Heavy losses on the cultural front

The start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon’s style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first great German Jewish man of letters, who, we are told, was passionate about social justice ‘for a man of his time and place’. None of those benighted men of the Enlightenment could be expected, of course, to attain the degree of passion about social justice that moves us now. We begin to fear we are in the hands of a liberal so complacent that he does not even know he is complacent.

On page seven, we get our first snatch of Heine. Elon quotes Heine often, but ruins the effect of this great German Jewish poet by quoting him only in English.