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unknown at the time among the German middle class. The aesthetic tea parties arranged by these ladies played an important part in German cultural history; they certainly helped to make Berlin, better known in the past for its soldiers than its poets, a cultural metropolis. There was hardly a figure of cultural eminence who did not frequent these salons at one time or another. Some talked about these occasions with derision, others wrote with genuine appreciation about the role played by the daughters of the Cohens, the Itzigs and the Efraims, who promoted the cult of Goethe and Jean Paul at a time when most Germans were still immersed in Rinaldo Rinaldini and Kotzebue. Their intellectual interests were wide-ranging: Henriette Herz studied Sanskrit, Malay and Turkish, and exchanged love letters with Wilhelm von Humboldt written in the Hebrew alphabet. The emphasis was, however, on the soul rather than the intellect. There was a great deal of affectation in the exalted conversation and in the letters exchanged, an artificial ardour, a sensibility that did not always ring true. Their libertinism struck their contemporaries and the succeeding generation as very wicked; Graetz refers to these goings-on in almost apoplectic terms. Today it all seems naïve and tedious, but at that time whoever did not possess the depth of feeling demanded by contemporary fashion tried at least to go through the right motions of sentimentality and emotional ecstasy. The platonic and not so platonic affairs of these ladies, usually with much younger men, were slightly ridiculous. There was an element of madness in the general malaise of the Romantic Age but there was nothing specifically Jewish about it.
    All the great Berlin hostesses eventually became Christians. Dorothea, Mendelssohn’s daughter, converted first to Protestantism and then, following the Romantic fashion, to Catholicism. Some of them became very religious indeed; Heine poked fun at the new converts who over-adapted themselves, lifting their eyes in church higher to heaven than all others and twisting their faces into the most pious grimaces. The best thing Henriette Herz found to say of her own father, Moses Mendelssohn, and the men of their generation, was that they had possessed the virtues of Christian love and tenderness. It is easy to cast doubt on the genuineness of these conversions, but there were mitigating circumstances: they had received little Jewish education, and what they knew they loathed. Judaism as a religion was in their eyes very inferior to Christianity and made no appeal to their imagination. Such was the state of Judaism that even a good and faithful Jew like Lazarus Ben David, who was deeply saddened by the mass exodus, found it not at all surprising. How could one blame these people (he once wrote) if they preferred the joyous, well-frequented church to the sad and desolate synagogue? For Rahel Varnhagen, the most formidable of the Berlin ladies, the fact that she was born a Jewess was the great tragedy of her life; it was ‘as if a dagger had penetrated my heart at the moment of birth’. She was also the only one who had second thoughts later on; in her old age she wrote that she would not now forswear what she had once regarded as the greatest disgrace of her life, the harshest suffering and misfortune, namely to have been born a Jewess.
    Latter-day Jewish thinkers have treated these apostates with contempt, but can one really betray what one does not believe in? Many of them genuinely needed a ‘religion of the heart’, something which Judaism obviously could not offer. The position of the Jewish avant-garde in the early decades of the nineteenth century was more difficult than it had been in Moses Mendelssohn’s time. Enlightenment preached a spirit of tolerance and implied a growing belief in Vernunftsreligion. But intellectual fashions had changed: Enlightenment had almost become a dirty word, and from reason and tolerance the emphasis had shifted