Why is this better?

From the end of the middle ages to around 1800, the main language of the robbers and gangsters in Europe was the so called 'Rotwelsch' which was mainly Yiddish since the majority (maybe not the majority but a substantial, influential part) of these robbers were Jews. My Jewish friend Hersch pointed this out to me to prove that the Jews of Europe had also assimilated downward into the robbers of Europe. Robbers that became famous – to give these bad Jews credit.

In 1979, if memory serves, the FREI ARBEITER STIMME–the NYC Jewish Anarchist newspaper (Voice of the Free Worker)–became defunct, simply because their subscribers had died off.

Bill: Our FBI (BKA) is built up by a dubious crew of characters with deep roots in the Berlin Nazi main police academy. This part of our history I know about not so long. It takes time for these matters to surface.

But a friend of mine went to the Hamburg police instead to the military. And he made notes in the academy for police man. It strictly was forbidden. But he published it later for friends. Continuity. That was around 1976/7.

That's always on my mind when something somewhere surfaces, e.g. complaints to not be able to persecute the Jewish emigrants from Russia. And there is a huge rumor mill.

Not long ago I translated a mid 19 century article on the history of Reform Judaism for an American scholar. It was still written in German, and he needed it for his research. Both these guys the writer and the editor, who commented on the article in short schoolmasterly notes, felt very German to me.

I thought, they might have been a bit heavy for the American Jews they thought needed reform.

No Bill – what I and my friend Hersch are saying is that there was not only upward but also downward Jewish assimilation in Europe. These robber gangs were mixed gentile/Jewish. A famous head of these robbers was Abraham Picar from Holland, convicted with his gang of about 50 Jews/gentiles in Germany around 1800 (I could look up the details). Anyway – Hitler never refered to him.

The article was in German but published in the US. And both the author of the Short History of Reform Judaism in the US and the editor of the magazine were German Jews. Part of the German reform "crowd".

I had to check in another PC for the exact details. But it was partly really funny. But that would take to long here to explain.

They can be found in in an interview he had with Ari Shavit that was published in Haaretz.

Elon:“There was nothing fundamental in the relationship between German culture and German Jewry that absolutely dictated this appalling end."

Shavit:If that's so, then basically you believe that this thing could have continued to survive. The option of the Jewish diaspora in Germany was the most promising cultural option for Europe, in your opinion.

Elon: "Certainly. German Jewry was the secular elite of Europe. They were the essence of modernism – leaders who made their livelihood from brainpower and not from brawn, mediators and not workers of the land. Journalists, writers, scientists. If it all hadn't ended so horribly, today we'd be singing the praises of Weimar culture. We'd be comparing it to the Italian Renaissance. What happened there in the fields of literature, psychology, painting and architecture didn't happen anywhere else. There hadn't been anything like it since the Renaissance."

Shavit: You refuse to see the fact that there was a basic failure in this enterprise of secular European Jewry. You refuse to see that it couldn't last.

Elon: "I sincerely dispute that. I don't think there was something deep or fundamental or unavoidable here. It was chance. If the First World War hadn't destroyed Germany's liberal middle class, a very progressive nation would have developed there. Even after the war, Hitler wasn't the only alternative."

Shavit: You're really insistent on that. It's important to you to cling to the lost option of the yekkes. The book you wrote is essentially a nostalgic ode to the refined lost paradise of that Jewish Germany. In a certain sense, it is your true homeland.

Elon: "No. I grew up here, not there. I grew up in Tel Aviv in a middle-class family that lost its assets as a result of its emigration to Israel. My parents arrived from Vienna in 1933. My father wanted to go to France but my mother said it had to be Eretz Israel. And so we ended up in Eretz Israel. That's why I am not an ideological Israeli. I did not grow up here out of choice. But I did grow up here. Here is where I kissed a girl for the first time. And what is a homeland if not the place where you kiss a girl for the first time?”

It has been pointed out by others that Jewish cultural productivity only seems to flourish outside Israel.