The Mechanics of Change: Essays in the Social History of German Jewry

by Steven M. Lowenstein

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Steven Lowenstein, scholar, teacher, and a writer was born in New York in 1945 into a family of German –Jewish refugees.

He received his master’s degree from the Princeton University in 1969 and went on earning doctorate degree from the Princeton University in 1972.

He taught at a number of universities, including Columbia University and Monmouth College, and worked as a researcher at YIVO and Leo Baeck Institute.

In the late 1970s Dr. Lowenstein moved to California where he is teaching Jewish history at the American Jewish University (formed from the University of Judaism and the Brandeis-Bardin Institute).

Beginning in the late 1970s Steven Lowenstein served as Isadore Levine Professor of Jewish History at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, California, USA.

He is the author of a large number of scholarly works, including The Jewish Cultural Tapestry: International Jewish Folk Traditions; The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770-1830; and Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its structure and Culture.

Reviews

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Histories of German Jews tend to give inordinate attention to a few exceptional and very, very wealthy families in Berlin (see Lowenstein’s previous book!), and this distorts the view of the German Jewish history in the nineteenth century. In reality, Berlin’s Jews were highly, highly not representative of overall trends. On a whole, most German Jews did not modernize until mid-century, and did not urbanize until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Other scholarship, says Lowenstein, vastly overemphasizes the importance of the Napoleonic era, which laid the roots of Reform and emancipation and modernization, but which did not bear true fruit until after the passage of an entire generation later. In this collection of different essays, all of which use statistical quantitative analysis to answer social history questions, many different facets of German modernization of non-elites are addressed. Many chapters focus on the persistent rural nature of German Jewry.