In a book published in 1950, a distinguished veteran of the fight against European anti-Semitism argued that the Nazi Holocaust had little to do with the tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany. Not only were people generally not drawn to Nazism because of longstanding anti-Jewish feeling, but the German public notably withheld enthusiasm for actions taken against Jews in the first years of the Hitler regime. The real cause of the catastrophe, wrote Eva Reichmann, had to be traced to the confluence of various crises in Germany after World War I, producing a profound social breakdown which the Nazis alone appeared capable of repairing. Germans who were drawn to Nazism for a variety of reasons, including ones rooted in individual and social aggressions, were attracted by the anti-Semitic campaign because it was part of a wider assault upon democratic values.
Mrs. Reichmann drew a distinction between such people and the Nazis themselves, for whom anti-Semitism was central—not merely part of a wider system of ideas, not just a vehicle for expressing other frustrations, but a profound commitment, and one particularly useful in their propaganda. Once in power, the Nazis pursued their Jewish quarry relentlessly, in measures that far exceeded those proposed or favored by the “mere” anti-Semites who had supported them.
Eva Reichmann approached her subject from a well-defined position. She had been a leading light of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith), a remarkable self-defense organization of German Jewry formed in 1893 which mobilized thousands of assimilated Jews on behalf of established rights. Members of the Centralverein believed both in Germanness and in Jewishness, at least as they defined them, and held this ground tenaciously against assaults by those who denied the possibility of a German-Jewish symbiosis. Among the latter were the Zionists, who long before World War II considered Jewish emancipation to have failed. Mrs. Reichmann had demurred, and indeed she maintained her faith even after the slaughter of the European Jews. “The social upheaval which was required to tear the fabric of Jewish-Gentile relationship even partly asunder,” she wrote in Hostages of Civilization, “shows how closely—in spite of all impediments—this fabric has been woven. Jewish emancipation is on the same footing as the emancipation of the workers and of women, and as democracy itself. If the conclusion is drawn that recent events in Germany have compromised its underlying idea beyond rehabilitation, then the idea of workers’ and women’s emancipation and of democracy itself would have been equally shown as untenable.” Her faith in emancipation remained secure despite the horrors of the Final Solution. German Jews had been overwhelmed, it was true, but their ideas had not thereby been rendered worthless.
Such notions are not warmly received in the United States today. I recently read a copy of Mrs. Reichmann’s book in the UCLA library and found it mortally wounded by a previous reader who had used a knife or razor blade on certain pages and had liberally sprinkled the remaining text with question marks and underlinings. “Attack this,” says the anonymous defacer opposite a passage suggesting that German anti-Semitism reflected self-mistrust rather than longstanding, unadulterated hatred; at other points question marks turn into wriggling snakes, stretching across the margins to cover arguments which plainly had not found favor with the reader. So far as 1 could tell, what aroused the ire of this reader was Mrs. Reichmann’s unashamed celebration of German-Jewish tradition, her dignified defense of Jewish aspirations for integration into German life, and her determination to locate the source of the tragedy in Nazi anti-Semitism rather than in a generalized, anti-Jewish disposition in society.
The more common view nowadays, repeated endlessly in popular works, holds anti-Semitism to be a kind of disease. Throughout history, anti-Jewish feeling works its way as a virus, scarcely altering its basic form, always ready to infect vulnerable societies. According to this “germ” theory, anti-Semitism is highly contagious and, unless it is blocked from the outside, always capable of producing the worst. The germ, moreover, is seen to operate independently of the Jews themselves, and independently of historical contingencies. Throughout time, it remains fundamentally the same, despite superficial variations in appearance. In this view, anti-Semitism is the reality of Jewish history, the force which has always conditioned the environment in which Jews lived. As a noted historian of the Holocaust was recently reported saying, “Nothing has changed in the modern world about anti-Semitism but the language.”1 Or again, in the words of Raul Hilberg, a distinguished student of the destruction of European Jewry:
The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend. . . . The missionaries of Christianity said in effect, you have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.
Let me suggest two problems with this understanding of anti-Semitism and its consequences. First, the notion of an unchanging or endlessly recurring force leads to an excessive preoccupation with origins. In this view what really matters about anti-Semitism is its idea, and what is important about ideas is how they are first put together. The particular means by which the Nazis moved against the Jews and the way in which their campaign evolved to its genocidal culmination thus become largely irrelevant.
