To the Editor:
Jacob Katz introduces his article, “Misreadings of Anti-Semitism” [July], by quoting the opening sentences of my review of his recently published From Prejudice to Destruction, in which I criticized him for failing to place his account of the development of European anti-Semitism in its proper context—the growth of anti-modern social and political movements. Mr. Katz apparently did not understand my criticism of his work, for he now imputes to me a position that I have never advocated, to wit, that “only the Gentile role in anti-Semitism is worthy of the historian’s attention,” while “Jews are merely passive victims.”
Having encountered scholarly resistance to his idiosyncratic views on the history of modern anti-Semitism, Mr. Katz, in reaction, has created a ludicrous caricature of the majority view. To argue, as I did in my review of his work, that stresses and strains in the larger societies in which Jews lived were critical in fostering the growth of anti-Semitic movements is not to deny that Jewish behavior—in the economy, in society, in political life—played some role in shaping anti-Jewish sentiment. It is not a question of either/or, but a matter of degree.
In his attack on “misreadings” of anti-Semitism, Mr. Katz reiterates his own position. He believes that the failure of the Jewish community to disappear of its own volition after emancipation, as both the advocates and opponents of emancipation believed it would, created “a sense of scandal” that linked up with ancient, religiously-derived prejudices to lay the basis for modern anti-Semitism. If Mr. Katz’s interpretation were correct, it would follow that in those countries where Jewish solidarity and particularism remained strongest in the post-emancipation era, anti-Semitism would have been at its deadliest. But, in fact, just the opposite was true. In the years 1870-1939, in the liberal states of the West—in Great Britain and the United States—where Jewish solidarity and visibility were not radically attenuated, anti-Semitism was weaker than it was in Germany, where assimilation had taken a far more extreme course. The only way of explaining the different paths of anti-Semitism in these countries, it seems to me, is to refer to the larger political and social context in which it developed.
To approach the history of anti-Semitism in this manner hardly warrants the charge that one is trying to “de-Judaize” anti-Semitism. By no stretch of the imagination does it invite the accusation that those who take this historiographical position are “fellow-travelers” with those who seek to universalize the Holocaust and downplay the uniqueness of the Jewish experience during the war years. Injecting this issue is a diversionary tactic that has no place in the debate over the origins of modern anti-Semitism.
Todd M. Endelman
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
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To the Editor:
I read Jacob Katz’s article with interest. I am not an academic, . . . but I am a Jew, and my curiosity about the whys and wherefores of anti-Semitism knows no bounds. . . .
Mr. Katz is arguing, if I understand him correctly, that the traditional theories of anti-Semitism are inadequate, or at least have not been proved, and are also perhaps inconsistent with historical facts. That is, the proposition that anti-Semitism is strictly a Gentile malady caused by social upheaval, or that it is directed by governments to relieve unrest, or that it is the product of a general nastiness in human nature . . ., or that it is a result of the unfolding urge of each group (race) to establish its sense of superiority—as I understand him, Mr. Katz maintains that none of these theories is sufficient to explain the presence and the persistence of anti-Jewish rancor over the ages. . . .
This leads me to wonder about Mr Katz’s own theory, which was not set forth in his article. If, as he suggests, we Jews have somehow played an active role in bringing abuse on ourselves, what is it that we have done or are doing? Mr. Katz mentions a number of qualities attributed to us by those who detest us: crudeness, lack of manners, xenophobia, avarice, moral in-sensitivity, etc. Is he saying that to some degree these vile characteristics are valid? . . . If they are not, then exactly what . . . is it that incites all with whom we come in contact? And if we are not vile, then what has caused such perverse reactions from the surrounding populace? In any case, what can we do about it?
Arthur Bay
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
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To the Editor:
. . . Jacob Katz deals with some theories of anti-Semitism, and though he may be quite correct in refuting them, he does not offer his own theory, at least in this article. Indeed, one gains the impression from the article that it is extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, to venture an explanation for this phenomenon. Mr. Katz seems to suggest that scarcely any explanation would be adequate since we are dealing with something so irrational that it defies human understanding. I wonder, however, whether Mr. Katz would agree with me that the original cause for the widespread hatred of Jews was religiously motivated. The Christian gospels are among the most widely distributed literature in the world. They are part of the education of every Christian child, yet they present unmistakably invidious accusations against the Jewish people. . . .
