The theologian Hans Küng wrote, ‘Nazi anti-Semitism would have been impossible without two thousand years of Christian anti-Judaism.’(28) This theme of Christian anti-Judaism is central to both the main academic theories on anti-Semitism. The ‘Rupture thesis’ argues that anti-Semitism increased with the decrease in Christian faith, developing in a vacuum as a kind of ‘ersatz religion’ that usurped the inherited functions of Christianity. The ‘Continuity thesis’ links Christian anti-Judaism with modern anti-Semitism, suggesting the latter is not something new and separate but is simply an evolution of Christian religious tradition. Neither are mutually exclusive arguments. It was after all the Crusades that marked the major turning point in Christendom’s treatment of the Jews.(29) The Crusades began the attack on all ‘infidels’, whether they were Jews, Muslims or heretics, in a religious genocide that continued under many different guises until the end of the eighteenth century.
The onslaught against Europe’s Jews mutated at the close of the eighteenth century when the French Revolution gave birth to a modern, essentially secular, nationalism, placing a hitherto unknown emphasis on the ‘citizen of the state’ coming first and foremost. And in the nineteenth century, Darwin’s revelations about evolution in the animal kingdom soon mutated into notions of Social Darwinism; the struggle between species was extended to mankind and citizenship and nationality increasingly became wed to the idea of race. Whereas in much of Western Europe varying degrees of assimilation had been achieved, in Eastern Europe the Jews largely remained a race apart, regarded as almost ‘other worldly’ by their host nations, and by and large wishing to remain isolated themselves.
Aronek Kierkowski was one of very few Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust; many of his family did not. Kierkowski’s family came from north-eastern Poland. His family were not typical of the majority of Jews in Poland, because they were extremely wealthy and also they spoke Yiddish and Polish, regarding themselves as Polish Jews — at least before the war. The Polish census of 1921 shows an oft-ignored picture, as expressed by the Jewish community themselves: Polish Jews overwhelmingly spoke Yiddish, 79.9 per cent of them spoke the language, whilst a further 7.8 per cent spoke Hebrew; in fact only a tiny percentage gave their mother tongue as Polish. But even more importantly, 73.8 per cent of them defined themselves as Jewish, not only by religion but also by race; they were not classed as Poles by those around them, and many did not class themselves as Poles either.(30) Kierkowski clearly describes the disastrous consequences of the Polish Jewish community’s self-imposed isolation, at the hands of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Russians alike. He states:
We had no social contact with the Poles and Germans who lived all around us, whether in town or in the countryside. That’s the way the Rabbis wanted it. They preferred to have the Jews isolated, because then they could control them religiously… Some of our Rabbis were like the Mullahs in Iran. They were still in the Dark Ages… When I grew up, Suwalki was like the rest of Poland, a very anti-Semitic place… Ghettoisation has always been a problem for Jews. When there’s danger, Jews tend to congregate. Then of course you’re a target concentrated in one spot… By living in ghettos for generations, some Jews who spoke Polish pronounced certain words with a Jewish accent. Instead of going to a Polish Gymnasium, many went to a Jewish school because community leaders wanted to keep Jews together.ccxii Thus if your parents spoke Yiddish, so did you. This was disastrous for us… These were problems our leaders could not cope with. For centuries, everyone relied on Rabbis for advice, but they couldn’t help here. They knew how to interpret the Torah, but they didn’t understand what was going on beyond their world… because of their isolation, Jews had very few Christian friends, people who could hide their identities and help them survive. Those Christians who did help should be declared saints, in my opinion. They were true human beings, but unfortunately there were very few of them in Eastern Europe.(31)
Eastern European Jews were far more likely to be orthodox and to have maintained their religious traditions, observance of religious rights, dress and ceremony than their counterparts in the West; they also had a far higher proportion of Rabbis and Talmud teachers. From the 1880s, as they became increasingly persecuted in the unremitting pogroms that took place in Russia proper, Russian Poland and the Ukraine, many fled to Western Europe and America, where they stood out from their assimilated Westernised cousins and were not always welcomed by more secular Jews. In their dress and appearance, they bore a closer resemblance to the parodies of Jews that appeared in anti-Semitic literature, and they drew greater attention to the issues of increased Jewish immigration and the extent to which assimilation was either possible or desirable. The steady stream of immigrants increased again significantly in the aftermath of the Bolshevik take over in Russia, when the revolution and ensuing civil war unleashed a new wave of massacres and pogroms against Jewish communities. They would not have headed for, and stopped in, Germany if Germany had not had a reputation as a safe haven for Jews, and a place better suited for them to stay than many others they could have chosen.
