Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
Page 79
4 J. G. Herder, “Uber die politische Bekehrung der Juden” in Adrastea und das 18. Jahrhundert, 1801–03.
[back]
***
5 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793–97), 40. Brief.
[back]
***
6 Felix Priebatsch,’”Die Judenpolitik des fürstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915, p. 646.
[back]
***
7 Lessing himself had no such illusions. His last letter to Moses Mendelssohn expressed most clearly what he wanted: “the shortest and safest way to that European country without either Christians or Jews.” For Lessing’s attitude toward Jews, see Franz Mehring, Die Lessinglegende, 1906.
[back]
***
8 See Honoré Q. R. de Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, London, 1788.
[back]
***
9 J. G. Herder, “Ueber die politische Bekehrung der Juden,” op. cit.
[back]
***
10 Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe’s review of Isachar Falkensohn Behr, Gedichte ernes polnischen Juden, Mietau and Leipzig, 1772, in Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen.
[back]
***
11 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Briefe bei Gelegenheit der politisch theologischen Aufgabe und des Sendschreibens judischer Hausvater, 1799, in Werke, 1846, Abt. I, Band V, 34.
[back]
***
12 This does not, however, apply to Moses Mendelssohn, who hardly knew the thoughts of Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, and other members of the younger generation. Mendelssohn was revered for his uniqueness. His firm adherence to his Jewish religion made it impossible for him to break ultimately with the Jewish people, which his successors did as a matter of course. He felt he was “a member of an oppressed people who must beg for the good will and protection of the governing nation” (see his “Letter to Lavater,” 1770, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, Berlin, 1930); that is, he always knew that the extraordinary esteem for his person paralleled an extraordinary contempt for his people. Since he, unlike Jews of following generations, did not share this contempt, he did not consider himself an exception.
[back]
***
13 The Prussia which Lessing had described as “Europe’s most enslaved country” was to Mendelssohn “a state in which one of the wisest princes who ever ruled men has made the arts and sciences flourish, has made national freedom of thought so general that its beneficent effects reach even the lowliest inhabitants of his domain.” Such humble contentment is touching and surprising if one realizes that the “wisest prince” had made it very hard for the Jewish philosopher to get permission to sojourn in Berlin and, at a time when his Munzjuden enjoyed all privileges, did not even grant him the regular status of a “protected Jew.” Mendelssohn was even aware that he, the friend of all educated Germany, would be subject to the same tax levied upon an ox led to the market if ever he decided to visit his friend Lavater in Leipzig, but no political conclusion regarding the improvement of such conditions ever occurred to him. (See the “Letter to Lavater,” op. cit., and his preface to his translation of Menasseh Ben Israel in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. Ill, Leipzig, 1843–45.)
[back]
***
14 See Heinrich Silbergleit, Die Bevölkerungs- und Berufsverhältnisse der Juden im Deutschen Reich, Vol. I, Berlin, 1930.
[back]
***
15 C. W. F. Grattenauer’s widely read pamphlet Wider die Juden of 1802 had been preceded as far back as 1791 by another, Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden in which the growing influence of the Jews in Berlin was already pointed out. Although the early pamphlet was reviewed in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, 1792, Vol. CXII, almost nobody ever read it.
[back]
***
16 Clemens Brentano’s Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte was written for and read to the so-called Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft, a famous club of writers and patriots, founded in 1808 for the struggle against Napoleon.
[back]
***
17 Thus the Rothschilds in the 1820’s withdrew a large donation from their native community of Frankfurt, in order to counteract the influence of reformers who wanted Jewish children to receive a general education. See Isaak Markus Jost, Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten, 1846, X, 102.
[back]
***
18 Op. cit., IX, 38.—The court Jews and the rich Jewish bankers who followed in their footsteps never wanted to leave the Jewish community. They acted as its representatives and protectors against public authorities; they were frequently granted official power over communities which they ruled from afar so that the old autonomy of Jewish communities was undermined and destroyed from within long before it was abolished by the nation-state. The first court Jew with monarchical aspirations in his own “nation” was a Jew of Prague, a purveyor of supplies to the Elector Maurice of Saxony in the sixteenth century. He demanded that all rabbis and community heads be selected from members of his family. (See Bondy-Dworsky, Geschichte der Juden in Boehmen, Maehren und Schlesien, Prague, 1906, II, 727.) The practice of installing court Jews as dictators in their communities became general in the eighteenth century and was followed by the rule of “notables” in the nineteenth century.
[back]
***
19 Johann Jacob Schudt, Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten, Frankfurt a.M., 1715–1717, IV, Annex, 48.
[back]
***
20 Selma Stern, Jud Suess, Berlin, 1929, pp. 18 f.
[back]
***
21 Schudt, op. cit., I, 19.
[back]
***
22 Christian Friedrich Ruehs defines the whole Jewish people as a “caste of merchants.” “Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht,” in Zeitschrift für die neueste Geschichte, 1815.