To illustrate, let me relate my own experience. When I was about seven years old and attending elementary school in Vienna, I was followed from school one day by two boys who tried to attack me while saying in German, “Du bist ein Judas, Du hast unseren Heiland umgebracht” (You are a Judas, you have killed our savior). Of course, at the time I did not understand what they meant, but later I realized that those boys had probably just received religious instruction in which they had been told the story of the gospels. Is it not understandable that such children would grow up with a strong bias against Jews in general? . . .
Adolph Lusthaus
Tamarac, Florida
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To the Editor:
Jacob Katz’s “Misreadings of Anti-Semitism” purports to outline a historical explanation of European anti-Semitism that would do justice to and not exceed the facts. His reasons for limiting a “proper” history to the so-called observable facts reflect the most simple-minded empiricism. The logical difficulties alone, which Mr. Katz simply ignores, are enough to undermine the writing of such a history.
Mr. Katz lays down certain conditions—to be taken as theoretical principles—that he believes all explanations of historical phenomena must meet: “To a historian, the proof of a theory lies in its serviceability, that is, in the possibility it offers of providing a basis for explaining historical processes and reconstructing the course of events,” What Mr. Katz finds so objectionable in psychoanalysis is not that it does not provide some understanding of the “hidden well-springs” of anti-Semitism, but that this system of interpretation cannot give a blow-by-blow narration of the manifest historical events. Mr. Katz’s objection . . . amounts to little more than a misunderstanding of the nature of explanation as such. “The factual narrative,” he complains of one book, “and the psychoanalytic interpretation proceed on two different levels.” Of course they do; the explanation of any phenomenon is always on a level that differs from the narrated facts. An adequate theory—be it historical, linguistic, anthropological, or any explanatory theory in the human sciences—must carefully transcend the facts if it is to have explanatory power. In the field of history, it is precisely in shifting from a mere chronological ordering of the narrated facts to the level of a systematic interpretation of their meaning that explanation consists. A refusal to take this step is tantamount to a mere replication of the events that we were trying to explain.
When he comes around to offering his own “explanation,” Mr. Katz only restates the facts. . . . He gives us repetition instead of knowledge:
The predicament of emancipated Jewry, and ultimately the cause of its tragic end, was rooted not in one or another ideology but in the fact that Jewish emancipation had been tacitly tied to an illusory expectation—the disappearance of the Jewish community of its own volition. When this failed to happen . . . a certain uneasiness, not to say a sense of outright scandal, was experienced by Gentiles.
Assuming that this nice tale of disappointed expectations did happen, how does it constitute an explanation, the ultimate cause no less, of the manifest anti-Semitism of the period? Mr. Katz’s would-be explanation merely substitutes one form of anti-Semitism—the expectation that Jews would disappear through assimilation into civil society—for another form of the same—the forcible fulfillment of that expectation in the humiliation and murder of the Jews. Mr. Katz has given us no ultimate cause here, only two aspects of the same anti-Semitism about which we are still very much in the dark.
Sensing the weakness of his “causal explanation,” . . . Mr. Katz takes cover by embedding it in a thesis of historical continuity:
Modern anti-Semitism is thus a blend, and any proper history of it must consist of a careful tracing of the processes whereby vestigial anti-Jewish beliefs, dating back to the Middle Ages, were successfully combined with a whole variety of modern ideologies. Only by following the route along which the anti-Jewish tradition was transmitted . . . can we gain historical insight into the mechanism of anti-Semitism and the riddle of its survival through the ages.
This paean to the longevity and survival of anti-Semitism, alas, explains nothing but a proper penchant for chronological ordering. The recurrence of anti-Semitism with all its combinations through the ages tells us nothing about its causes, or, to use a different explanatory logic, it tells us nothing about what anti-Semitism essentially is. Mr. Katz gives us a sort of Jewish version of the Eternal Return myth; he has turned a vital problem calling for enlightenment into an inexplicable “tradition.”
