Source: Saul Friedlaender, Chapter 3 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol. I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 73-112.
The situation was possibly even more extreme in Austria-Hungary. At the end of the nineteenth century, Jews owned more than 90 percent of the major banks in the Austrian part of the empire, and occupied nearly 80 percent of the key positions in the banking world 42 . In the Hungarian part, the Jewish economic presence, which benefited from the full support of the Hungarian aristocracy, was even more widespread. Above all, Jews were prominent among the great tycoons. They owned, edited, and very extensively contributed to most of the leading newspapers of Vienna. Though his words were somewhat exaggerated, it was nonetheless telling that Harry Wickham Steed, the London Times correspondent in the Austrian capital, could write that economically, politically and in point of general influence they [the Jews] are...the most significant element in the Monarchy.' 43
During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the harmonious assimilation of the Jews into German society, as in other countries of Western and Central Europe - later made formally possible by the full emancipation of 1869 and 1871 - could appear to many as a reasonable prospect 44 . More than anything else, the Jews themselves wanted to join the ranks of the German bourgeoisie; this collective ΓÇ£projectΓÇ¥ was undoubtedly their overriding goal 45 . Lay leaders and enlightened rabbis never tired of stressing the importance of Bildung und Sittlichkeit (manners and morals) 46 . Although the great majority of Jews did not abandon Judaism entirely, the collective effort of adaptation led to deep reshapings of Jewish identity in the religious domain as well as in a variety of secular pursuits and attitudes 47 . The modern German Jew, however, did create - consciously or not - a specific subculture that, although aiming at integration, resulted in a new form of separation 48 . Religious-cultural distinctiveness was reinforced by the increasingly negative reactions of society in general to the very rapidity of the Jews' social and economic ascent. Economic success and growing visibility without political power produced, in part at least, their own nemesis. In his biography of Bismarck's banker, Gerson Bleichroeder, Fritz Stern alluded to the shift in attitudes from the 1870s on: [Bleichroeder's] middle years described the moment of the least troubled amalgamation of German and Jewish society; his declining years [he died in 1893] marked the first organised repudiation of that amalgamation, and his very success was taken as a warrant for repudiation.' 49
One may readily agree with German historian Thomas Nipperdey that in comparison to that of France, Austria, or Russia, German anti-Semitism on the eve of World War I was certainly not the most extreme. One may also agree with his statement that pre-1914 anti-Semitism should be evaluated both within its own historical context and from the perspective of later events (ΓÇ£under the sign of AuschwitzΓÇ¥) 50 . However, his related statement that the Jews of Germany themselves considered the anti-Semitism of those years a marginal issue, a remnant of prior discrimination that would disappear in due time is less convincing 51 . Any perusal of contemporary testimonies indicates that Jews held diverse views regarding the attitudes of society in general toward them. It needs only Moritz Goldstein's lament to show that some German Jews were quite aware of the fact that the chasm between them and the surrounding society was growing.
This was true not only in Germany. Two equally remarkable literary representations of Austria before the Great War, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Arthur Schnitzler's The Road into the Open , provide contrary assessments of how the Jews perceived their own situation. For Zweig anti-Semitism was practically nonexistent, for Schnitzler it was at the centre of his characters' consciousness and existence. In any event, whatever the relative strength of pre-war anti-Semitism may have been, its presence was a necessary condition for the massive anti-Jewish hostility that spread throughout Germany during the war years and increasingly after the defeat of 1918. Moreover, the pre-war scene also provided some of the ideological tenets, political demands, and institutional frameworks that endowed post war anti-Semitism with its early structures and immediate goals.
When one considers the wider European scene, the achievements, political attitudes, and cultural options of Jews at the end of the nineteenth century appear as those of members of an identifiable minority, stemming in part from the peculiar historical development of this minority. But these achievements and options were first and foremost those of individuals whose goal was the kind of success that led to integration into society in general. For the anti-Semite, however, the situation looked entirely different: Jewish striving and Jewish success, real or imaginary, were perceived as the behaviour of a foreign and hostile minority group acting collectively to exploit and dominate the majority.