Prussia and then Germany presented the opposite image of Jewish society from that in Poland and Eastern Europe. From the 1740s to the 1930s, an unprecedented flowering of Jewish culture and scientific endeavour bloomed in Germany. The Jewish Enlightenment, the ‘Haskalah’, and its younger generation, the ‘Maskilim’, took the Jews out of their isolation and built bridges between Christian and Jewish civilisations. The leading figure in this process was the Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn was a Talmudic scholar who left the ‘hermetic insularity of the medieval ghetto’ to follow his Rabbi to Berlin. He entered Berlin in 1743 using the ‘Rosenthaler Tor’, the only gate through which Jews were allowed to pass. This was the Berlin of the Enlightenment in which, a mere three years earlier, Frederick II (the Great), had been the first European monarch to proclaim, ‘All religions must be tolerated,’ at a time when the French would still torture and execute a man for not doffing his hat at a passing Catholic procession.(32) When Mendelssohn arrived in Berlin, he would have seemed an unlikely figure to take on the role of bridge builder between the two worlds of Jews and Christians. His situation in 1743 was similar to how Aronek Kierskowski described Jews living in Poland in the 1930s, in that he only spoke Hebrew and Judendeutsch (Yiddish).ccxiii Although Mendelssohn could not even read or write German when he first arrived in Berlin, he became a man of letters, an important figure in the German and Jewish Enlightenment, and even went on to learn French, English, Greek and Latin. The message he preached essentially demanded greater tolerance from both Christians and Jews. From the Jewish community he also argued that ‘they shake off the isolation they had chosen for themselves’, and that ‘Jews should follow their religious laws and become loyal Prussian citizens, retain pride in their own culture while opening themselves up to the German culture.’ Mendelssohn taught that each community should learn from and take the best from the other. He opened the first German-Jewish Freyschule (Free School) in Berlin, where education led children out of their isolation whilst teaching them to cherish their own cultural origins. Many other such schools followed, all teaching reading and writing in both Hebrew and German.(34) Mendelssohn preached the right message for the right time, and it set the Jewish community on a path that lasted for two centuries, as they integrated themselves into first the Prussian, and later German society with an unprecedented level of cultural assimilation. Prejudice remained, but ever more doors and opportunities opened to a highly educated Jewish community.
