Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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8 The only, and irrelevant, exception might be those tax collectors, called fermiers-généraux, in France, who rented from the state the right to collect taxes by guaranteeing a fixed amount to the government. They earned their great wealth from and depended directly upon the absolute monarchy, but were too small a group and too isolated a phenomenon to be economically influential by themselves.
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9 The urgencies compelling the ties between government business and the Jews may be gauged by those cases in which decidedly anti-Jewish officials had to carry out the policies. So Bismarck, in his youth, made a few antisemitic speeches only to become, as chancellor of the Reich, a close friend of Bleichroeder and a reliable protector of the Jews against Court Chaplain Stoecker’s antisemitic movement in Berlin. William II, although as Crown Prince and a member of the anti-Jewish Prussian nobility very sympathetic to all antisemitic movements in the eighties, changed his antisemitic convictions and deserted his antisemitic protégés overnight when he inherited the throne.
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10 As early as the eighteenth century, wherever whole Jewish groups got wealthy enough to be useful to the state, they enjoyed collective privileges and were separated as a group from their less wealthy and useful brethren, even in the same country. Like the Schutzjuden in Prussia, the Bordeaux and Bayonne Jews in France enjoyed equality long before the French Revolution and were even invited to present their complaints and propositions along with the other General Estates in the Convocation des Etats Généraux of 1787.
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11 Jean Capefigue (Histoire des grandes opérations financières, Tome III: Banque, Bourses, Emprunts, 1855) pretends that during the July Monarchy only the Jews, and especially the house of Rothschild, prevented a sound state credit based upon the Banque de France. He also claims that the events of 1848 made the activities of the Rothschilds superfluous. Raphael Strauss (“The Jews in the Economic Evolution of Central Europe” in Jewish Social Studies, 111, 1, 1941) also remarks that after 1830 “public credit already became less of a risk so that Christian banks began to handle this business in increasing measure.” Against these interpretations stands the fact that excellent relations prevailed between the Rothschilds and Napoleon III, although there can be no doubt as to the general trend of the time.
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12 See Priebatsch, op. cit.
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13 According to an anecdote, faithfully reported by all his biographers, Bismarck said immediately after the French defeat in 1871: “First of all, Bleichroeder has got to go to Paris, to get together with his fellow Jews and to talk it (the five billion francs for reparations) over with the bankers.” (See Otto Joehlinger, Bismarck und die Juden, Berlin, 1921.)
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14 See Walter Frank, “Walter Rathenau und die blonde Rasse,” in Forschungen zur Judenfrage, Band IV, 1940. Frank, in spite of his official position under the Nazis, remained somewhat careful about his sources and methods. In this article he quotes from the obituaries on Rathenau in the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Hamburg, July 6, 1922), Die Zeit, (June, 1922) and Berliner Tageblatt (May 31, 1922).
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Wilhelm von Humboldt, Tagebücher, ed. by Leitzmann, Berlin, 1916–1918, I, 475.—The article “Juif” of the Encyclopédie, 1751–1765, Vol. IX, which was probably written by Diderot: “Thus dispersed in our time...[the Jews) have become instruments of communication between the most distant countries. They are like the cogs and nails needed in a great building in order to join and hold together all other parts.”
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16 Walter Rathenau, foreign minister of the Weimar Republic in 1921 and one of the outstanding representatives of Germany’s new will to democracy, had proclaimed as late as 1917 his “deep monarchical convictions,” according to which only an “anointed” and no “upstart of a lucky career” should lead a country. See Von kommenden Dingen, 1917, p. 247.
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17 This bourgeois pattern, however, should not be forgotten. If it were only a matter of individual motives and behavior patterns, the methods of the house of Rothschild certainly did not differ much from those of their Gentile colleagues. For instance, Napoleon’s banker, Ouvrard, after having provided the financial means for Napoleon’s hundred days’ war, immediately offered his services to the returning Bourbons.
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18 J. H. Hobson, Imperialism, 1905, p. 57 of unrevised 1938 edition.
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19 How well the Rothschilds knew the sources of their strength is shown in their early house law according to which daughters and their husbands were eliminated from the business of the house. The girls were allowed, and after 1871, even encouraged, to marry into the non-Jewish aristocracy; the male descendants had to marry Jewish girls exclusively, and if possible (in the first generation this was generally the case) members of the family.
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20 See especially Egon Cesar Conte Corti, The Rise of the House of Rothschild, New York, 1927.
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21 Capefigue, op. cit.
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22 It has never been possible to ascertain the extent to which the Rothschilds used Jewish capital for their own business transactions and how far their control of Jewish bankers went. The family has never permitted a scholar to work in its archives.
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23 James Parkes, The Emergence of the Jewish Problem, 1878–1939, 1946, discusses these conditions briefly and without bias in chapters iv and vi.
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24 Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, Berlin and Stettin, 1781, 1, 174.
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25 Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, Berlin, 1900, V, 236.