Explorations of Nazi anti-Semitism that proceed along these lines soon become a hunt for ideological ancestors—Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner, Gobineau, Luther, or whoever, in a seemingly endless regression. And the explorers never lack discoveries. For it turns out, as everybody knows, that anti-Jewish sentiment has permeated Western culture through the ages. But to a historian what is vital, or should be vital, are the contingencies. For if anti-Jewish feeling has been a constant, the murder of Jews certainly has not. Discovering why murder has occurred, when it has, is surely a crucial task for any investigator.
Second, along with its preoccupation with origins, the ideological approach also prompts an exaggerated (if understandable) focus upon the Final Solution, seen as the logical and perhaps necessary culmination of the anti-Semitic idea. This introduces an element of fatalism into the historical record which the evidence will not support. For not every racist or anti-Jewish formulation contributed to the ultimate catastrophe. Historians who concentrate on ideas to the detriment of other factors can become drawn into a web of necessity—as when it is suggested that Hitler’s “euthanasia” program followed as a logical consequence from the ideas of racial engineering to which the Nazis were attracted. Perhaps. But eugenics was so common a notion in social-scientific circles before the advent of Hitler that it is difficult to find people not attracted to it—and few of them became advocates of murdering the sick, the infirm, or the Jews. Indeed, Arthur Ruppin, the careful demographer for the Jewish Agency in Palestine in the interwar period, devoted a small chapter of the 1934 book, The Jews in the Modern World, to “Endeavors to Improve the Physical Standard,” a survey of Jewish efforts aimed at a “self-purification of the race.”
The point is that neither race-thinking nor anti-Semitism necessarily leads to murder; different historical circumstances have yielded quite different results. One thinks of the slogan, reportedly seen on a wall in Amsterdam in 1943: “Hitler! Keep your dirty hands off our dirty Jews!” Or of the old-line anti-Semite who during the Nazi occupation of France told Pierre Mendès-France: “If we have an account to settle with the Jews, we’ll take care of that after the war, when we will be free; today anti-Semitism is a German strategy, and we don’t fall into the trap.”
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Are there other approaches to the study of anti-Semitism? In our recent book, Vichy France and the Jews, Robert O. Paxton and I proposed a model which conceives of anti-Semitism in the modern period as a series of concentric rings. In the outermost is a wide band of anti-Jewish feeling, the product of many factors which together produce a vague, often mild, antipathy. This anti-Jewish feeling is but one of many constellations of dislike that circulate within most societies, and that usually express themselves in social choices to associate or not to associate with particular groups or individuals. Closer to the center is a second band of feelings and responses which are more intense and volatile. Defensive and hostile, this area becomes particularly wide and active in times of trouble—most commonly economic trouble but also political trouble such as national collapse brought about by war. Third, at the hard core, is the region of the anti-Jewish fanatic, which is also capable of growth and which has an impact upon the other two. This hard core is fuelled by the irrational, unprompted by events, and unaffected by what Jews do or do not do. But it too acts differently according to historical circumstances.
These bands continually interact with one another, sometimes producing a climate extremely dangerous to Jews. Distinguishing among them, however, helps us to understand with greater precision how anti-Semitism becomes activated, and how, as the values or program of one band spill over to its neighbors, a wave of anti-Semitism can be set in motion. Indeed it is precisely the dynamic quality of the bands, pulsating with the rhythms of time, which becomes evident at the darkest moments of Jewish history. But let us flesh out this model with concrete historical examples.
In his famous novel The Man Without Qualities, first published in 1930, the Austrian writer Robert Musil speculated that social antipathies such as those experienced by Jews were a permanent feature of life: “It is a fundamental characteristic of civilization that man profoundly distrusts those living outside his milieu, so that not only does the Teuton regard the Jew as an incomprehensible and inferior being, but the football player likewise so regards the man who plays the piano.”
