now thus was born Zionism.

Now Zionism has become a heavily-loaded term,

for some people even a tragically-loaded term,

but not for me.

I'm a Zionist, I'm quite unapologetic about it,

because it comes down to this -

was Herzl, who had a sense of a catastrophic event

just around the corner, telling the truth, or wasn't he,

about whether it was possible still

to live the Enlightenment dream here in the German world?

Of course he was.

With that knowledge, with that sense of the Jews having

never had the power of their own national home,

how could you not be a Zionist?

But not everyone was ready to give up on the Enlightenment dream.

Many still believed

that anti-Semitism belonged to a rotten, decadent past,

not to the future.

And in the new, fearless modern world that was being created

in music, art and architecture, Jews would march side by side

with their brothers and sisters, in the cultural revolution.

One of the most fearless modernists

was the Jewish-born Austrian composer and painter,

Arnold Schoenberg,

who, in the early 20th century, changed the very nature of music.

Working in Vienna and later Berlin, he abandoned tonality -

the system of notes

that had sustained Western music for 500 years.

Schoenberg counted many non-Jewish thinkers and artists

among his friends, among them, Wassily Kandinsky,

who was also ripping up the rule book

with his abstract art.

Like Felix Mendelssohn, Schoenberg had converted to Christianity,

hoping that it would immunise him

from the growing virus of anti-Semitism in Germany.

It didn't.

Even the love between modernist comrades could be tainted.

In 1923, Schoenberg discovered that Kandinsky had been sounding off

about the so-called "Jewish problem".

Kandinsky hastened to assure Schoenberg

he didn't mean him - goodness, no!

Schoenberg would be an exception, of course, to the Jewish question,

and Schoenberg said, "I do not want to be an exception,"

and wrote a long, impassioned letter to Kandinsky in which he said this.

"The events of the past year have forced on me a lesson

"and it's one I will never forget." What was that lesson?

Well, it was that, "I am no German, I am no European."

"Ja, vielleicht kaum ein Mensch bin.

"Perhaps I'm not even a man,

"since Europeans seem to prefer the worst of their race to me.

"Ich Jude bin.

"I am a Jew."

When the Nazis came to power ten years later, they agreed with him,

forcing him out of his job at the Berlin Music Academy.

Germany was now over for Arnold Schoenberg.

He left for America via Paris...

..and there he stepped towards another light.

This story of a great leap of faith began in a synagogue,

when a Jew was cast out by his own people.

It ends in another synagogue, rather differently.

On 24th July, 1933,

Arnold Schoenberg stood here

in the synagogue on the Rue Copernic in Paris,

seeking formal readmission to the community of Jews and Judaism.

The date could hardly be more significant.

For more than a decade, he had been predicting

that if Hitler and the Nazis ever came to power,

it would not just be the great experiment in cultural modernism,

which had begun perhaps since Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn,

which would be a casualty, but the entirety of Jews

that would be engulfed in something utterly catastrophic.

He knew that what had begun with words

would end with terrifying violence.

He'd long been devoted to themes Jewish.

He was in the middle of what was an unfinished opera, Moses And Aaron,

and now he stood there absolutely committed to this identity.

He'd become an ardent Zionist, and above all, he wanted,

right from this minute, to alert the world

to the extermination which he thought was about to happen.

Indeed, of course, he was so prescient.

That great dream of being Jewish and a cultural adventurer

was about to disappear into the smoke of the crematoria.

'Was it all a delusion, then, right from the start?

'I don't know.

'I like to think I would've been optimistic with Moses Mendelssohn

'and realistic with Theodor Herzl.

'I like to think that the humanity of the Enlightenment idea

'was not entirely cancelled out by the inhumanity of its incineration.

'To declare anything else is to declare victory for the murderers.

'I do know I grieve endlessly for those here in Berlin,

'and all over Europe, who innocently imagined they could be Jews

'and citizens of their own countries, and who, to the end,

'could not imagine the evil that would turn their books

'and their bodies into ash.'

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