As long as merely a few Jews, under the patronage of kings and princes, managed to climb the social ladder, their limited number, the function they fulfiled, and the protection they were granted checked the spread of hostility. When, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in somewhat different terms 52 , emancipation allowed for the social advancement of a large number of Jews within a context in which their social function was losing its specificity and in which political power no longer backed them, they increasingly became the targets of various forms of social resentment. Modern anti-Semitism was fueled by this conjunction of increasing visibility and increasing weakness.
A common trigger of various forms of non-racial anti-Jewish resentment was undoubtedly the very existence of a Jewish difference. Liberals demanded that, in the name of universalist ideals, the Jews should accept the complete disappearance of their particular group identity; nationalists, on the other hand, demanded such disappearance for the sake of a higher particularist identity, that of the modern nation-state. Although the majority of Jews were more than eager to travel a long way down the road to cultural and social assimilation, most of them rejected total collective disappearance. Thus, as moderate as Jewish particularism may have been, it antagonised its liberal supporters and incensed its nationalist opponents. Jewish visibility in highly sensitive domains exacerbated the irritant in difference.
Racial anti-Semites also claimed that their anti-Semitic campaign was based on the Jews' difference. However, whereas for the non-racial anti-Semite such difference could and should have been totally effaced by the complete assimilation and disappearance of the Jews as such, the racial anti-Semite argued that the difference was indelible, that it was inscribed in the blood. For the non-racial anti-Semite, a solution to the ΓÇ£Jewish questionΓÇ¥ was possible within society in general; for the racial anti-Semite, because of the dangerous racial impact of Jewish presence and equality, the only solution was exclusion (legal and possibly physical) from society in general. This well-known basic picture should be completed by two aspect of the modern anti-Jewish scene that are either barely mentioned by many historians or considered all-encompassing by others: the survival of traditional religious anti-Semitism and the related proliferation of conspiracy theories in which the Jews always played a central role.
Whether or not Christian hostility toward the Jews was intermittent, whether or not the Jews themselves contributed to the exacerbation of this hostility 53 does not alter the fact that, in dogma, ritual, and practice, Christianity branded the Jews with what appeared to be an indelible stigma. That stigma had been effaced neither by time nor by events, and throughout the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries, Christian religious anti-Semitism remained of central importance in Europe and in the Western world in general.
In Germany, apart from the general motives of Christian anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Jewish attitudes also stemmed from the particular situation of the Churches throughout the Imperial era. German Catholics were antagonised by Jewish support for the National Liberals, who were Bismarck's allies during his anti-Catholic campaign of the 1870s, the Kulturkampf 54 ; conservative Protestants were firmly committed to the Christian nature of the Second Reich, and even liberal Protestants, in their attempt to rationalise Christianity, entered into confrontations with liberal Jews keen on demonstrating the pagan core of the Christian religion 55 . Finally, in Germany, France, and Austria, political use of Christian anti-Jewish themes proved successful, at least for a time, in appealing to lower-middle-class voters.
For some historians the rootedness and the very permanence of Christian anti-Judaism has been the only basis of all forms of modern anti-Semitism. Jacob Katz, for example, sees modern anti-Semitism as but a continuation of the pre-modern rejection of Judaism by Christianity, even when it [modern anti-Semitism] renounced any claim to be legitimized it or even professed to be antagonistic to Christianity.' In Katz's view any claims for an anti-Semitism that would be beyond ΓÇ£the Jewish Christian divisionΓÇ¥ were but a mere declaration of intent. No anti-Semite, even if he himself was anti-Christian, ever forwent the use of those anti-Jewish arguments rooted in the denigration of Jews and Judaism in earlier Christian times.' 56 This interpretation is excessive, but the impact of religious anti-Judaism on other modern forms of anti-Semitism is apparent in several ways. First, a vast reservoir of almost automatic anti-Jewish reactions continued to accumulate as a result of early exposure to Christian religious education and liturgy, and to everyday expressions drawn from the pervasive and ongoing presence of the various denominations of the Christian creed. Second, the very notion of ΓÇ£outsiderΓÇ¥ applied by modern anti-Semitism to the Jew owed its tenacity not only to Jewish difference as such but also to the depth of its religious roots. Whatever else could be said about the Jew, he was first and foremost the ΓÇ£other,ΓÇ¥ who had rejected Christ and revelation. Finally, perhaps the most powerful effect of religious anti-Judaism was the dual structure of the anti-Jewish image inherited from Christianity. On the one hand, the Jew was a pariah, the despised witness of the triumphal onward march of the true faith; on the other, from the Late Middle Ages onward, an opposite image appeared in popular Christianity and in millenarian movements, that of the demonic Jew, the perpetrator of ritual murder, the plotter against Christianity, the herald of the Antichrist, the potent and occult emissary of the forces of evil. It is this dual image that reappears in some major aspects of modern anti-Semitism. And, its threatening and occult dimension became the recurrent theme of the main conspiracy theories of the Western world.