If the history of snobbery is ever written, the Jews will certainly occupy a place in it, for their own sins as well as for the sins of others against them. In the modern era it is hard to think of a Western country where Jews did not suffer social exclusion, despite remarkable efforts at camouflage in particular cases. Indeed, European societies from the early 19th century, even as they expanded outward and dominated other civilizations, may have accentuated social exclusiveness at home. Lancelot Farrar has noted recently how the characteristic vitality of European society during this period was based on highly competitive power relationships abroad and a heightened consciousness of vulnerability domestically. In an age of competing nationalisms, the pursuit of national identity became a popular vocation.2
As the values of the old aristocracy became ever more widely generalized in the late 19th century, so too did the disposition to exclude or look down upon outsiders. Liberals, too, participated. The distinguished Oxford historian E.A. Freeman, a liberal and a champion of parliamentary democracy, mobilized the Engish past in the service of the national cause. He postulated a superior, liberal Aryan race inhabiting Britain, and fulminated against its racial inferiors—the, reactionary Turk, the unintelligent Negro, the uncivilized Jew. His contemporary in France, the great socialist Jean Jaurès, similarly absorbed the stereotypes of his culture. At the height of the Dreyfus affair, despite his firm support for the Dreyfus cause, and months after Zola’s J’Accuse appeared in Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore, he could allude to “la race juive concentrée, subtile, toujours dévorée par la fièvre du gain (“the close, cunning Jewish race, always consumed with acquisitive fever”). Clemenceau himself, intimately involved as he was with many Jews, noted publicly that they belonged to a different race from the Celts, whom they characteristically exploited with their customary ruses and perfidy. One thinks also of Charles de Gaulle, utterly impervious to anti-Semitism during the Hitler period, yet dropping his famous petite phrase of 1967: “peuple d’élite, sûr de lui et dominateur” (“an elitist people, self-assured and domineering”).
What is one to make of these expressions, which derive from what I have called the outer band of anti-Semitism? Most who spoke this way would certainly have repudiated the label of “anti-Semite,” and some indeed aligned themselves forthrightly against anti-Semitism. Twenty-five years after having created Fagin, a loathsome anti-Jewish stereotype in his popular novel Oliver Twist (1838), Charles Dickens was baffled to find himself accused of animosity toward Jews. To compensate, he made a donation to the Lady Montefiore Memorial.3
No single country has ever had a monopoly on anti-Semitism of this kind, and no Western society has escaped it. But such attitudes, whatever their origins, have seldom contained within themselves a serious anti-Jewish purpose. Left alone, as social preferences usually are, they could and did coexist easily with a general trend toward the integration of Jews into Western societies. Jews may have winced at the occasional snub or smear, but outside the relatively privileged and affluent among them, few were actually affected. It was only when the outer ring of anti-Semitic attitudes became activated by the more intense second band that persecution became a possibility.
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Serious outbreaks of anti-Jewish activity in modern European societies have seemed to coincide with periods of national trouble and uncertainty. In such times, the instincts of self-preservation can give rise to powerful feelings of dread, which in turn seek objects on whom to blame the difficulties the nation is facing. Jews provide a useful target. Early in the century, for example, as World War I ground on with appalling losses on all sides, the effects of anti-Semitism could be seen everywhere in Europe—not only in imperial Germany, which undertook a celebrated wartime census of Jews in the armed forces, but in liberal France and Britain as well. Jews were not only looked down upon and treated with condescension in the war years, but were openly feared. They were portrayed as Bolsheviks, undermining an increasingly fragile national unity; or as war profiteers, enriching themselves at the expense of the fatherland; or as job-stealers, competing unfairly for limited positions while others were at the front. The solution, advanced with remarkable regularity, was for restrictions to be applied against Jews in politicial, economic, and social life.
An outstanding earlier example of this kind of outbreak is fin-de-siècle Vienna, renowned for its cosmopolitan sophistication, a city where Jews faced an increasingly hostile environment at the end of the 19th century. The mayor of the city from 1897 until 1910 was Karl Lueger, who capitalized upon the anti-Semitic attitudes of the electorate as no one before in history. Of working-class origins himself, and identifying self-consciously with the poor, Lueger reaped the advantage of a municipal franchise newly extended to elements of the lower bourgeoisie. Like many who benefited from anti-Semitism at the time, Lueger presented himself as an energetic populist reformer, concerned with alleviating social misery and with protecting the traditions of the Austrian Mittelstand from the depredations of industrial and finance capitalism, the destructive cruelties of economic growth and competition.
Lueger’s party, the Christian Socials, worked within the framework of the Hapsburg empire and professed unshakable loyalty to its Kaiser. He and his followers called for no nationalist or racialist adventures; the remedies they proposed were to be secured by law. Thus, compared with the anti-Semitic agitators who would win power in the 20th century, Lueger must be seen as a mild and pragmatic leader, whose victory brought little real hardship to Jews. Though he breathed public fire against Jewish capitalists and press barons, he continued to associate with Jews of various persuasions, many of whom had been his reformist comrades-in-arms in the early 1880’s. He wore his anti-Semitism lightly once it had helped him into office, and was therefore sometimes charged with inconsistency by his more serious followers. Responding to such charges, Lueger may well have uttered the famous remark attributed to him: “Wer ein Jude ist bestimme ich” (“I’ll decide who is a Jew”).
