the mythology of antisemitism

7/28/2019 The Mythology of Antisemitism

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of ideas, developments in predictivefiction, and first attempts to forecastthe future scientifi~~y.The mythology of antisemitismPeter PufzerMany nations have suffered destructionby their enemies, but the reasons forthis have generally been simple. Thenative Americans and Australians stoodin the way of the white mans greed.One tribe has disputed anothers claimto grazing lands or water. But there isonly one instance in history of aregime attempting to exterminate anentire people for reasons of abstractprinciple, the Nazis final solution ofthe Jewish Question. What is theorigin of the belief in the wickedness ofthe Jews ?The Jewish people have displayedtwo peculiarities. The first is that theytake their religion, which imposesstrict observances, with them. They donot adapt to local observances orworship their earthly rulers. This gavethem, even in biblical times, the reputa-tion of being bad citizens. The second isthat though, after the Roman destruc-tion of Jerusalem in AD 70, theyceased to have a homeiand and werescattered in a worldwide Diaspora,they maintained, thanks to their reli-gion, their nationality. In a Europeturned Christian, this nation that deniedJesus was the Messiah became in-creasingly suspect.l

However, discrimination developedslowly. It is with the coming of thePeter Pulzer lectures in Politics at OxfordUniversity and is an Official Student (ieFellow) of Christ Church. His books include7.e Rise of Po&ical Antisemitism n Germany andAustria (New York and London, John Wiley,1964).

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crusades from the 12th century on-wards, that it becomes systematic; thatpopular violence against Jewish com-munities begins; that they are con-fined to ghettoes and forced to wearspecial dress; that they are excludedfrom crafts and the ownership of land,restricting them to trade and usury.Though some of the early churchfathers had accused the Jews of varioussins, it is from this time that thecommoner beliefs of Jewish malprac-tices date : that they desecrate thehost; that they ritually murder Christ-ian children, whose blood they need tocelebrate the Passover; that theirlearned writings, the Talmud, teachthem to hate and swindle Christians.

Thus, life was unpleasant for Jewsin much of the Christian era, but theirexistence as a people was not threaten-ed. Antisemitism, an organised politicalmovement pursuing the old pre-judices with new means, does notappear until the 19th and 20th cen-turies.

The reasons for this are simple. Aslong as the Jew was a second-classcitizen, he did not challenge the statusof others. As long as Christians wereexpected to be obedient to authority, itwas undesirable-indeed dangerous-to mobilise them with agitation. Anti-Semitism is a product of two features ofthe modern world, the emancipation ofthe Jews and the emancipation of themasses. Both these developments weresymptoms of increasingly rapid econo-mic and social change: the disintegra-


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tion of the old order based on agri-culture and subsistence production, itsreplacement by large-scale commerceand manufacture and a money-domi-nated market economy. It had itsorigins in the twin revolutions of thelate 18th century: revolutions of in-dustry in Britain and politics in France,which gradually spread eastwards andsouthwards through Europe.

In the new order, men were honouredfor talent not birth, merit not status,achievement not belief. The Jew, too,turned from pariah to citizen; equalrights were granted in France in 1791,in Britain in 1858, in Germany in1869. And though all callings werenow in theory open to all men, Jewsstill found it difficult to enter those ofhigh prestige-the army, the diplo-matic service or university teaching-and continued to follow those tradi-tionally open to them, or those whereingenuity or adaptability were at apremium-banking, new forms of com-merce, journalism, the law.

Jews were not alone to benefit fromthe new freedoms, whether economicor political; the new middle classeseverywhere became more numerous,more prosperous, more influential.But Jews were the most obviousbeneficiaries, and anyone who did notlike the new order was tempted tobelieve that because Jews had donewell out of the changes, they must haveinstigated them; that one had only topush Jews back into their previousinferiority for the good old ways toreturn. That is the origin of modernantisemitism.In contrast with the periodic out-bursts of Jew-baiting in earlier cen-turies, the new antisemites behavedlike political parties, with their ownnewspapers, election candidates, massrallies and-frequently violent-demonstrations. It is hardly surprisingthat Jews responded, in self-defence,by clinging even more strongly to thoseideologies that emphasised humanequality, liberalism, and socialism. This

polarised opinion even more, and theidentification of Jews with subversiveswas further fuelled.

In most European countries, formost of the 19th century, antisemiticviews were restricted to cranks. Theyinterest us now not because they saidanything illuminating about their times,but because in the hands of a fanaticaldictatorship their ravings became highpolicy. Their writings impress withtheir unqualified despair in the face ofthe apparently limitless power of thenewly enfranchised Jew. For the French-man Alphonse Toussenel in 1847 theprocess is almost complete.2Thanks to this parliamentary impotence,this inertia of power and torpor of thespirit, the mercantile feudal power rapidlyadvances towards the heart of our institu-tions. Cleverly profiting by the divisionsthat our press foments between monarchyand the people, it implants itself moredeeply every day, supporting its feet onthe peoples and the monarchys throat. Itis not yet totally organised today, it will betomorrow; it already has the producer andthe consumer at its mercy. The Jew reignsand rules in France.A generation later, the more celebratedEdouard Drumont declared : 3It seemed interesting and useful to me todescribe the successive phases of thisJewish Conquest, to indicate how, little bylittle, through the action of the Jews,France has dissolved and decomposedherself and how that carefree, happy andloving people has been replaced by ahateful, gold-infected people on the pointof starvation.A German pamphleteer, Carl Wil-manns, writing during the speculativeboom of the 187Os, coined the phraseThe Golden International to describethe network of banks and stock-exchanges in which he saw Jews as thechief link.4These assertions could gain wideacceptance only if certain conditionswere fulfilled. There had to be agenuine grievance, the Jews had to bea plausible explanation for deeply

