19th Century Antisemitism

Even the most honorable Jews is under the inescapable influence of his blood, carrier of a semitic morality, totally opposed to Germanic values. . . aimed at the destruction and burial of German values and traditions. . . . Before the vote for anyone, first ask about his blood and worry later about his political opinions.

Image: Cover of Wilhelm Marr's book, The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism.

Adolf Stöcker

Adolf Stöcker was a court preacher in Berlin who worked as a missionary among the poor. He was convinced that Jews dominated the economy and were destroying the Christian values of Germans. He was also convinced that the proletariat were becoming influenced by materialist views of Jews and straying from Christian values.

Image: Adolf Stöcker, 1835-1909.

Image: Biography of Otto Böckel (written in German).

Otto Böckel

Otto Böckel was an organizer in Hesse, Germany. He voiced the frustration of peasants and small artisans in rural communities. These were the groups that felt threatened by the changing economic situation of a capitalistic economy. Jews were blamed for the exploitation of peasants, and the rural communities demanded that free credit be made available to peasants. Böckel also demanded that the emancipation of Jews be repealed.

Theodor Fritsch

Theodor Fritsch ran an antisemitic publishing house which published Antisemitic Catechism in 1893, later published as the Handbook of Antisemitism in 1896. By 1914, his publications had undergone numerous editions; he continued to influence public opinion until his death in 1933. Fritsch wanted Germans never to mingle with Jews since mingling would lead to the tainting of German blood.

Image: Theodor Fritsch

Central of Fritsch’s message was the superiority of the German Volk (people). The values of rural communities were considered superior to the corrupting values of urban centers. To purify Germany, it was seen as imperative that the people return to the peasant customs, songs and rituals—this return would restore the essence of the Volk.

Image: Cover of book by Theodor Fritsch: The Handbook of the Jewish Question, The most important facts for the evaluation of the Jewish People.

Volkish Thought

The historian, John Weiss, summarizes the essence of Volkish thought:

The volkists demanded lebensraum (living space) precisely as the Nazis would—the conquest and exploitation of the east in order to relocate Germanic stock in racially pure settlements, gathering in dispersed ethnic Germanic Slavic cities, razed, would be replaced by networks of communal Nordic peasant-warrior villages. There would be no place for the millions of Slavs and Jews already there. Guido von List yearned for a Germanic Führer, who, resurrected in spirit from the ancient Teutonic gods, would lead Aryans in the bloody conquest and show no mercy to Jews or Slavs. The Nazis also derived rituals, symbols, and sacraments from volkist cults. Hitler would be the apex of a sacred personality cult, its saints and great heroes who had died in the race war, solemnly sanctified on holy days in vast sacred ,monuments. Himmler created marriage and baptismal ceremonies for the SS (Schutzstafel) from volkist models. Future rulers of the Reich trained in ancient castles, and the special killing units studied volkist racial “science” to prepare for ethnic cleansing. Himmler himself informed them that any guilt feelings they might have were remnants of a degenerate Judeo-Christian heritage meant to destroy Nordic peoples. Stern pioneers of what the Nazis called “racial hygiene,” the Nordic people of the of the future would thank them, grateful to live in a world purged of the threat of Jewish blood. As Hitler said, “People accuse us of being barbarians, and we are proud of it!”

Weiss, Ideology of Death, pp. 110-111.

Two sides developed. Military officials and conservative political leaders held strong antisemitic views and maintained that Dreyfus, a Jew, was guilty. On the other side, there was a range of liberal journalists and politicians who campaigned for Dreyfus’ release and pardon.

Image:Caricature from an antisemitic Viennese magazine with caption, "In the Dreyfus Affair, the more that is exposed, the more Judah is embarrassed."

Photo: Emil Zola

The writer, Emil Zola, was firmly convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence. Zola wrote a series of articles during 1896 and 1897 in his newspaper Le Figaro, arguing on behalf of Dreyfus. In January 1898, Zola wrote in the liberal paper, L’Aurore, a letter to the President of France, Felix Faure. The letter opened with the words “J’accuse” (“I accuse”), and Zola accused the government and military of lying about Dreyfus. A year later, 1899, the case was reopened, and it was discovered that a forgery had been used to implicate Dreyfus. Dreyfus’ sentence was reduced to ten years. It was not until 1906 that Dreyfus was rehabilitated.

The explosion of Jew hatred in France essentially ended the great turn in history that was the post-Revolution emancipation of Jews in Europe. Despite the witness of the exceptions cited above, that explosion was ignited and fueled by Roman Catholicism. Later, the strategic use of overt anti-Semitism as a way to restore Catholicism was rejected by Leo XIII, but the French Church, for a crucial time, rallied around just such a policy. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Catholic priests--. . .attended antisemitic congresses, gave Jew-baiting speeches, and, in their sermons, inflamed Catholic congregations all over France. The usual stereotypes were invoked; the Jew as revolutionary, as financier, as traitor, as the killer of Christ, as the ritual murderer or Christian children. These priests were never chastised or reined in by their bishops, who themselves never raised a protest, as one injustice followed another in l’affaire Dreyfus. Catholic bishops in other countries, like Bishop John Ireland of the United States, spoke up for Dreyfus, but not in the country in which the scandal unfolded: “No authorized voice was raised in the Church of France against their judicial monstrosities,” on Catholic Dreyfusard protested, adding, “The universal silence of the French episcopate appeared as a crime. . . The great moral authority which the Church represents was dumb. . .it did not protest, it did not wax indignant, when forgery, collusion and perjury combined in broad daylight to mislead the conscience of Christians."