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Lueger helps us to enter the second band of anti-Semitism. Based upon social apprehensions, it is overwhelmingly a defensive response to new challenges which are ill-understood and difficult to deal with, yet broadly felt in society. In Vienna, Jews were associated with the most recent forces undermining social existence, and were considered to have benefited the most from the unsettling transformations of the day. Their visibility was heightened by the presence of many newly arrived, unassimilated Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. (Vienna before Lueger experienced a vast increase in its Jewish population—from just over 6,000 in 1857 to over 118,000 in 1890, when they constituted 8.7 percent of the population.) In the unsettled economic climate before the turn of the century, Jews appeared talented, aggressive, on the make. Observers accused them of being too successful, too innovative, too unappreciative of the old ways. In Germany the economist Werner Sombart considered that since Jews were on the average so much brighter and more intelligent than Germans, unless restrictions were imposed upon their admissions to universities they would end up by taking over. On a much more modest level, Viennese shopkeepers felt the same way.
Anti-Semitic agitation sought redress through a limitation of Jewish activity—strict controls on immigration, expulsion of aliens, quotas in professions and educational institutions, protective legislation against outsiders in commerce and crafts, and a cultural protectionism which accentuated homogeneity and patriotism. Occasionally, individual Jews slipped under the bar and found acceptance even among those who wanted to keep most Jews out. And there were always Jews to defend restrictions—in Vienna or anywhere else where these conditions obtained. In the United States, the young journalist Walter Lippmann drafted a statement to a Harvard University committee looking into the issue of Jewish representation in 1922:
I am fully prepared to accept the judgment of the Harvard authorities that a concentration of Jews in excess of 15 percent will produce a segregation of cultures rather than a fusion. . . . I do not regard the Jews as innocent victims. They hand on unconsciously and uncritically from one generation to another many distressing personal and social habits which were selected by bitter history and intensified by a pharisaical theology.
Still, however ruthless it was to raise barriers, this kind of anti-Semitism had its limits. Jews found many doors closed to them, but there were usually compensating opportunities elsewhere. Outside Eastern Europe, physical assault was a rarity. Restrictionist sentiment reverberated through societies when times were difficult, but tended to abate when conditions improved. The popular appeal of this kind of anti-Semitism, and its usefulness as a political tool, diminished notably with the coming of better times. Leon Poliakov suggests that the anti-Semitic tide began everywhere to recede in Western and Central Europe in the mid-1890’s, coinciding with improved economic circumstances and the energetic mobilization for international conflict. After World War I it remained powerful in Germany, Poland, and Hungary, which were racked by continuing crises until the mid-1920’s, but was relatively weak where recovery was more rapid. France is a notable case in point. To overcome the effects of the demographic trough created by huge wartime losses, both unions and industrialists supported massive recruitment of labor abroad. As a result, Eastern European Jews were welcomed in Paris; with prosperity, anti-Semitism lost its potency.
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Always ready to fuel a new outburst, however, were the anti-Semites of the hard core—the anti-Jewish ideologists. For such people anti-Semitism is neither an attitude nor a response—it is a central obsession. These anti-Semites have seen Jews as a powerful destructive force, everywhere eating away at the foundations of established society. Their perceptions of Jewish influence are so wildly distorted as to suggest paranoia. Generally they tend to define Jews not by religion, culture, or nationality, but by race, thus making ineradicable the Jewish taint. And finally, their program, when announced, tends to be part of a wider apocalyptic vision which calls for the most sweeping attacks on. Jews wherever they are found.
No single state is preeminent as a home for the hard core. Most of us think first of Germany, but as the historian Zeev Sternhell has recently reminded us, French politics before World War I was a kind of laboratory for the creation of a new synthesis of extreme nationalism and social radicalism. After the war, Poland and Hungary certainly seemed more anti-Semitic to most observers than did the Germany of Weimar.