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felt evils, and the assertions needed tocoincide with existing patterns ofbelief.

The upheavals caused throughout19th century Europe by rapid indust-rialisation, the new impetus given toracial and ethnic feeling by the emer-gent demand for nation states and bythe scramble for overseas empiresendangered any minority that failed tofit the desired form of society. Econo-mically threatened strata-landowners,peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers-who could not compete with the moreefficient capitalists found in antisemitisman attractive safety valve. Not allsuccessful capitalists were Jews andmost Jews were far from rich. But ahandful of well-known success stories,like that of the Rothschilds, and ahandful of local moneylenders, sufficedto reinforce the equation of Jews withthe oppression of money.The pursuit of purityOthers, not necessarily threatenedwith poverty, saw the Jew as anobstacle to the implementation of theirmania for national purity and cul-turally homogeneous states. Howeverardently the Jew might wish to inte-grate with the nation among whosepeople he lived, his good will wasoften not reciprocated. This peoplewithout a land, always on the move,seemed to belong everywhere andnowhere. To an Englishman a Jew wasreally a German, to a German really aFrenchman, to a Pole really a Russian,to all of them someone who owed moreloyalty to a cousin in New York thanto his king. Here, too, no evidence wasneeded: the mere fact of the Diasporawas proof.

These suspicions were all the easierto entertain if they were reinforcedwith inherited religious prejudice. Thesecond half of the 19th century saw arevival of writings on the allegedimmorality of the Talmud. The mostsuccessful of these was Der Talmudjudeby August Rohling, a Catholic priest

and professor of oriental languages atthe University of Prague, who turnedout, however, to be quite ignorant ofHebrew.6The charges were familiar: theTalmud permitted Jews to treat allnon-Jews, even animals, as enemies, tocheat and exploit them, indeed itcommanded them to show no sym-pathy or generosity to a Gentile. In anage when religious belief was in decline,such arguments might have had littleimpact. But the religion that Rohlingattacked had (he alleged) harmfuleffects in secular matters, in the Jewseveryday relations with the Christian.Much of the evidence in Wilmannsspamphlet was culled from Rohling. Themoral was clear: whatever the lawmight say, the Jew was not as good asyou and I: he was different and hewas inferior; his claim to equal rightswas null and void.

To the old religious argument wasadded a new, scientific-sounding one,that of race. Indeed the term anti-Semitism was coined in 1873 by aHamburg journalist, Wilhelm Maar, tosuggest that Jews, as Semites, werebiologically different from Europeans.To those who, without having readDarwin, had heard of the phrases thestruggle for survival and survival ofthe fittest, the new doctrine of raceseemed an admirable pretext for deny-ing the common humanity of awkwardfellow citizens. In 1899, they receivedtheir bible-in Die Grundlagen des noun-zehnten Jahrhunderts by the expatriateEnglishman Houston Stewart Cham-berlain, who surveyed the whole ofworld history as a struggle between theraces. 6

None of these beliefs could by itselfprovide the impetus for genocide. Tostate (however untruthfully) that Jewsbehaved badly to Christians because itwas in their nature to do so mightexcuse driving them back into theghetto, but hardly into the gas chamber.To justify the latter, it needs to beshown that Jews act in this way deli-

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berately and in concert: that there is aconspiracy. Here too, it is not difficultto find believers, if the events that needexplaining are sufficiently horrendous.After all, conspiracies have happened,secret societies do exist, and while itmay be difficult to prove that aparticular cataclysm was caused by aparticular conspiracy by a particularsecret society, it is virtually impossibleto prove that it was not.

The first event to require a con-spiracy explanation was the FrenchRevolution. It was duly provided byAbbe Barruel in 1797. His villainswere the Freemasons and the BavarianIlluminati. Only later did he becomeconvinced that Jews were in on it too.

The Jewish-Masonic conspiracy sur-facedatintervals thereafter,mostnotablyin the novel Biarritz by Sir JohnRetcliffe (a Prussian postal officialcalled Hermann Goedsche) .s Beforelong, this work of fiction, in which theDevil presides over a meeting of thetwelve tribes of Israel in the Jewishcemetery of Prague, reappeared as anauthentic document in antisemitic pub-lications.

The most celebrated fantasy of thiskind is, however, the Protocols of theElders of

the mythology of antisemitism

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