[back]
***
23 A remarkable, though little-known, fact is that assimilation as a program led much more frequently to conversion than to mixed marriage. Unfortunately statistics cover up rather than reveal this fact because they consider all unions between converted and nonconverted Jewish partners to be mixed marriages. We know, however, that there were quite a number of families in Germany who had been baptized for generations and yet remained purely Jewish. That the converted Jew only rarely left his family and even more rarely left his Jewish surroundings altogether, accounts for this. The Jewish family, at any rate, proved to be a more conserving force than Jewish religion.
[back]
***
24 Briefe aus Paris. 74th Letter, February, 1832.
[back]
***
25 Ibid., 72nd Letter.
[back]
***
26 The “conscious pariah” (Bernard Lazare) was the only tradition of rebellion which established itself, although those who belonged to it were hardly aware of its existence. See the author’s “The Jew as Pariah. A Hidden Tradition,” in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2 (1944).
[back]
***
27 It is not without irony that this excellent formula, which may serve as a motto for Western European assimilation, was propounded by a Russian Jew and first published in Hebrew. It comes from Judah Leib Gordon’s Hebrew poem, Hakitzah ami, 1863. See S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 1918, H, 228 f.
[back]
***
28 This formulation was made by Karl Kraus around 1912. See Untergang der Wilt durch schwarze Magie, 1925.
[back]
***
29 The title phrase is taken from a sketch of Disraeli by Sir John Skleton in 1867. See W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, New York, 1929, II, 292–93.
[back]
***
30 Morris S. Lazaron, Seed of Abraham, New York, 1930,
“Benjamin Disraeli,” pp. 260 ff.
[back]
***
31 Horace B. Samuel, “The Psychology of Disraeli,” in Modernities, London, 1914.
[back]
***
32 J. A. Froude thus closes his biography of Lord Beaconsfield, 1890: “The aim with which he started in life was to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries, and wild as such an ambition must have appeared, he at last won the stake for which he played so bravely.”
[back]
***
33 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
[back]
***
34 In his novel Tancred, 1847.
[back]
***
35 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
[back]
***
36 Disraeli himself reported: “I was not bred among my race and was nourished in great prejudice against them.” For his family background, see especially Joseph Caro, “Benjamin Disraeli, Juden und Judentum,” in Monatsschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1932, Jahrgang 76.
[back]
***
37 Lord George Bentinck. A Political Biography, London, 1852, 496.
[back]
***
38 Ibid., p. 491.
[back]
***
39 Ibid., pp. 497 ff.
[back]
***
40 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 1507.
[back]
***
41 Horace S. Samuel, op. cit.
[back]
***
42 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 147.
[back]
***
43 Ibid.
[back]
***
44 Robert Cecil’s article appeared in the most authoritative organ of the Tories, the Quarterly Review. See Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., pp. 19–22.
[back]
***
45 This happened as late as 1874. Carlyle is reported to have called Disraeli “a cursed Jew,” “the worst man who ever lived.” See Caro, op. cit.
[back]
***
46 Lord Salisbury in an article in the Quarterly Review, 1869.
[back]
***
47 E. T. Raymond, Disraeli, The Alien Patriot, London, 1925, p. 1.
[back]
***
48 H. B. Samuel, op. cit., Disraeli, Tancred, and Lord George Bentinck, respectively.
[back]
***
49 In his novel Coningsby, 1844.
[back]
***
50 See Lord George Bentinck and the novels Endymion, 1881, and Coningsby.
[back]
***
81 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
[back]
***
82 Horace B. Samuel, op. cit.
[back]
***
53 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 882.
[back]
***
54 Ibid., p. 73. In a letter to Mrs. Brydges Williams of July 21, 1863.
[back]
***
55 Lord George Bentinck, p. 497.
[back]
***
56 In his novel Lothair, 1870.
[back]
***
57 Lord George Bentinck.
[back]
***
58 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit, p. 1470. This excellent biography gives a correct evaluation of Disraeli’s triumph. After having quoted Tennyson’s In Memoriam, canto 64, it continues as follows: “In one respect Disraeli’s success was more striking and complete than that suggested in Tennyson’s lines; he not only scaled the political ladder to the topmost rung and ‘shaped the whisper of the throne’; he also conquered Society. He dominated the dinner-tables and what we would call the salons of Mayfair ...and his social triumph, whatever may be thought by philosophers of its intrinsic value, was certainly not less difficult of achievement for a despised outsider than his political, and was perhaps sweeter to his palate” (p. 1506).
[back]
***
56 Ibid., Vol. I, Book 3.
[back]
***
60 Yves Simon, La Grande Crise de la République Française, Montreal, 1941, p. 20: “The spirit of the French Revolution survived the defeat of Napoleon for more than a century....It triumphed but only to fade unnoticed on November 11, 1918. The French Revolution? Its dates must surely be set at 1789–1918.”
[back]
***
61 The fact that certain psychological phenomena did not come out as sharply in German and Austrian Jews, may partly be due to the strong hold of the Zionist movement on Jewish intellectuals in these countries. Zionism in the decade after the first World War, and even in the decade preceding it, owed its strength not so much to political insight (and did not produce political convictions), as it did to its critical analysis of psychological reactions and sociological facts. Its influence was mainly pedagogical and went far beyond the relatively small circle of actual members of the Zionist movement.