I would like, finally, to take issue with Mr. Katz’s dismissal of Max Horkheimer, who seems deserving of such treatment simply because Mr. Katz heard somewhere that he was a Marxist. Consulting the pertinent chapters on anti-Semitism in Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (which he wrote with Theodor Adorno) and his later essay, “The German Jews,” I find Horkheimer much more reverent of the facts of history than is Mr. Katz. Indeed, that is why Horkheimer eschews a single all-embracing cause of modern anti-Semitism. He gives, instead, proliferating interpretations, the traditional Marxist one counting for very little of the total. . . .
Saul E. Myers
Mt. Kisco, New York
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Jacob Katz writes:
First I must clarify a somewhat strange misunderstanding on the part of Todd M. Endelman. Because my essay opened with a quotation from his review of my book, From Prejudice to Destruction, Mr. Endelman assumes that the thrust of my entire essay is a polemic aimed at his criticism. The quotation I used contained a felicitous phrase characterizing the attitude of historians with whom I intended to take issue. Otherwise, there is no overt or covert reference to Mr. Endelman’s review in the entire article. Consequently, his indignation over opinions attributed to him is absolutely groundless, though now, of course, I am bound to reply to the objections raised in his letter.
On one central point Todd M. Endelman, Arthur Bay, and Saul E. Myers are in agreement. All three are bent on locating the explanation for anti-Semitism in any given era in data contemporaneous with that era. Mr. Bay contends that if none of the current theories explaining anti-Semitism is found acceptable, no other recourse remains but to admit that there is indeed something to the negative assessment of Jews by anti-Semites. Mr. Endelman, in his original review, defends the position of historians who attribute European anti-Semitism to the growth of anti-modern social and political movements. While he now concedes that “Jewish behavior in the economy, in society, in political life” also played a role “in shaping anti-Jewish sentiment,” still, all these components were of contemporary vintage. Mr. Myers, on the other hand, favors the position of the psychohistorians for whom the riddle of anti-Semitism is solved by reference to ever-present unconscious drives.
The only one of my critics to make reference to the past is Adolph Lusthaus, who quite properly mentions the impact of the Christian gospels; for it is only by expanding our perspective far beyond the particular period that we can achieve what the historian Marc Bloch calls an “understanding of the present by the past.” Bloch warns that in seeking explanations, the student of history should not limit himself to “the immediately preceding” period because what he is seeking may actually be located several centuries farther back in time. That is exactly the case with early modern anti-Semitism. Its roots and origins lay in generations of religious conflict between Judaism and Christianity. The age of emancipation believed it had overcome this conflict, and had thus eliminated the cause of anti-Semitism. But the outbreak of the anti-Semitic movement in the late 19th century revealed this to be an illusion. The anti-Jewish tradition, which had seemingly waned, actually continued to lead an underground existence, only to reappear in a new guise three generations later.
The proper task of the historian is to trace the path of this subterranean metamorphosis—which is what I tried to do in From Prejudice to Destruction. While I did not avoid describing the contemporary historical circumstances (the crisis of liberalism and so on) under which anti-Semitism reemerged, I did not concentrate on this aspect as other historians have, and as Mr. Endelman would like me to have done.
I pointed out in my essay the dangers of concentrating on what transpires in non-Jewish society (and the contraction of perspective this implies). Mr. Endelman now declares that of course Jewish behavior had a share in eliciting anti-Semitism, a statement which is even more questionable than his original thesis. For whatever variations the phenomenon of anti-Semitism reveals, one aspect of it is constant. Whenever anti-Semitism has become virulent, Jewish behavior, for better or worse, has had only the most marginal influence upon it. It is not what Jews did in the period under question which called down recurrent wrath upon them, but what they were—descendants of the despised and diabolized enemies of Christianity who, owing to their prolonged ghetto existence, continued to live conspicuously apart. Some traces of this heritage from the past clung to Jews everywhere; they reappeared most strongly where the expectation of their disappearance was most sharply disappointed.