In 1869 all remaining discriminatory legislation of any kind was removed and the link between citizenship rights and religious creed was abolished by the North German Federation (including Prussia) even before Germany was unified. Jews in Germany were at the dawn of a new era, where they were simply Germans of Jewish faith. The Jewish community in Germany gained prominence in a wide range of economic fields from banking and publishing, to shipping, electronics and retail commer
ce, and not least, in law and medicine. German Jewish banking dynasties, some of which went on to found financial empires, not only in Germany, but across the world, included the Rothschilds (from Frankfurt), the Oppenheims (from Cologne), the Bleichröders (from Berlin) and the Warburgs (from Hamburg). Ludwig Bamberger became the first head of the Deutsche Bank, creating a unified banking system for Bismarck’s new Imperial Germany. Bismarck himself has been accused of anti-Semitism and he like many contemporaries of his age across Europe no doubt harboured prejudices but it would be totally misplaced to try and equate these in any way, shape or form with what came over half a century later. Prominent Jewish businessmen such as Gerson Bleichröder and Ludwig Bamberger mentioned above did not only establish the banking system for the Reich but were personal bankers to Bismarck. At their invitation, Bismarck attended the opening of Berlin’s Jewish synagogue and despite his rampant anti-socialism and few close personal relationships he held a great personal respect and friendship for Ferdinand Lassalle, the Jewish founder of the precursor to what became the German Social Democratic Party. Other prominent Jewish businessmen went on to found business empires first in Germany and then globally, such as Albert Ballin who founded the world’s largest shipping company HAPAG (Hamburg America Parcel Transport). The Rathenau family dynasty founded the global electronics giant AEG. Georg Wertheim created the German department store chain Wertheim (now Karstadt) that built the ‘Harrods of Berlin’ on the Leipziger Strasse. The Mosse family established Ullstein, the large publishing house, which still exists today. In law and medicine, the German Jewish community, despite making up less than one per cent of the nation’s population, accounted for 25 per cent and 15 per cent of all of Germany’s lawyers and doctors respectively by 1925 — a simply staggering achievement.(35) The anti-Semitic single-issue lobby groups and political parties that did exist remained a total and utter electoral failure in Imperial Germany.(36)
The realm of politics was another field in which German Jews figured prominently. The German Jewish community produced men that founded some of the most important political movements in German history, including: Eduard Lasker, a leading member of the National Liberals during the Bismarckian era; Ferdinand Lassalle, the co-founder of the German Social Democrats, which became the world’s largest Socialist Party before the First World War and Rosa Luxemburg who became the co-founder of Germany’s Communist Party; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were, of course, also prominent Germans Jews. German Jews also played leading roles within the Weimar Republic: Walter Rathenau was Foreign Minister, Otto Landsberg was Minister of Justice, and Hugo Preuss was Minister of the Interior and the man who wrote the constitution. Amos Elon wrote, ‘The major revolutions in European and American Jewish life during the nineteenth century, from religious reform to political Zionism, originated in Germany and Austria among Jews passionately devoted to German culture.’ccxiv (37)
Jewish Germans rose to prominence in a wide variety of walks of life, not least in science and the arts, producing no lesser figures than Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Paul Ehrlich and Sigmund Freud. In literature, the Jewish community produced great writers including Kafka, Heine, Boerne and Zweig and in music, Mahler, Felix Mendelssohn and Schoenberg. In theatre, Kurt Weill’s The Three-penny Opera and Max Reinhard’s ‘new theatre’ are other examples of German Jews whose prominence has lived on.(38) While they flourished, they nurtured the soil and the spirit that had given them life, namely the Goethian high ideal of Bildung (high culture), which proliferated in a nation that had substantially more universities than any other nation in Europe, and which helped to produce such an array of talent in so many fields. By the time of the First World War, nowhere in Europe were the Jews more assimilated or successful than in Germany. Discussions abounded among Jewish scholars as to the dichotomy of being a German Jew, about the ‘duality of being a German and a Jew — two souls within a single body.’ Kafka defined their symbiosis rather more satirically when he stated that Germans and Jews ‘have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs.’(39) Along with Kafka, there was no shortage of writers who, both before the storm, and after it, noted the striking similarities between the perceived national characteristics of Germans and Jews, noting that both had ‘a great respect for education, hard work, the importance of family and a marked talent for abstract, speculative thinking. Both Germans and Jews were considered highly musical and were often regarded by other nations as being both indispensable and troublesome, aggressive and prone to self pity… But as Freud shrewdly observed, the narcissism of little difference can produce great hatreds; proximity, affinity and assimilation may in certain circumstances give rise to an intense and irrational backlash.’(40)
