ANTI-SEMITISM

The term anti-Semitism first appeared and gained currency in Europe in the early 1880s to describe, it was claimed, a modern and objective hostility to the Semitic race, in contrast to hatred derived from earlier religious fantasies about Jews. The distinction was a key point in a defining document of modern anti-Semitism, Wilhelm Marr's best-selling book Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanentum (The Victory of Jewry over Germany), first published in 1879. Marr, a sixty-year-old journalist of middling talent, attempted to turn this publishing success in a political direction by establishing an anti-Semitic league, which was to take up the fight against the alleged Jewish victors. His political initiative is also considered by historians to have been a key development in hostility to Jews moving from a diffuse social prejudice intertwined with Christian belief to an organized political movement based on modern racist ideology and looking to legislation that would limit Jewish rights and curtail what was believed to be a rising Jewish power. In October 1880, the Anti-Semites' Petition gathered more than a quarter of a million signatures, and in the early 1880s the anti-Semitic Berlin Movement challenged the ruling and generally pro-Jewish leftist coalition in Berlin.

The distinction made by Marr between religious and racial hostility, however, was from the beginning not consistently observed. Within the diverse ranks of those who began to use the new term, its meaning remained imprecise, more or less synonymous with such earlier generic terms as Judeophobia or Judenhass (Jew-hatred) that had not made such explicit claims to racism as a science. Similarly, Marr was by no means the first to insist that Jews were a separate race with destructive proclivities. What made his pamphlet stand out was its focus on the growing dangers of the Jewish rise in the economic, political, and cultural realms—so much so that Jews had, he claimed, already effectively taken over Germany from behind the scenes. Marr's claim gained credence in part because of what was indeed a remarkable rise of Jews in nineteenth-century German-speaking areas, especially in Berlin. That Jewish culprits had been very prominent among those linked to financial scandals in the 1870s further enhanced the plausibility of Marr's charges.

The generic usage of the new term came to prevail not only in Germany but also in the rest of the Europe, gradually coming to be applied to any and all forms of antagonism to Jews, from simple irritation to murderous detestation. "Religious anti-Semitism" was a contradiction in terms, ignoring the very point made by Marr, but nonetheless religious hostility to Jews in the 1880s was also increasingly termed anti-Semitic. For example, Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), the chaplain to the court of the German Kaiser, launched a series of notorious attacks on Jews in the 1880s that featured both religious and economic themes but that nonetheless was considered part of the general surge of anti-Semitism in those years. Stoecker occasionally used vaguely racist language and was particularly interested in the role of Jews in modern capitalism, but he accepted Jewish converts to Christianity—indeed, took pride in them—in a way that a doctrinaire racist could not have.

Similarly, the harsh criticisms of Jews by the popular professor and nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), starting in the late 1870s, lacked a hard-core racist consistency, even though he too used the term anti-Semitism (Antisemitismus) and indeed had employed the notion of "Semitism" (Semitentum) in his writings as early as the 1860s. In a series of much-discussed articles in 1879–1880, Treitschke urged Germany's Jews to reform, to become Germans wholeheartedly, abandoning their lingering separatist identity, with its implications of superiority to non-Jews. However, whereas Marr's pamphlet described the "un-German" behavior of Jews in Germany as an expression of their fundamentally unchangeable racial essence, Treitschke believed that in fact many Jews had already accomplished the reform he asked for. He observed that there were Jews in Germany, "baptized and unbaptized … [who were] Germans in the best sense of the word" (Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, pp. 280–283), but he was also deeply troubled by what he saw as a new arrogance and separatist spirit among Jews, especially those arriving from eastern Europe.

In short, the "anti-Semitism" of both Stoecker and Treitschke, while using vaguely racist vocabulary, lacked Marr's belief in rigid racial determinism. Similarly, their approach, unlike Marr's, remained largely hortatory, urging Jews to reform, religiously or cultural-nationalistically. Both men warned against the danger of violence against Jews and did not support stripping Jews in Germany of their recently granted civil equality. But they both also predicted that violence would be the result if the mounting impudence of so many Jews was not curbed.

