SOURCE: Fenton, James. “Clues to the Holocaust.” New Statesman 95, no. 2461 (19 May 1978): 674–75.

In the following review, Fenton examines the issues surrounding internalized anti-Semitism among German-Jews that are discussed in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans.

One of the errors of the Whig interpretation of history, according to Butterfield, was a kind of retrospective modernisation of its subjects: Luther, for instance, was seen as the founder of the modern secular state—a development which Luther himself would have regarded with horror. It was the task of the historian, Butterfield argued, to show rather what divided Luther from our time, what made his assumptions and beliefs entirely different from those of later generations. This may be hard enough with Luther, but how much harder is it with a subject such as the Jews in 19th-century Germany. There the force of hindsight really does make us lose sight of the complexity of the...