Niall Ferguson poses the altogether terrifying supposition that it is precisely when levels of assimilation reach their high point that elements within society reassert their intention to delineate their groups from the continued process of assimilation. In the case of Nazi Germany, Ferguson wrote, ‘The potential instability of assimilation and integration; the insidious spread of the meme that identifies some human beings as aliens; the combustible character of ethnically mixed borderlands; the chronic volatility of mid twentieth century economic life… all combined to destroy the highly assimilated and sophisticated Jewish community in Germany, just as had happened in Spain half a millennium before.’ccxv (41)
Despite the lack of mainstream political support for anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany there had been an upturn in anti-Semitism during the Great Depression of the late nineteenth century, made more socially acceptable by the likes of historian Heinrich von Treitschke’s attacks on Jewish financiers and the role he attributed to their playing in the speculative property and stock market bubble that emerged and then burst following Germany’s unification. This was coupled with the politics of envy that accompanies all economic downturns, when the publication of Prussia’s tax returns showed one-third of the richest families living in Prussia were of Jewish descent. But this still does not explain why there was such a rapid escalation in anti-Semitism in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War, which then began to contaminate the major parties of the right, including the Catholic Centre Party. What could possibly have created such a dissolution of civilisation and rush into irrational hatred? As described in earlier chapters, the ‘perfect storm’ of defeat, revolution, humiliation and economic collapse into hyperinflation created a tidal wave of bitterness and anger that swept the nation, fuelling the search for a universal scapegoat on which the Germans could pin all their woes. The military perpetuated the idea that Germany could have fought on to win better terms, but that she was ‘stabbed in the back’ by the revolution; a revolution that came from Bolshevik Russia, a revolution that was the inspiration of Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and from German leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacists. The right-wing press gave lurid reports of Jewish profiteers who had run armaments firms and made money during the war, building on age-old ingrained prejudices passed down by the Church about Jews as usurers. Economic crises and mass unemployment bred a rise in populist extremism and racism, as when jobs are short, it is common to hear people lash out at the most recent immigrants or the minorities in society. Right-wing tabloids in Germany portrayed rich Jewish department store owners as the ruin of German middle-class small shopkeepers, whilst at the same time demonising the flow of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe.
During the 1920s, up to a fifth of Germany’s Jewish population was made up of the impoverished orthodox Ostjuden (eastern Jews). These Orthodox Jews had lost everything fleeing from the pogroms initiated against them by the forces of the White counter-revolutionaries. These forces, which emerged in Russia and the Ukraine, as well as the new nationalist, authoritarian and anti-Semitic governments in Poland and Romania, in particular, had all bought into the link between Judaism and Bolshevism. The Orthodox Jewish community was an easy target as it presented a vi
sible ‘otherness’. Bearded men, boys wearing their hair in ringlets, and the traditional garb of black suits, hats and kaftans, made the Orthodox Jews highly visible as cultural outsiders who had arrived during a period of great social and economic upheaval. They were a world away from the secular, assimilated German Jews, many of whom blamed the rise in anti-Semitism on their arrival. In these diminished economic circumstances, radical biological racism was gaining a hold, not only on the far right, but also on elements of the Catholic and Christian Centre as well. Millennial Christian prejudice, and inflammatory superstition raged against the ‘Christ killers’ and became welded to a new economic anti-Semitism focused against ‘Jewish capitalism’, which increased with each twist in the economic crisis.ccxvi
The Catholic Church bought into the notion of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ from the outset, aligning itself with the fascist governments that emerged in Italy, Austria, Spain, Croatia and Germany, often turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses they committed in favour of seeing them as the last bulwark against the Jewish (or Godless) communism of the Soviet Union. When it came to saving Jews in the run up to the Second World War, the Vatican was only keen to save those Jews who had converted to Catholicism.(42) Protestant Churches were no better, although they were influenced less by a fear of communism and more by a long-standing sense of fervent nationalism, deep-rooted conservatism and anti-Judaism. The Churches and the right-wing conservative establishment tarred the Jews with ‘the rootless cosmopolitanism of international capital’, an ‘exploitative capitalist system’ as well as of being ‘the vanguard of decadent cultural modernity.’(43)
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