Whatever the genuine intent of these two men, the emotional power of their language, linked to their respected position in German society, added much fuel to the flames of what was increasingly called the anti-Semitic movement. Treitschke's name became associated with the notorious slogan, "The Jews are our misfortune!" (Die Juden sind unser Unglück), which would be picked up by more extreme activists and, eventually, the Nazis. Stoecker, in his many public speeches, caustically dismissed Judaism as "dead at its very core"; Jews no longer honored the god of their fathers but instead worshipped Mammon—in their new temple, the stock exchange; and in the leading ranks of the new capitalist rulers of Europe.

the spread of anti-semitism in the 1880s and 1890s

A rising hostility to Jews, often but not consistently using the new vocabulary of race, was in evidence elsewhere in Europe in the 1880s, although there were important and revealing variations from country to country and much inconsistency in what anti-Semitism seemed to mean. In the western regions of tsarist Russia, Jews were violently attacked in a series of riots, or pogroms (a Russian word for riot), killing scores and resulting in much property damage, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Jews were special targets in part because revolutionaries of Jewish origin had previously participated in violent attacks on a number of tsarist officials and also numbered among the assassins of the tsar.

Those revolutionaries did not in fact claim to speak for the Jews, and the rampaging mobs made no mention of the Semitic race, a term that was not in their vocabulary or world view. The more fundamental origins of the pogroms were to be found in the serious economic and social tensions in Russia at the time and the incompetence of the tsarist authorities in dealing with them. The immediate catalyst of the pogroms was a rumor—mistaken but widely believed—that the new tsar, Alexander III, had given an order to punish the Jews for participating in the murder of his father. At any rate, the pogroms, although subsequently described as anti-Semitic, were not racist in Marr's sense, nor were they the product of modern political organization; instead, they resembled the episodic, disorganized uprisings of the Russian peasantry in the past.

To state that Russian mobs in 1881 and subsequent years were not motivated by racial hatred may seem to make a mere verbal distinction; Russians of all classes certainly recognized Jews as profoundly different, because most of Russia's large Jewish population looked different (in physical traits and dress), spoke a different language (Yiddish), followed a different religion (one that itself greatly emphasized the separate lineage and nature of Jews and non-Jews), engaged in different economic activities (typically as middlemen rather than as peasants tied to the land), and were ruled by separate laws (Jewish with tsarist oversight). In short, one might easily conclude that Jews in Russia constituted a race without the word. However, tsarist regulations defined Jews as a religious group, not as a race in Marr's sense, and those Jews who converted to Christianity were treated differently; in a few cases some even entered government service.

In the west, there was also much variety. A racial-political movement against Jews was almost completely lacking in Italy, whether among the peasants or the rest of the population, but in Vienna, capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Karl Lueger (1844–1910), was elected mayor in 1897 on an anti-Semitic program, after being disqualified in several previous elections by the emperor, Francis Joseph, who thoroughly disliked Lueger and feared the implications of race-based movements in his multinational empire. Lueger's Christian Social Party, which may be considered Europe's most successful anti-Semitic organization before 1914, was another example of a party that attacked Jews with racist language but that also resorted to religious imagery and, indeed, relied upon support from the Catholic Church.

The Jewish population in most of western and central Europe by the 1880s was significantly unlike that in Russia; their status as a separate people—a "race" apart—was more subtle and ambiguous. By the late nineteenth century, they had been granted equality under the law, had prospered economically and risen socially, and in a number of areas had even served as high-ranking government officials, both appointed and elected. Their numbers were generally far smaller than in Russia (in Germany, around 1 percent of the population, and in most of the rest of western Europe, only a fraction of 1 percent). Most western Jews had adopted, or were adopting, the language, dress, and customs of the surrounding populations. It was widely assumed, especially by the liberal Left, that Jewish assimilation would continue as an aspect of the general progress of modern societies.

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Hostility to Jews of course much predated the 1880s. By the late eighteenth century what was termed "the Jewish question" was widely discussed, at least by the intellectual elites, among whom there were often ill-tempered dissents about the assertion that Jews could be expected to assimilate into the nations of Europe. The issue of whether Jews could become citizens was passionately debated in the first years of the French Revolution; they were finally granted civil equality in the revolutionary constitution of 1791, but by a very narrow majority. As French revolutionary armies expanded into the rest of the Europe, civil equality was extended to the Jews in all the lands ruled by the French. Still, deep and recurring misgivings about the issue remained in both France and the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Most of these misgivings might, again, be termed anti-Semitic before the actual word existed, in that they assumed some sort of unchangeable essence in Jews, one that was dangerous to non-Jews. In the many efforts to formulate the nature of that essential difference, the term race came to play a growing role. Still, there were pervasive and lasting uncertainties associated with what race in general, and the Semitic race in particular, actually referred to. Usage of the word race evolved in the course of the nineteenth century, with different nuances in each language, from initially being more or less synonymous with "sort" or "kind" (as in the "human race") to becoming a more precise or scientific term designating inherent physical and psychological traits. Still, even by the end of the nineteenth century, there was no clear consensus among the many theorists of race, let alone in the general population, about what constituted a race, or how completely membership in a race determined an individual's nature and behavior.