The of Christian phantasm a Jewish plot against the Christian community may itself have been a revival of the pagan notion that the Jews were enemies of humanity acting in secret against the rest of the world. According to a popular medieval Christian legend, a secret rabbinical synod convened periodically from all over Europe to determine which community was in turn to commit ritual murder.' 57 From the eighteenth century on new conspiracy theories also pointed to threats from a number of non-Jewish occult groups, Freemasons, Illuminati, Jesuits. In the landscape of modernity, paranoid political thought was acquiring a permanence of sorts. What is the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style,' wrote Richard Hofstadter, is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a vast' or gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.' 58
Within this array of occult forces, the Jews were the plotters par excellence, the manipulators hidden behind all other secret groups that were merely their instruments. In the notorious two-pronged secret threat of ΓÇ£Jews and Freemasons,ΓÇ¥ the latter were perceived as instruments of the former 59 . Jewish conspiracies, in other words, were at the very top of the conspiratorial hierarchy, and their aim was nothing less than the total domination of the world. The centrality of the Jews in this phantasmic universe can be explained only by its roots in the Christian tradition.
Like any other national anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century and during the years preceding World War I, anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany was determined, as I have already indicated, both by dominant Christian and modern European trends and by the impact of specific historical circumstances, among which several further aspects should be stressed.
In general terms a structural dimension needs to be emphasised in distinguishing, for example, between French and German modes of national integration, with the relevance of such a distinction in terms of anti-Jewish attitudes becoming clearly apparent. Since the French Revolution, the French model of national integration had been that of a process fostered and implemented by the state on the basis of universal principles, those of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Since the romantic revolution, the German model of national integration had been derived from and predicated upon the idea of the nation as a closed ethno-cultural community independent of and sometimes opposed to the state. Whereas the French model implied the construction of national identity by way of a centralised educational system and all other means of socialisation at the disposal of the state, the German model often posited the existence of inherited characteristics belonging to a pre-existing organic community 60 .
By way of state-directed socialisation and in the name of the secular republic's universal values, a Jew could become French, and not merely on a purely formal level. (This despite intensely hostile reactions from that substantial part of French society that rejected the Revolution, the republican state, and thus the Jews, identified as foreigners allied with the state and as carriers of the secular, subversive values of social upheaval and as carriers othe secular, subversive values of social upheaval and modernity.) Regardless of formal emancipation and equality of civic rights, the Jew was often kept at a distance by a German national community fundamentally closed to a group whose recognisable difference seemed to society in general to be rooted in alien ethno-cultural - and, increasingly, racial - soil. A somewhat different (but not incompatible) interpretation has pointed to the fact that in France legal emancipation carried a prime expectation of gradual Jewish assimilation (also by way of the French educational system and its universalist values), whereas in Germany a widely shared position was that the process of assimilation should be imposed and monitored by bureaucratic means, and that full emancipation should be granted only at the end of the process. As time went by, in Germany the success of Jewish assimilation was increasingly questioned. Therefore, even after the Jews of Germany were granted full emancipation, anti-Semites of all hues - and even liberals - could argue that total assimilation had not really been achieved and that the results of emancipation were problematic 61 .
