German hatred for the Jews did not originate with Hitler and Nazi Germany. With the exception of the Jews of Altoona, German Jews in the 18th century lived under worse circumstances than their Eastern European counterparts. The man who reversed that was Moses Mendelssohn. Rabbi Wein chronicles Mendelssohn's rise to celebrity within German society, and captures the bitter irony that Mendelssohn's proposed solutions to anti-Semitism did nothing to stop "the final solution."