the mid-nineteenth century

The rise of nationalism in the middle years of the nineteenth century further complicated matters. Many who advocated granting equal protection under the law to Jewish residents nonetheless did not believe that Jews could possibly become authentic members of a European people or nation. And insofar as it was believed that nations were to be composed of a single race, or of closely kindred races, the problem was even larger, since even if Jews did learn non-Jewish languages and embrace non-Jewish customs, they could not become a different race. "Semites" remained a non-European people with no obvious homeland in Europe.

The issue had parallels in the much earlier and long-standing doubts by some Christians about whether Jewish converts to Christianity had genuinely abandoned their Jewishness. Such was the issue in Spain at the time of the Inquisition, when Jewish converts allegedly lacked limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood (often cited by modern historians as an early-modern proto-racist concept). Many observers in the nineteenth century, including many Jews, emphasized that Jews would always remain in some significant sense separate, never wholly blending into the people of the various European nations. At the same time, it should not be assumed that Marr, in his dogmatic assertion of the unchangeable and destructive essence of Jews, spoke for more than a minority, even in Germany. There is no question that Europeans in the nineteenth century became increasingly fascinated with the concept of racial determinism; many blended racist and nationalist language, but differences of opinion, inconsistency, and contradiction continued to characterize racist thought up to 1914 and beyond.

The case of Count Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), often described as the father of modern racism, is revealing in those regards. His very widely read Essai sur l'inegalité des races humaines (1853–1855; Essay on the inequality of the human races) offered the controversial theory that Europe's upper classes were racially different from and superior to its lower classes. Gobineau popularized another new term, Aryan, which he applied to the upper classes. Although he has often also been identified as an anti-Semite, Gobineau in his Essai placed the Jews among the superior "white" races. On the other hand, in his rankings the black or Negro race was at the bottom of the world's inferior races, and he described France's lower classes as having similar traits to blacks—especially low intelligence and a proclivity to outbursts of violence.

The qualities Gobineau attributed to blacks and other allegedly inferior races were rarely associated with Jews, even by anti-Semites. Marr had in fact written that the Semitic race was stronger and tougher than the German; he and most other anti-Semites also stressed the high intelligence of the Jews, made all the more dangerous because of their "un-German," slippery morality. Negative associations with the term Semite came from a wide range of other forms, seen perhaps most influentially in the extremely popular writings of the French scholar Ernest Renan (1823–1892). He introduced racial determinism as an important interpretive tool, although often in imprecise and paradoxical ways—and applied it in a negative way to other European races, not only the Semites. He wrote, for example, that France's courageous and combative "Frankish" race had been much weakened by its mixing over the centuries with the garrulous and effete "Celtic" racial strain, which helped explain France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871.

Renan's description of the role of the Semites in history contained both positive and negative elements—positive in their bringing monotheism to the world, but negative thereafter, because Jews gradually lost their creativity and became overly or destructively critical. However, he did not attribute those negative or destructive traits to his Jewish contemporaries in France, among whom he had many admirers and close friends. Indeed, as he observed the mean-spirited direction that political-racial anti-Semitism had taken toward the end of his life, he made efforts to disassociate himself from it. Marr, too, in his old age backed away from his earlier positions, apologizing to the Jews and quipping that the anti-Semites turned out to be worse than the Jews.

the late nineteenth century

Renan's and Marr's second thoughts were not unusual; imagery about Jews as the nineteenth century progressed was characteristically shifting and paradoxical, not predominantly or uniformly negative. Sympathy for the sufferings of Jews and recognition of their virtues existed side-by-side with jealousy over Jewish successes and worries about growing Jewish power, especially that exercised behind the scenes. Jews were portrayed, on the one hand, as frail, physically unattractive, and even malformed, but also as more resistant to disease than non-Jews and as reproducing faster than they were. As the new racial terminology spread, Aryan-Semitic contrasts or dualities seemed to gain credence and currency, mostly pointing to the degenerate spiritual qualities of Jews: Aryan creativity versus Semitic destructiveness, Aryan tolerance and generosity versus Semitic intolerance and egotism, Aryan bravery and idealism versus Semitic cowardice and "realistic" materialism, Aryan honesty and simplicity versus Semitic cunning and deviousness, Aryan chastity and morality versus Semitic sensuality and licentiousness.