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26 For an excellent description of these civil servants who were not essentially different in different countries, see Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century, London, 1939, pp. 361–362: “Without class prejudices and hostile to the privileges of the great nobles who despised them, ...it was not the King who spoke through them, but the anonymous monarchy, superior to all, subduing all to its power.”
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27 See Kleines Jahrbuch des Nützlichen und Angenehmen für Israeliten, 1847.
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28 When the Prussian Government submitted a new emancipation law to the Vereinigte Landtage in 1847, nearly all members of the high aristocracy favored complete Jewish emancipation, See I. Elbogen, Geschichte der laden in Deutschland, Berlin, 1935, p. 244.
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29 This was the reason why Prussian kings were so very much concerned with the strictest conservation of Jewish customs and religious rituals. In 1823 Frederick William III prohibited “the slightest renovations,” and his successor, Frederick William IV, openly declared that “the state must not do anything which could further an amalgamation between the Jews and the other inhabitants” of his kingdom. Elbogen, op. cit., pp. 223, 234.
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30 In a letter to Kultusminister v. Puttkammer in October, 1880. See also Herbert von Bismarck’s letter of November, 1880, to Tiedemann. Both letters in Walter Frank, Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker und die christlich-soziale Bewegung, 1928, pp. 304, 305.
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31 August Varnhagen comments on a remark made by Frederick William IV. “The king was asked what he intended to do with the Jews. He replied: ‘I wish them well in every respect, but I want them to feel that they are Jews.’ These words provide a key to many things.” Tagebüc
her, Leipzig, 1861, II, 113.
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32 That Jewish emancipation would have to be carried out against the desires of Jewish representatives was common knowledge in the eighteenth century. Mirabeau argued before the Assemblée Nationale in 1789: “Gentlemen, is it because the Jews don’t want to be citizens that you don’t proclaim them citizens? In a government like the one you now establish, all men must be men; you must expel all those who are not or who refuse to become men.” The attitude of German Jews in the early nineteenth century is reported by J. M. Jost, Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten. 1815–1845, Berlin, 1846, Band 10.
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33 Adam Mueller (see Ausgewählte Abhandlungen, ed. by J. Baxa, Jena, 1921, p. 215) in a letter to Metternich in 1815.
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34 H. E. G. Paulus, Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln, 1831.
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35 For a clear and reliable account of German antisemitism in the nineteenth century see Waldemar Gurian, “Antisemitism in Modern Germany,” in Essays on Anti-Semitism, ed. by K. S. Pinson, 1946.
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36 The only leftist German antisemite of any importance was E. Duehring who, in a confused way, invented a naturalistic explanation of a “Jewish race” in his Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschädlichkeit für Existenz, Sitte und Cultur der Völker mit einer weltgeschichtlichen Antwort, 1880.
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37 For antisemitic attacks on Bismarck see Kurt Wawrzinek, Die Entstehung der deutschen Antisemitenparteien. 1873–1890. Historische Studien, Heft 168, 1927.
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38 Otto Glagau, Der Bankrott des Nationalliberalismus und die Reaktion, Berlin, 1878. The same author’s Der Boersen- und Gruendungsschmndel, 1876, is one of the most important antisemitic pamphlets of the time.
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39 See Wawrzinek, op. cit. An instructive account of all these events, especially with respect to Court Chaplain Stoecker, in Frank, op. cit.
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40 This proposition was made in 1886 in Cassel, where the Deutsche Antisemitische Vereinigung was founded.
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41 For an extensive discussion of the “parties above parties” and the pan-movements see chapter viii.
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42 The first international anti-Jewish congress took place in 1882 in Dresden, with about 3,000 delegates from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia; during the discussions, Stoecker was defeated by the radical elements who met one year later in Chemnitz and founded the Alliance Antijuive Universelle. A good account of these meetings and congresses, their programs and discussions, is to be found in Wawrzinek, op. cit.
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43 The international solidarity of the workers’ movements was, as far as it went, an inter-European matter. Their indifference to foreign policy was also a kind of self-protection against both active participation in or struggle against the contemporary imperialist policies of their respective countries. As far as economic interests were concerned, it was all too obvious that everybody in the French or British or Dutch nation would feel the full impact of the fall of their empires, and not just capitalists and bankers.
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44 Compare chapter viii.
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45 See Paul H. Emden, “The Story pf the Vienna Creditanstalt,” in Menorah Journal, XXVIII, I, 1940.
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46 See F. A. Neuschaefer, Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, Hamburg, 1935, and Eduard Pichl, Georg Schoenerer, 1938, 6 vols. Even in 1912, when the Schoenerer agitation had long lost all significance, the Viennese Arbeiterzeltung cherished very affectionate feelings for the man of whom it could think only in the words Bismarck had once uttered about Lassalle: “And if we exchanged shots, justice would still demand that we admit even during the shooting: He is a man; and the others are old women.” (Neuschaefer, p. 33.)
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47 See Neuschaefer, op. cit., pp. 22 ff., and Pichl, op. cit., I, 236 ff.
