There is palpable relief when the premodern is left behind, for now we see Jews fully enter into secular history. After the Enlightenment, the museum finally feels on firm ground, recounting the ways in which Jews became central figures in German banking, commerce, journalism and the arts.
But overall it is as if intellectual and religious substance had been drained from Judaism, leaving behind cursory accounts of rituals, tales of victimization and an accumulation of Jewish achievements that might inspire contemporary interest (like Leib’s writings or the emigration of Levi Strauss, the jeans pioneer).
And while pointing out conflicts, the museum tends to become sanguine about the knotty relationship between Jews and Germans. You learn, for example, about the involvement of Friedrich the Great with the ideals of the Enlightenment, but you won’t find out here that because he had trouble selling artifacts from his Royal Porcelain Factory, he forced Jews to buy second-rate porcelain if they wanted to bear children without paying exorbitant taxes.
Facts like those can disclose an entire world. But it would also make the museum more troubling. Instead, by making the German past seem more enlightened, and the Jewish past less particular, it has created an assimilated blandness in which antipodes unite in ersatz tolerance.
Imagine what the museum might have been had it decided to eliminate exaggerated effects and dull homogeneity. It might have been subtle, touching, unsettling. It might have taken history seriously. Perhaps it would have had the potency of the underground “Bibliotek” memorial built in the mid-1990s on the Bebelplatz, where the Nazis held a book burning in 1933, consigning thousands of volumes to the flames.
The memorial’s creator, Micha Ullman, knew he couldn’t reproduce the magnitude of the event or its destructiveness. Instead, he put a transparent window in the ground of the plaza, under which you can see an illuminated array of empty white bookshelves.
“Where books are burned,” a bronze plaque simply reads, quoting the poet Heinrich Heine from 1820, “in the end people will burn.”
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