Nonetheless, with a few exceptions, anti-Semitic political movements did not gain broad popular support or achieve any notable legislative victories until 1914. Jews continued to prosper, to grow in numbers, and to move up socially, especially in western Europe; the Rothschilds and many other Jewish financiers and entrepreneurs became legendary millionaires. One of the nineteenth century's most celebrated politicians, Benjamin Disraeli (British prime minister, 1868, 1874–1880), not only was of Jewish origin but also was well known for his boasting about the racial superiority of Jews.

anti-semitism in the generation before 1914

It is revealing that none of the previously discussed anti-Semites or alleged anti-Semites described Jews as vermin, or as worthy of death. Even the most influential anti-Semitic theorist of the pre-1914 period, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), whose work is often cited as linking pre-1914 anti-Semitism with Nazism, did not call for violence against the Jews and in other ways was considered moderate. His best-selling and almost universally praised volume, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (first published in 1899 with many subsequent editions into the 1920s), emphasized, as had Renan's works, the role of racial determinants in history—and the negative role of the Semites—but his definition of race, too, was elastic and hardly doctrinaire. He wrote, for example, "A purely humanized Jew is no longer a Jew because, by renouncing the idea of Judaism, he ipso facto has left that nationality." There were certainly others, theorists and popular agitators in the generation before 1914, who did describe Jews as vermin, implicitly deserving death or destruction, but they remained on the fringes, with nothing like the readership or popular following of Chamberlain or the other previously mentioned figures.

The successes of anti-Semitism before 1914 were limited but also difficult to gauge confidently. Lueger was indeed a very popular mayor, but his success had to do with his personal charisma and his "municipal socialism" in Vienna; he in fact did very little in terms of putting anti-Semitic programs into action. Laws were passed in Russia against the Jews, but by tsarist decree, not legislation initiated by elected anti-Semitic politicians, and those laws were notably unsuccessful. Even the most notorious explosion of anti-Semitic hatred in nineteenth-century history, the Dreyfus affair, cannot finally be termed a success for anti-Semitism, because it ended in victory—legal, political, and in other regards—for the so-called Dreyfusards, those opposed to anti-Semitism.

Nonetheless, the Dreyfus affair, arising out of charges that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a highly assimilated French Jew, had sold military secrets to the Germans, became much more than a trial; the extent of the hatred for Jews it unleashed shocked both Jews and non-Jews, especially because it occurred in a country where Jews had widely been considered better off than in any other. In the course of the affair's complex development, beginning in late 1896 and lasting into the

early years of the next century, political alliances, personal friendships, and even families were torn apart. Crowds chanted "death to the Jews!" and the language used by some of the anti-Dreyfusard militants was rabidly hate filled.

Issues of racial anxiety and social-Darwinistic struggle were central to the Dreyfus affair, as they were in Marr's writings and in those of other anti-Semites. The French were haunted by the fear of further defeats at the hands of the Germans; that men of dubious racial fidelities seemed to have gained power in the government and in high-ranking military positions, pushed many to panic and irrational judgments. The evidence against Dreyfus was in fact weak, largely circumstantial, and some of the testimony against him would later be revealed as false, but anti-Semitic agitators succeeded in whipping up mass hysteria, often resorting to reckless charges and bald-faced lies.

Theodore Herzl (1860–1904), a Jewish journalist reporting on the trial of Dreyfus for a Viennese newspaper, recorded that observing the anti-Jewish hatred in France at this time finally convinced him that Jews faced implacable hatred in the lands of non-Jews; the Jewish dream, his earlier dream, of becoming a respected part of European civilization was turning into a nightmare. Herzl, who would become known as the iconic founder of Zionism, concluded that Jews needed their own nation. A Jewish state and a Jewish homeland was the only realistic solution to the Jewish question.