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48 Quoted from Pichl, op. cit., I, p. 26.
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49 See especially Walfried Vernunft, “Die Hintergründe des französischen Antisemitismus,” in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, Juni, 1939.
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50 See Chapter iv.
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51 See J. de Maistre, Les Soirées de St. Petersburg, 1821, II, 55.
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52 Charles Fourier, Nouveau Monde Industriel, 1829, Vol. V of his Oeuvres Completes, 1841, p. 421. For Fourier’s anti-Jewish doctrines, see also Edmund Siiberner, “Charles Fourier on the Jewish Question” in Jewish Social Studies, October, 1946.
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53 See the newspaper Le Patriote Français, No. 457, November 8, 1790. Quoted from Clemens August Hoberg, “Die geistigen Grundlagen des Antisemitismus im modernen Frankreich,” in Forschungen zur Judenfrage, 1940, Vol. IV.
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54 Marx’s essay on the Jewish question is sufficiently well known not to warrant quotation. Since Boerne’s utterances, because of their merely polemical and un-theoretical character, are being forgotten today, we quote from the 72nd letter from Paris (January, 1832): “Rothschild kissed the Pope’s hand....At last the order has come which God had planned when he created the world. A poor Christian kisses the Pope’s feet, and a rich Jew kisses his hand. If Rothschild had gotten his Roman loan at 60 per cent, instead of 65, and could have sent the cardinal-chamberlain more than ten thousand ducats, they would have allowed him to embrace the Holy Father.... Would it not be the greatest luck for the world if all kings were deposed and the Rothschild family placed on the throne?” Brief e aus Paris. 1830–1833.
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55 This attitude is well described in the preface by the municipal councilor Paul Brousse to Cesare Lombroso’s famous work on antisemitism (1899). The characteristic part of the argument is contained in the following: “The small shopkeeper needs credit, and we know how badly organized and how expensive credit is these days. Here too the small merchant places the responsibility on the Jewish banker. All the way down to the worker—i.e. only those workers who have no clear notion of scientific socialism—everybody thinks the revolution is being advanced if the general expropriation of capitalists is preceded by the expropriation of Jewish capitalists, who are the most typical and whose names are the most familiar to the masses.”
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56 For the surprising continuity in French antisemitic arguments, compare, for instance, Charles Fourier’s picture of the Jew “Iscariote” who arrives in France with 100,000 pounds, establishes himself in a town with six competitors in his field, crushes all the competing houses, amasses a great fortune, and returns to Germany (in Théorie des quatre mouvements, 1808, Oeuvres Complètes, 88 ff.) with Giraudoux’s picture of 1939: “By an infiltration whose secret I have tried in vain to detect, hundreds of thousands of Ashkenasim, who escaped from the Polish and Rumanian Ghettos, have entered our country ...eliminating our fellow citizens and, at the same time, ruining their professional customs and traditions ...and defying all investigations of census, taxes and labor.” In Pleins Pouvoirs, 1939.
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57 See especially the critical discussion in the Nouvelle Revue Française by Marcel Arland (February, 1938) who claims that Céline’s position is essentially “solide.” André Gide (April, 1938) thinks that Céline in depicting only the Jewish “spécialité,” has succeeded in painting not the reality but the very h
allucination which reality provokes.
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58 See for instance René Pinon, France et Allemagne, 1912.
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59 Some aspects of the Jewish question in Algeria are treated in the author’s article, “Why the Crémieux Decree was Abrogated,” in Contemporary Jewish Record, April, 1943.
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60 The term is Stefan Zweig’s, who thus named the period up to the first World War in The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, 1943.
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61 For a wonderful description of the British state of affairs, see G. K. Chesterton, The Return of Don Quixote, which did not appear until 1927 but was “planned and partly written before the War.”
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1 Although Jews stood out more than other groups in the homogeneous populations of European countries, it does not follow that they are more threatened by discrimination than other groups in America. In fact, up to now, not the Jews but the Negroes—by nature and history the most unequal among the peoples of America—have borne the burden of social and economic discrimination.
This could change, however, if a political movement ever grew out of this merely social discrimination. Then Jews might very suddenly become the principal objects of hatred for the simple reason that they, alone among all other groups, have themselves, within their history and their religion, expressed a well-known principle of separation. This is not true of the Negroes or Chinese, who are therefore less endangered politically, even though they may differ more from the majority than the Jews.
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2 This surprisingly apt observation was made by the liberal Protestant theologian H. E. G. Paulus in a valuable little pamphlet, Die jiidische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln, 1831. Paulus, much attacked by Jewish writers of the time, advocated a gradual individual emancipation on the basis of assimilation.
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3 This attitude is expressed in Wilhelm v. Humboldt’s “Expert Opinion” of 1809: “The state should not exactly teach respect for the Jews, but should abolish an in-human and prejudiced way of thinking etc....” In Ismar Freund, Die Emancipation der Juden in Preussen, Berlin, 1912, II, 270.
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