Grattenauer, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich°

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GRATTENAUER, KARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH°

GRATTENAUER, KARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH ° (1770–1838), German antisemitic pamphleteer. His first publication Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden (1791) launched the idea of an unchangeably negative and corrupt "Jewish mentality." In another of his widely circulated tracts attempting to rouse public opinion against Jewish emancipation Wider die Juden (1803, running into five editions), Grattenauer suggested that the Berliners remove Moses *Mendelssohn's bust and replace it with Voltaire's. Following in the wake of the latter's allegedly rationalist arguments against the Jews, Grattenauer was among the first to introduce the concept of race, thus heralding a new and ominous tendency in antisemitism, based no longer on religious but on pseudo-scientific grounds. "That the Jews are a very singular race, no historian or anthropologist can contest," wrote Grattenauer.

add. bibliography:

J. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction. Anti-Semitism 1700–1933 (1980).