In Russia, where Nicholas II considered himself to be at war with the Jews both inside and outside the country, violent pogroms again burst forth from 1903 to 1906, partly linked to Russia's disastrous war with Japan in 1904 and the ensuing revolution in 1905. The anti-Jewish violence this time was far worse than in 1881. That many of the most prominent leaders of the revolution were Jews, perhaps most famously, Leon Trotsky, reinforced an anti-Semitic theme—that Jews were both capitalist and socialist destroyers—that would become ever more powerful after 1917, central to Nazism.

the importance of anti-semitism in the nineteenth century

Historians have disagreed about the precise role of anti-Semitism in the arrest and conviction of Dreyfus, and even about anti-Semitism's power and general appeal in the affair, in part because of how much the country seemed to settle down afterward; the efforts to use anti-Semitism for reactionary political purposes seemed deeply discredited. Whatever the validity of Herzl's conclusions, very few French Jews left the country or embraced Zionism. Moreover, they continued to prosper after the affair as they had before. Parallel questions have been posed about the power and significance of anti-Semitism in Vienna, since Jews also continued to move into the city at a great rate until 1914. Moreover, the period when Lueger was mayor corresponded to a golden age for Jews, a time of prosperity and unparalleled creativity. Again, whatever the meaning of the popularity of Chamberlain's volume, the German anti-Semitic political parties of the generation before 1914 also fizzled, with their leaders discouraged and discredited. In Russia, where anti-Semites enjoyed governmental support, the sensational "blood libel" trial of Mendel Beilis in 1913, often termed the Russian Dreyfus affair, ended in his acquittal—to the apparent jubilation of the general population and the dismay and discredit of those, including government officials, who tried to exploit it for reactionary purposes.

For such reasons, some historians have warned against exaggerating the importance of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century, or of considering it narrowly through the filter of later Nazi victories and the Holocaust. Historians have similarly differed about the very nature of anti-Semitism: Was racial-political hatred to be defined as something new, or was it simply a modern variant of a much larger and more basic entity—a unique, endlessly baffling hatred, stretching back through the Christian period into the ancient world? Should anti-Semitism be conceptualized as a modern, secular problem, or is it closer to a religious belief, embedded so deeply and obscurely in the consciousness of European civilization that it is naive to believe in practical or "rational" solutions within any foreseeable future?

In related ways, some scholars have described hatred of Jews as a deep-seated and self-generating "diseased discourse" of Western civilization. This general approach maintains that Jewish activity or Jewish nature has had little or nothing to do with provoking anti-Semitism; the hatred has been, in the deepest sense, an expression of the psychic needs of non-Jews for a scapegoat. To suggest that Jews themselves played a significant role in provoking hatred has been dismissed as "blaming the victim." Opponents of the scapegoat theory have argued that conflict between Jews and non-Jews has usually involved significant elements of mutuality, having to do with "normal" competition and genuinely contrasting values (not only bigoted illusions or miscommunication); the tenets of Jewish religion, it has been argued, are inherently tension creating (strict monotheism entails intolerance; claims to being a divinely chosen people have engendered an offensive sense of Jewish superiority), just as characteristically Jewish occupations, such as money lending, tend to produce understandable resentments. Those emphasizing mutuality also describe typically Jewish occupations as being the result of conscious choice by Jews, emerging out of Jewish tradition, not only choices imposed by surrounding society. It is argued, at any rate, that the frictions between Jews and others are best conceptualized as comparable to what other merchants and money lenders, such as the Chinese or Indians, have faced in other civilizations, and not as utterly unique, irrational, or involving moral responsibility only on one side.

To some extent these contrasting interpretations parallel those familiar in other historical controversies, touching upon issues of agency and responsibility. Just as historians in the once-raging debates over guilt for World War I put primary emphasis on individuals, nations, or impersonal forces, so the controversies about anti-Semitism have often been about the relative importance or responsibility of individuals (Chamberlain, Nicholas II), nations (Germany, Russia), or impersonal forces (industrialism, nationalism). Signs of the kind of consensus that finally emerged from the war guilt controversies have begun to appear in regard to the origins and nature of anti-Semitism, but passionate disagreement also continues to characterize the field.

See alsoAlexander III; Chamberlain, Houston Stewart; Dreyfus Affair; Jews and Judaism; Lueger, Karl;Nationalism; Nicholas II; Pogroms; Race and Racism; Renan, Joseph-Ernest.

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