Antisemitism pt 3: The old 'new antisemitism'

The old new Antisemitism

I'm going to skip most of the details of the Holocaust. We all know that it was the most premeditated, industrialized, and intended to be the most complete genocide in history. Or, at least, for those of us who don't know that, there is no hope. Instead, there are a few questions surrounding the Holocaust that it is helpful to explore – the how and why. First, is how the whole of German society could allow such a thing to happen. For many, there are easy answers to this in the inherent evils of the "German nature," whatever that is. This series, however, is intended more for a left that won't give in to such bigotry, and I'm going to dismiss it entirely. There are also historical differences between nations that sometimes seem to explain, but we should be careful in how much power we grant to such explanations and careful to present more than merely a subtler form of essentialist, anti-German racism. Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis was, in fact, very much like other European nations, not notably more antisemitic than France or Britain. Neither, indeed was it much more nationalistic than France. And while much has been made of the character of German nationalism that developed out of friction between the different German states prior Bismarkian Germany, that development was not especially different from French or British consolidation into the nations they are today. Attempts at explanation that rely too much on German history (sometimes going back to the Protestant Reformation) often seem convincing until we realize that they don't explain the fundamental question they are meant to. Why then and there?

That German society overall was vulnerable to such ideologies has more to do with universal human psychology. That is not to say that human nature is corrupt, another right-wing answer, but that human nature has certain flaws. Stanley Milgram's psychological experiments, for instance, devised in response to the Holocaust, demonstrate how even good people who are not prone to sadism will, under certain circumstances, follow the orders of an authority figure to an extreme end. Other experiments and historical examples extend this explanation to other types of situations. And so, one of the lessons of the Holocaust, sometimes forgotten, is that such evils do not require especially evil societies, and so we mustn't simply say "It can't happen here." For anyone further interested in such analysis, I recommend the works of psychologist and historian, Robert Jay Lifton. This goes a long way to explaining how, but in recognizing that one does not need an especially sadistic or otherwise "evil" society for such things to happen, we reinforce the difficulty and importance of "why then and there?"

Historical analysis always struggles with looking for causes. There are both continuities and breaks in historical trends. There is always the question of how far back to look for "root" causes. I will not pretend that what is written here is a complete explanation for the Holocaust. However, it does seem very much to be a necessary condition for the Holocaust, one which helps to explain why then and there. And while it may not be a sufficient explanation in all respects, many of the important events it cannot explain (such as the Night of the Long Knives, and more generally the rise to prominence within the National Socialist party of someone like Hitler) seem inevitable over a sufficient period of time with certain conditions. I'm going to focus on the nature of antisemitism in Germany at the time.

This historiography begins in 1879, when Wilhelm Marr published Der Sieg Des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Jewishness over German-ness) and influenced a dramatic change in the nature of antisemitism. At the time, Jew-hatred was not especially common in German society or Western Europe in any open or blatant form. It was the Age of Reason, and such religious prejudices were looked down upon as an anachronism from a bygone barbarism. In the south of Germany, nearer central Europe, there were occasionally pogroms, but unlike the Russian pogroms, they were not instigated by the authorities of the state or church. When they did occur, those authorities responded quickly and effectively. (The Russian pogroms, unfortunately, are almost always under-emphasized in histories due to space concerns, and I'm going to repeat that injustice here. Although Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement vies for the title of worst oppression in Jewish history, even Jewish writers of the Pale focused instead on the West, where they saw their own future liberation predicted.) Discrimination against Jews, though still present, had subsided sufficiently that Jews nearly caught up to the rest of German society in simple measures like wealth. Legal emancipation was granted in 1871, and Jews began to turn toward fuller cultural acceptance. Already the most fully assimilated Jews in European history, they sought out positions in the arts and sciences to prove their ability as Germans to contribute to German culture. Rates of conversion and intermarriage were relatively high. Even when Jewish couples did not themselves convert, it was not unusual for them to have their children baptized.

In this atmosphere, Marr could not successfully agitate against Jews as Jews in open and obvious ways. As historian Shulamit Volkov notes, he repeatedly denied hatred of Jews:

"There is no Jew hatred in my heart," he writes, "even less some hatred of Jews on a religious basis; not even a 'hatred of this nation' or a 'hatred of this race' "

In Marr's case, we have reason to be skeptical of these claims. Even he admitted that

in the past I have sharply polemicized against the Jews, but I plead guilty of the charge... my politics has been nothing but an anachronism.