[back]
***
62 Compare the interesting remarks on this subject by E. Levinas, “L’Autre dans Proust” in Deucalion, No. 2, 1947.
[back]
***
63 J. E. van Praag, “Marcel Proust, Témoin du Judaisme déjudaizé” in Revue Juive de Geneve, 1937, Nos. 48, 49, 50.
A curious coincidence (or is it more than a coincidence?) occurs in the moving-picture Crossfire which deals with the Jewish question. The story was taken from Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole, in which the murdered Jew of Crossfire was a homosexual.
[back]
***
64 For the following see especially Cities of the Plain, Part I, pp. 20–45.
[back]
***
65 Cities of the Plain, Part II, chapter iii.
[back]
***
66 Ibid.
[back]
***
67 Ibid.
[back]
***
68 The Guermantes Way, Part I, chapter i.
[back]
***
69 Ibid.
[back]
***
70 Ibid.
[back]
***
71 Within a Budding Grove, Part II, “Placenames: The Place.”
[back]
***
72 Ibid.
[back]
***
73 Cities of the Plain. Part II, chapter iii.
[back]
***
74 The Guermantes Way, Part II, chapter ii.
[back]
***
75 Ramon Fernandez, “La vie sociale dans l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust,” in Les Cahiers Marcel Proust, No. 2, 1927.
[back]
***
76 “But this was the moment when from the effects of the Dreyfus case there had arisen an antisemitic movement parallel to a more abundant movement towards the penetration of society by Israelites. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that the discovery of the judicial error would deal a fatal blow to antisemitism. But provisionally at least a social antisemitism was on the contrary enhanced and exacerbated by it.” See The Sweet Cheat Gone, chapter ii.
[back]
***
1 The most extensive and still indispensable work on the subject is that of Joseph Reinach, L’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1903–11, 7 vols. The most detailed among recent studies, written from a socialist viewpoint, is by Wilhelm Herzog, Der Kampf einer Republik, Zürich, 1933. Its exhaustive chronological tables are very valuable. The best political and historical evaluation of the affair is to be found in D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1940, Books VI and VII. Brief and reliable is G. Charensol, L’Affaire Dreyfus et la Troisième République, 1930.
[back]
***
2 Written by two officers and published under the pseudonym Henri Du
trait-Crozon.
[back]
***
3 The Action Française (July 19, 1935) praised the restraint of the French press while voicing the opinion that “the famous champions of justice and truth of forty years ago have left no disciples.”
[back]
***
4 See G. H. Archambault in New York Times, August 18, 1945, p. 5.
[back]
***
5 The sole exceptions, the Catholic journals most of which agitated in all countries against Dreyfus, will be discussed below. American public opinion was such that in addition to protests an organized boycott of the Paris World Exposition scheduled for 1900 was begun. On the effect of this threat see below. For a comprehensive study see the master’s essay on file at Columbia University by Rose A. Halperin, “The American Reaction to the Dreyfus Case,” 1941. The author wishes to thank Professor S. W. Baron for his kindness in placing this study at her disposal.
[back]
***
6 Thus, for example, H. B. von Buelow, the German chargé d’affaires at Paris, wrote to Reichchancellor Hohenlohe that the verdict at Rennes was a “mixture of vulgarity and cowardice, the surest signs of barbarism,” and that France “has therewith shut herself out of the family of civilized nations,” cited by Herzog, op. cit., under date of September 12, 1899. In the opinion of von Buelow the Affaire was the “shibboleth” of German liberalism; see his Denkwürdigkeiten, Berlin, 1930–31, I, 428.
[back]
***
7 Théodore Reinach, Histoire sommaire de l’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1924, p. 96.
[back]
***
8 Reported by Joseph Reinach, as cited by Herzog, op. cit., under date of June 18, 1898.
[back]
***
9 That even Clemenceau no longer believed in it toward the end of his life is shown clearly by the remark quoted in René Benjamin, Clémenceau dans la retraite, Paris, 1930, p. 249: “Hope? Impossible! How can I go on hoping when I no longer believe in that which roused me, namely, democracy?”
[back]
***
10 Weygand, a known adherent of the Action Française, was in his youth an Anti-Dreyfusard. He was one of the subscribers to the “Henry Memorial” established by the Libre Parole in honor of the unfortunate Colonel Henry, who paid with suicide for his forgerieo while on the General Staff. The list of subscribers was later published by Quillard, one of the editors of L’Aurore (Clemenceau’s paper), under the title of Le Monument Henry, Paris, 1899. As for Pétain, he was on the general staff of the military government of Paris from 1895 to 1899, at a time when nobody but a proven anti-Dreyfusard would have been tolerated. See Contamine de Latour, “Le Maréchal Pétain,” in Revue de Paris, I, 57–69. D. W. Brogan, op. cit., p. 382, pertinently observes that of the five World War I marshals, four (Foch, Pétain, Lyautey, and Fayolle) were bad republicans, while the fifth, Joffre, had well-known clerical leanings.