After all, these people produced Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Freud, Einstein, the painter Liebermann, film directors such as Billy Wilder and novelists such as Joseph Roth—one of the greatest writers of the 20th century who, appalled by the onset of nationalism and aware of what was going to come, drank himself to death in Paris in 1939.At times such as this, I think of people such as David Daiches, probably our greatest literary scholar and the son of the rabbi...