Mr. Endelman argues that according to my theory, a reaction to Jewish perseverance ought to have occurred “in Great Britain and the U.S. where Jewish solidarity and visibility” were more in evidence than in “Germany where assimilation had taken a more extreme course.” But in fact Jews became more “visible” the more they were expected to disappear altogether. This was most strongly the case in Germany, France, and Hungary; in Great Britain, where emancipation was not predicated on radical assimilation, Jewish “visibility” was not so offending. (This difference was pointed out several decades ago by H. A. Schmidt.) When it comes to the United States, the historian Ben Halpern has rightly ascribed the relative advantage of American Jewry over its European counterparts to the fact that American Jews were spared the struggle for political emancipation altogether.
My observations about the decisive role of the dead hand of the past in the perseverance of anti-Semitism ought to relieve Mr. Bay of his dilemma. To reject the three current theories of anti-Semitism does not mean that we must accept the rationale of the anti-Semites themselves. As to Mr. Lusthaus’s personal experience of anti-Semitism, this sort of accusation, while hardly unheard of, is not so typical of modern times. The trouble is that the religious passion attached to such accusations transferred itself to their profane replacements in the course of the secularization process of modern history. Hence the irrational drive of anti-Semitism, and its sheer inaccessibility to counterargument.
Mr. Myers’s frontal attack sounds very sophisticated, yet it actually reflects an utter disrespect for historical data as well as faulty reasoning. “The recurrence of anti-Semitism with all its combinations through the ages” boils down for Mr. Myers to “a sort of Jewish version of the Eternal Return myth.” There is, however, nothing mythical or mystical about what the British historian James Parkes called the conflict between the Church and the Synagogue. That conflict reflects rather hard facts of history that shaped Jewish destiny and are still shaping it to a certain extent to this very day.
Mr. Myers’s carelessness with facts is also evident in the way he argues against my point about the effect of continuous Jewish existence contrary to expectations of Jewish disappearance. According to Mr. Myers this is to explain one form of anti-Semitism, the drive for the physical destruction of Jews, by means of another, the expectation of their disappearance through assimilation. Yet to dub the promoters of emancipation anti-Semites is to be arbitrary in the extreme. Far from intending harm to Jews—an intention inherent in anti-Semitism by definition—they thought to render them the highest of favors by liberating them from the burden and the curse of their past history. That the result turned out altogether different from what was intended can teach us a lesson about the dialectics of human history in general and about the convoluted path taken by anti-Semitism in particular. Mr. Myers, however, is not interested in seeking down-to-earth enlightenment; he is bent on arriving at the ultimate causes of anti-Semitism and penetrating to its essence.
Now some philosophers have indeed tried their hand at such abstractions, attributing the seemingly eternal estrangement between Jews and Gentiles to a primordial or metaphysical division of some sort. Yet Mr. Myers does not hint at any such idea, basing himself rather on the psychoanalytical interpretations of anti-Semitism. But even if we accept the need for some essentialist explanation, does it necessarily follow that psychoanalysis represents this essence?
Finally, I am amused by Mr. Myers’s zeal to protect the good names of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and by his assumption that my knowledge of their Marxist leanings originated in hearsay. As it happens, I studied with these two scholars in Frankfurt in the early 30’s and I hold their memories in respect, despite my differing approach to problems of history and society. Mr. Myers is correct in stating that the interpretation of anti-Semitism contained in Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is not exclusively Marxian; it also contains a good portion of Freudianism which is of course a redeeming feature in his eyes. Others may think that the combination of the two schools of thought in vogue in the Weimar period (especially among Jewish intellectuals) is a hybrid creation, as evidenced in the intellectual acrobatics which have made this book justly famous, if nearly unreadable. At any rate, I am able to testify that neither Horkheimer nor Adorno would have resented being called a Marxist, at least not at the time I was acquainted with them. On that point Mr. Myers’s mind may be set at rest.
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