Ralph David Fertig

Love and Liberation: when the Jews Tore Down the Ghetto Walls Ralph David Fertig

In the Breslau ghetto in the late eighteenth century, Jonah seeks to avenge his father, unjustly imprisoned by Prussians. He confronts subjugation from without the Jewish community and the oppression of religious fundamentalism within. When his Jacobin cell is discovered, he flees westward, joins the French revolutionists, and marches with Napoleon across Italy and the Germanic states, battling his way back to Hadassah, the schoolmaster's daughter, the love he seeks to liberate. Aaron finds comfort in the Talmud and tries to express its message of social justice in a context suited to the Age of Enlightenment, against the exuberance of the Chasids, on the one hand, and the growing impetus for assimilation, on the other. Widowed upon the death of Hadassah's sister, he finds a partnership with her in the nascence of Reform Judaism. Nathan, whose father manipulates the ambiguity of the period, builds economic opportunity as capitalism emerges from the wreckage of feudalism. He faces conflicts in values between the salon society of affluent Berlin Jews, the intellectual heritage of his wife's family, and the pushcart peddlers of the ghetto, among whom Aaron and Hadassah minister. Their interactions with one another and with representative and real characters of the time reveal the struggles and forces that culminate for each in their own personal liberation and that of Jews throughout Europe.