The situation in Germany was further exacerbated by developments specific to the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly the various aspects of an extremely rapid process of modernisation. By entirely transforming the country's social structures and by threatening its existing hierarchies, the onof German modernisation seemed to endanger hallowed cultural values and the organic links of the community 62 ; at the same time it seemed to allow the otherwise incomprehensible social ascent of the Jews, who were thus perceived as the promoters, carriers, and exploiters of that modernisation. The Jewish threat now appeared to be both penetration by a foreign element into the innermost texture of the national community and furthering, by way of that penetration, not of modernity as such (enthusiastically embraced by the majority of German society) but of the evils of modernity.
It is within this context that other developments peculiar to Germany acquire their full significance. First, after the rise and fall of the German anti-Semites parties between the mid-1870s and the late 1890s, anti-Jewish hostility continued to spread in Germany society at large through a variety of other channels - economic and professional associations, nationalistic political organisations, widely influential cultural groups. The rapid increase of such institutionalised infusions of anti-Jewish attitudes into the very heart of society did not take place - or at least not on such a scale - in other major Western or Central European countries. Second, in Germany a full-blown anti-Semitic ideology was systematically elaborated; it allowed more or less diffuse anti-Jewish resentment to adopt ready-made intellectual frameworks and formulas that in turn were to foster more extreme ideological constructs during the coming years of crisis. Such specific ideologisation of German anti-Semitism was particularly visible, in two different ways, with regard to racial anti-Semitism. In its mainly biological form, racial anti-Semitism used eugenics and racial anthropology to launch a ΓÇ£scientificΓÇ¥ inquiry into the racial characteristics of the Jew. The other strand of racial anti-Semitism, in its particularly German, mystical form, emphasised the mythic dimensions of the race and the sacredness of Aryan blood. This second strand fused with a decidedly religious vision, that of a German (or Aryan) Christianity, and let to what can be called ΓÇ£redemptive anti-Semitism.ΓÇ¥
References:
42 Bernard Michel, Banques et banquiers en Autriche au début du XXe Siècle (Paris, 1976), p. 312.
43 Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef (Oxford, 1989), p. 170. The extraordinary role of the Jews in Viennese culture at the turn of the century has been systematically documented in Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867ΓÇô1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, England, 1989).
44 For the historical background of emancipation, see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770ΓÇô1870 (New York, 1978).
45 Shulamit Volkov, ΓÇ£Die Verbuergerlichung der Juden in Deutschland als Paradigma,ΓÇ¥ in Juedisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990), pp. 112ff.
46 See in particular George L. Mosse, ΓÇ£Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,ΓÇ¥ in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 1ff.
47 Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749ΓÇô1824 (Detroit, 1967).
48 David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780ΓÇô1840 (New York, 1987).
49 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichraeder and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), p. 461.
50 Nipperdey, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie , p. 289.
51 Ibid., p. 290.
52 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; reprint, New York, 1973), pp. 11ff.
53 For debates on these issues see in particular Israel Y. Yuval, ΓÇ£Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,ΓÇ¥ Zion 58, no. 1 (1993): 33ff.; and Zion 59, no. 2ΓÇô3 (1994) (Hebrew).
54 Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870ΓÇô1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975) pp. 96ΓÇô98.
55 Ibid., pp. 209ΓÇô10.
56 Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700ΓÇô1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 319.
57 Amos Funkenstein, ΓÇ£Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern,ΓÇ¥ Jerusalem Quarterly 19 (1981): 67.
58 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago, 1979), p. 29.
59 Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723ΓÇô1939 , (Cambridge, England, 1970), particularly pp. 148ff.
60 Such distinctions have been implicit in some of the historical work published in the 1960s on the special course of German history during the nineteenth century; these theses have been recently reformulated and systematised by political sociologists. See in particular Pierre Birnbaum, “Nationalismes: Comparaison France-Allemagne,” in La France aux Français: Histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris, 1993), pp. 300ff.
61 For the comparative part of the argument, see mainly Reinhard Ruerup, Emanzipation und Antisemtismus: Studien zur ΓÇ£JudenfrageΓÇ¥ der buergerlichen Gesellschaft (Goettingen, 1975), pp. 17ΓÇô18.
62 For a clear summary of German modernisation and its impact, see Volker R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1987). For the voelkisch reactions to this evolution, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964); and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, Calif., 1961)