Yet everywhere in pre-Hitler Europe we find spokesmen for the anti-Jewish obsession, spinning their theories into long, angry books about the Jewish’ onslaught on Western civilization. These anti-Semites had been a permanent fixture of the landscape for quite some time. What happened in the last quarter of the 19th century is that their ideas began to be popularized, so that the inner core of obsessive anti-Semitism came to affect a wider public. Thousands of future members of the German elite heard lectures on politics at the University of Berlin from an anti-Semitic tribune, Heinrich von Treitschke. Even more important was the transmission of anti-Jewish ideology to a mass audience. Publicists like Edouard Drumont in France, or politicians like Georg von Schönerer in Austria, reached hundreds of thousands of people via the popular press and democratic politics. In Wilhelmine Germany, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s influence was unsurpassed. His Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was spectacularly successful, and brought together a comprehensive anti-Jewish theory with racism, a celebration of German culture, and an urge to build a new Aryan utopia.
Before World War I such anti-Semitic fundamentalists helped to mobilize support behind the anti-Jewish campaigns of those who called merely for a restriction of Jewish influence. Nietzsche’s brother-in-law, Bernhard Forster, an inspired Wagnerian, launched an anti-Semitic petition calling for a census of Jews and for their exclusion from teaching and the civil service; he obtained 250,000 signatures in a few weeks. Georg von Schönerer, the pan-German Austrian activist, had a plank built into the nationalist and reformist Linz program of 1882 calling vaguely for the “elimination of Jewish influence from all areas of public life.”
Still, elaborate and loquacious as they were in theory, ideological anti-Semites were usually impoverished when it came to practical suggestions. A recent biographer of Chamberlain has noted how his venomous thinking on Jews, which helped to buttress his calls for German rebirth, fell short of offering concrete proposals.4 Attuned to the apocalypse, these anti-Semites seldom had the temperament to work out details or the political wit to win power or combine with others to take over governments.
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It took a catastrophic national collapse to bring together the three bands of anti-Semitism long enough to sustain a violent anti-Semitic policy, whether under the aegis of Nazism, Vichy France, the Iron Guard of Rumania, or the Arrow Cross in Hungary. Without such a crisis, ideological anti-Semites in Germany and elsewhere were largely voices in the wilderness, only occasionally winning the support of disgruntled malcontents. Hitler himself did not find anti-Semitism a useful mobilizing tool during Germany’s period of national stability and prosperity in the late 1920’s. In France, similarly, the voices of anti-Semitism in the decade after World War I, mainly those of Charles Maurras and the Action française, were practically reduced to a whisper. Crises of various kinds—staggering unemployment in the Great Depression, the paralysis of parliamentary government in France in 1936, catastrophic defeat in France in 1940—lent prominence to fanatical anti-Semites or provided them with an opportunity to carry out a thoroughgoing persecution of Jews.
Catastrophic circumstances Were necessary because in Western and Central Europe, at least, popular strains of anti-Semitism in the modern period were never strong enough on their own to support violent persecution. But thanks to widespread antipathy toward Jews, and tacit backing for restrictionist moves against them in times of national upheaval and hardship, full-blooded anti-Semites could in certain specific circumstances count on indifference or even passive acceptance of their extreme programs. This turned out to be enough for the murder of six million Jews. Yet it is worth noting even so that anti-Semitism of the most extreme variety seldom won the commitment of wide segments of the population. Recent research on German public attitudes toward the persecution of Jews under Hitler suggests that the Nazis were unable to communicate to ordinary people their passionate, dynamic obsession with the Jewish menace. Ordinary Germans, many of whom simply did not like Jews, had other things on their minds, and remained unmoved. Nazi leaders knew this well, and sometimes complained to each other that the Jewish Question was not really understood in Germany. Their answer was to ring down a curtain of secrecy on their program of mass murder, keeping it as far away as possible from the German public. In Vichy France it was much the same. There was popular support for humiliating Jews, and for excluding them from many spheres of public life. But the most ruthless and visible anti-Jewish program—deportation to the East—was received with stony silence.
All this is bad enough, and that is precisely the point. Anti-Semitism of the more genteel varieties, the two outer rings, is distinct from anti-Semitism of the hard core. But in times of great peril, when politics or a sudden twist of the wheel of fortune has put the most fervent anti-Jewish zealots into power, such “outer-ring” anti-Semitism has tended to have an anaesthetic effect, numbing people to persecutions far more radical than they would themselves have ever proposed, even helping to prepare the way for massacre.
1 Yehuda Bauer, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1981.
2 See L.L. Farrar, Jr., Arrogance and Anxiety (1981).
3 See Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (1960).
4 Evangelist of Race, by Geoffrey Field (1981).
