17.6: Modern Anti-Semitism

European Jews were a minority everywhere they lived. Throughout history, Jews have faced persecution and a deep-seated form of mistrust from a majority of Christians. This hatred, referred to as anti-Semitism, took on new characteristics in the modern era that made it even more dangerous.

Since the Roman Empire, Jews had been part of European society. In the Middle Ages, Jews were frequently persecuted, expelled, or even massacred by the Christian majority. Jews were incorrectly accused of being responsible for the death of Christ, and blamed for plagues and famines. Depending on the location, they were unable to own land, marry Christians, or practice trades besides sharecropping, peddling goods, and lending money. (Christians were banned from lending money at interest until the late Middle Ages.) Beginning in the late period of the Enlightenment, some Jews were grudgingly "emancipated", legally being allowed to move to Christian cities, own land, and practice professions they had been banned from in the past.

By the end of the 19th Century, the legal emancipation was complete almost everywhere in Europe. although Russian still maintained anti-Semitic restrictions. Anti-Jewish hatred did not vanish. Instead, Jews were vilified for representing everything that was wrong with modernity, such as urbanization, the death of traditional industries, and the evils of modern capitalism. To modern anti-Semites, Jews were the scapegoat for all of the problems of the modern world itself.

At the same time, anti-Semitism was bound up with racial theories, including Darwinian evolutionary theory, its perverse offspring Social Darwinism, and the Eugenics movement which sought to purify the racial gene pool of Europe and the United States. Many theorists hypothesized that Jews were not just a group of people who traced their ancestry back to the ancient kingdom of Judah, but were a “race,” a group defined first and foremost by blood, genetics, and by supposedly inexorable and inherent characteristics and traits.

Ample fuel for the rise of anti-Semitic politics existed between vilification for the ills of modernity and the newfound obsession with race swept across European and American societies. In 1870s, an Anti-Semitic League emerged in Germany under the leadership of a politician named Wilhelm Marr, who claimed that Jews had “without striking a blow” “become the socio-political dictator of Germany.” In fact, Jews were about 1% of the German population and had negligible political influence.

As parties that defined themselves solely by anti-Semitism diminished, anti-republican, militaristic, and strongly Christian-identified parties on the political right in France, Austria, and Germany soon started using anti-Semitic language as part of their overall rhetoric.

Along with the new, racist, version of anti-Semitism, a modern conspiracy theory of global Jewish influence emerged. Published in 1868, a Prussian pulp novelist named Hermann Goedsche wrote about a completely fictional meeting of a shadowy conspiracy of Rabbis who vowed to seize global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through Jewish control of world banking. That “Rabbi's Speech” was soon republished in various languages as if it had actually happened. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a document claiming to be the minutes from a meeting of international Jewish leaders referred to in Goedsche's work. The Protocols were first published in 1903 by the Russian secret police as justification for continued anti-Semitic restrictions in the Russian Empire. After World War I, the 'protocols' were used as “proof” that the Jews had caused the war in order to disrupt the international political order.

Figure 17.6.1: An American copy of the “Protocols” published in 1934.

Dreyfus Affair

In the 1890s, a French Jewish military officer named Alfred Dreyfus was framed for espionage, stripped of his rank, and imprisoned. An enormous public debate broke out in French society over Dreyfus's guilt or innocence, which revolved around his identity as a French Jew. “Anti-Dreyfusards” argued that no Jew could truly be a Frenchman and that Dreyfus, as a Jew, was inherently predisposed to lie and cheat. Meanwhile, “Dreyfusards” argued that anyone could be a true, legitimate French citizen, Jews included.

In the end, the “Dreyfus Affair” culminated in Dreyfus’s exoneration and release, but not before anti-Semitism was elevated to one of the defining characteristics of anti-liberal, authoritarian right-wing politics in France. Some educated European Jews concluded that the pursuit of legal equality and cultural acceptance was doomed given the strength and virulence of anti-Semitism in European culture, and started a new political movement to establish a Jewish homeland in the historical region of ancient Israel. That movement, Zionism, saw a slow but growing migration of European Jews settling in the Levant, which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1948, it culminated in the emergence of the modern state of Israel.