James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 457-8.

Map: Jewish Population in Europe 1933.

Image: The Jews played a pioneering role in Prussia's industrialization. In the textile sector small businesses could be kept alive only by adapting to new technical developments. The cotton industry was rapidly mechanized. In 1824, the Silesian textile manufacturer, Meyer Kauffmann and his wife Philippine, established a draper's shop in Schweidnitz. In 1841 they opened a branch in Breslau. After the London Exposition of 1851, they purchased 200 mechanical looms and opened a textile factory.

Image: Statistics compiled for the exhibition, Jews of Germany under Prussian Rule, graphically demonstrate the economic situation of Jews in Germany. The classification charts display the total population and the Jewish population according to their professions as of June 16, 1925.

At the start of the nineteenth century there were some 2.5 million Jews in the world including 100,000 in Germany. Following a period of rapid population growth, by the 1930s there were some 16 million Jews most living in Eastern Europe, and with some one-half million in Germany. With regard to the Jews, the period of European history preceding the Holocaust can be characterized as an era of migration from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and the United States, and from less industrialized and commercialized regions to more developed areas of the world. . . .

[Jews tended to concentrate in large towns and cities. In several cases, the majority of Jews lived in the capitals such as Copenhagen, Paris, London and Vienna. German Jews also went through the process of urbanization:]

In 1816, out of a total population of 197,717 Germans living in Berlin, there were 3,373 Jews; by 1849 there were 412,154 Germans of whom 9,595 were Jews, an increase of 185 percent, of whom 86,152 were Jews. Thus in the forty six years between 1849 and 1895 the total population of Berlin grew by 307 percent while the Jewish population alone increased by 798 percent. Moreover, though the concentration of Jews in Berlin never reached the levels of Copenhagen or Paris, in 1925 out of a population of 564,379 German Jews, some 172,672 or 30.6 percent lived in Berlin. In sum, both in terms of rate and concentration, the processes of urbanization that had affected world Jewry were also transforming German Jews. These processes were part of a larger package that included education and occupational change as well.

. . . Within a generation or two after the establishment of state-supported schools in Germany , most Jewish children not only attended but many excelled in them and continued on to secondary education at a rate that far exceeded their non-Jewish neighbors. . . .

This desire for secular education and culture among European Jews can be seen with particular force in the rate of Jewish attendance at universities. . . . It should be noted that in all countries the percentage of Jewish students was far greater than the percentage of the Jewish population. This suggest a number of points pertaining to Jewish social mobilization and antisemitism.

To the extent that university education is a scarce good and measure of modernization and social mobilization, this ratio suggests that Jews were proportionately more able to attain it and were more mobilized that the population as a whole. . . .

It is striking that in the nineteenth century, at a time when most non-Jews in Germany were still occupied in agriculture, some 78 percent of Jews were classified as earning their living in commerce, industry, and the professions. By 1907 most Jews in Germany were working squarely in the modern industrial-commercial sector, while nearly half of their non-Jewish compatriots were still part of a rural-agricultural world dominated by traditional values. . .

Richarz points out that prior to emancipation in Germany about 80 percent of Jews were small shopkeepers, peddlers, domestic servants, and beggars. Some 2 percent belonged to the “protected” elite of Schutzjuden, a class of wholesale merchants, bankers, and court Jews whose dealings were mainly with princes and with other Christians. By 1861, with only 2 percent of non-Jews engaged in trade in Prussia, 58 percent of Jews were merchants; this implies that 20 percent of all German merchants were Jews. With the tremendous expansion of German industry between 1850 and 1871, Jews moved rapidly into capitalist enterprises, especially the fledgling textile industry. Their progress was so rapid that “by the middle of the nineteenth century, half of all the known entrepreneurs in Berlin were Jews.

Adapting rapidly to capitalism and free enterprise and rising swiftly with the general improvement of economic conditions in Germany most Jews in the nineteenth century were able to join the economic version of the middle class within one or two generations after emancipation. . . .

Not all Jews had made it. Even in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, 9 percent of Jews were domestic servants, and 8 percent were beggars. In Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia in particular, few Jews had attained middle-class status. Although ehre, too, most Jews were engaged in commerce, including petty and even marginal trade, there was a large Jewish industrial working class with some 39.2 percent of Jews belonging to the proletariat. Thus the impression of a rapid embourgeoisement of Jewish society in Germany should not be generalized to all European Jews. . . .

Robert Nelson, Revolution and Genocide, pp.

Delighted by the possibility of identifying with Germany and its culture, a great many Jews . . . wanted to be German, that was all. Gabriel Reisser expressed this attitude as follows: There is only one baptism that initiates into nationality, and that is the baptism of blood in the common struggle for freedom and fatherland. Demonstrative love of country and patriotism . . . brought a whole series of Jews to the point where they believed in a profound similarity between the basic natures of German and Jew, an inner identity of German and Jewish characteristics.

Roland Klemig, Jews in Germany Under Prussian Rule.

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