A comparative and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the specific and catastrophic development of National Socialist anti-semitism in Germany. It investigates the factors - economic, political, historical and social-psychological - that led Germany to the Nazi policy and practice of genocide. This book adopts a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to this central problem which, free from any metaphysics of ethnicity, seeks to confront both the paradoxes of the German-Jewish experience - the extraordinary initial success and the devastating subsequent failure, of assimilation - and the complex patterns of assimilation and rejection in other European societies.