All language subtitles for BBC.The.Story.of.the.Jews.3of5.A.Leap.of.Faith.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org

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,

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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