However, there is also reason to believe that he really did see himself as somewhat reformed. Racial "science" was coming into vogue, and he may have preferred it over medieval religious intolerance. Even so, his hatred that was not purely racial. In fact, his wife was Jewish and his worst vitriol was saved for German gentiles who were alike to Jews. What he hated most was "Jewishness," which was naturally most common in Jews. Whatever his personal motivations, the effect of his agitation for antisemitism rather than a rejected Jew-hatred was effective. Many people, Jews and non-Jews alike were unsure whether this antisemitism was a continuation of Jew-hatred or not. Many vocal opponents of Jew-hatred, which was not socially acceptable, openly embraced antisemitism, which was. But while this was often seen as completely different from Jew-hatred and therefore moral, it meant that a Jew could not escape their Jewishness merely by converting to Chritianity. Jewishness became an even more essentialized trait, and hatred spread against an even larger group of Jewish (or Jew-ish) people.

Marr's antisemitism was extreme. During this time of the Pogroms in Russia, Marr wrote that Israel was the most powerful nation in the world. There was no actual state of Israel, and hardly anyone who even dreamed of one, but Marr argued that the Jews controlled Britain and France and were winning in the struggle over Germany. He saw Russia – the culmination of Medieval European oppression and violence – as the world's last stronghold against the Jews. Yet the term antisemitism, by not referring to Jews directly as such, disguised his hatred sufficiently. According to Volkov:

Significantly, the term "antisemitism" did not refer directly to Jews or to Judaism. It spelled a rather vague opposition to "semitism," that is, to everything related to the existence of some obscure semitic race. According to all contemporary authorities, the Jews, who were known and familiar to the European nations from time immemorial, constituted only one segment of this race, whereas no one could precisely identify the others. Still, the new term created a larger semantic space as a vessel for a variety of desired contents. It had a scientific aura and could be placed on a par with such terms as "liberalism" or "conservatism," thus entering respectable linguistic company, no doubt.

Marr began his political career as a left-liberal. Although we can doubt his credentials as a leftist on some issues, there are others who were more clearly anti-racist. Paul de Lagarde, for instance, consistently viewed racism with abhorence, calling it "a crude form of materialism, scientifically meaningless." (In England just over a decade after Marr's first publications, similar antisemitism could be seen prominently among leftists with the most sterling anti-racist credentials in the movement against the Boer War.) It wasn't long before some other leftists, such as August Bebel, who called antisemitism "the socialism of fools," were writing to Friedrich Engels about the failures of the German left, worried that opposition to antisemitism was too late to muster sufficiently. The conservative right, with romantic notions of an older Germany, quickly adopted this antisemitism, which played a central role in redefining the right. They adopted formerly leftist nationalism (as in the French slogan "Liberty, equality, fraternity") to blamed inequality among Germans to foreign influence, while many on the left drifted toward the right. In this way, the right was able to entice many in the lower-middle classes away from their previous anti-aristocratic liberalisms with a perverted populism. This is not to say that the masses were antisemitic and wooed with antisemitism itself. Indeed, the early antisemitic political parties were very short lived. Yet many, even among those most favorable toward Jews, were willing to adopt this disguised bigotry under certain political circumstances.

What grew between the time of Marr and the rise of the Nazis was not so much blatant antisemitism but the centrality of "the Jewish Question." Where you stood on that question became a shorthand, a cultural code, for your politics, often the only idea connecting disparate policy stances and strange political allies. When the Nazis became a political force, their ranks included people from all over the political spectrum, including socialists. Hitler solidified his power by assassinating political opponents on the Night of the Long Knives.

But he solidified his mass appeal by repeating the tropes of medieval Jew-hatred behind the veil of antisemitism. While Marr warned that the Jews were engaged in war with the Germans – a delusion that probably grew out of the conspiracy theories that always accompanied the Blood Libel – Hitler took the argument to it's logical conclusion. If one is being attacked one must defend oneself. The German people had to defend themselves against the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903 in Russia (during the Pogroms, remember) claimed definitive proof that a global Jewish conspiracy was bent on world domination. Although the Protocols had been proved a forgery in 1921, copies sold almost as well as the Christian Bible or Mein Kampf. Yet still, even many Jews were in denial that this antisemitism was such an extreme hatred. Most expected just an anullment of the emancipation of 1871. Until Kristallnacht in November, 1938.

That Jewish conspiracy was blamed for manipulating history on a grand scale and starting all wars and losing all wars. World War I, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Boer War. The conspiracy didn't have to make much sense – after all, Jews were clever and ruled the world with many different "tentacles." Capitalism and Communist were both seen as Jewish inventions to forward the aims of the conspiracy. If nothing made sense, that was because the Jews were too devious. Though, as many people today are aware, Hitler told the Germans their ethnic purity had been diluted, and homosexuals were the first to be killed, but the immediate threat was the Jews. The threat that needed to be dealt with urgently, that called for action, was the Jewish threat. As in the Middle Ages, when Jews were said to be allied with Satan, Jews were again the greatest threat facing mankind. When faced with such a threat, one cannot remain passive, and so the demonization of Jews was an effective call to arms. Hitler talked about lebensraum to the East. To the South were Germanic peoples he said should be united inside a Greater Germany. Why did Hitler invade France? For no other reason than to kill every European Jew?

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