GLOBAL ANTISEMITISM IN THE MODERN ERA, TO THE 1900s

An Educational Unit

By Edith Shaked

The Exclusive Dimension of Identity and Nationality

From Religion to Secularism: Continuity, change, and the Jewish struggle
for Equality

Issues
* The Jewish Question: A World problem - international manifestations of
antisemitism
* Antisemitism in the modern world, within the context of the socio-economic and
political transformations of Europe, following the Enlightenment, and the
Industrial and French Revolutions.
* Reasons for the persistence of popular stereotypes of Jews over centuries.
Secularization of religious antisemitism, and its transformation into political
antisemitism.
* Modern secular national and racial antisemitism were added to the religious
body of traditional religious antisemitism.

CHAPTER OUTLINE AND FOCUS QUESTIONS

Main Question: Why could the great majority of nations, and leaders either lend
support to the Nazi effort or simply choose to do and say nothing?
________________________________________________________________
_______
On the State of Being Jewish and the Other in the Modern Era
Why and how did the Jews come to have an evil image in the secular nation-
state?

Rationalism and Secularism: The 18th century Age of Enlightenment

What were the contributions of the intellectuals/philosophes of the eighteenth
century? Why and how did some leading figures of the Enlightenment foster
antisemitism?

Liberalism & Nationalism: French Revolution and Political National

Citizenship
What was the French Revolution? What effects did it have on the Jews?
What role did nationalism play in the rise of modern antisemitism?

Industrial Capitalism, Socialism and Class Antagonism - The Industrial

Revolution
What was the Industrial Revolution? What effects did it have on European
economic and social life?
Why and how did the Jews come to have an evil image in the Industrial

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Revolution? (What was the social and economic impact of the Industrial
Revolution?)

Nationalism and Industrial Capitalism as Sources of Antisemitism

What were the positive and negative aspects of the political and socio-economic
changes in Jewish life in the 1800s? Why and how did the Jews come to have an
evil image in the Industrial Revolution? What role did nationalism and industrial
capitalism play in the rise of modern antisemitism?

Imperialism - Exporting Antisemitism and Emancipation

What were the effects of French imperialism on the Jews in Frances North
Africa?

Political Antisemitism, Mass Society, and Mass Politics

What roles did mass society and mass politics play in modern antisemitism? Give
examples.

CRITICAL THINKING
How did the modern antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
differ fundamentally from the traditional and medieval antisemitism of earlier
century?
How did antisemitism in the modern era provide an indispensable seedbed
for the success of Nazism on the popular level, and led many to stand on the
sidelines as masses of Jews were murdered?

On the State of Being Jewish and the Other in the Modern Era
________________________________________________________________
________
Why could the great majority of nations, and leaders either lend support to the
Nazi effort or simply choose to do and say nothing?

The causes of antisemitism, as well as its enduring nature and intensity, are
based primarily on the religious and spiritual creed of Judaism and on the role
played by Jews in the economy and other spheres of life ... Furthermore, through
the centuries, the term Jew has been associated with concepts, stereotypes,
images, and calumnies that together formed a negative composite image on both
the conscious and the emotional level, often almost without any relationship to
Jewish society as it really was. Yad Vashems historian, Israel Gutman (1990:
55)

Following many centuries of persecution and exclusion, the Jewish minority in

Europe achieved some rights after the Enlightenment. As Europe became more
secular and Jews integrated into mainstream society, political forms of
antisemitism emerged. Jews were targeted for their ideas and their role in society
... All of these centuries of hatred were exploited by the Nazis and their allies

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during World War II (ushmm:1)

The Jewish Question: A World Problem

This chapter traces history of the modern Jews in a world of challenges and
threats. It examines the history of antisemitism in the modern era, and the
antagonism between the Jews and their neighbors, in a much broader and global
perspective than is generally the case. It continues to investigate European
history as seedbed of the Holocaust, and the trends in modern history that
enabled the Holocaust.

Emancipation, integration-assimilation of the Jews in the general society, and

ideological sources of confrontation are explored, in order to provide an
understanding of the Holocaust within a broader historical context. This chapter
also explores antisemitic representations of the Jews in the modern era, some
responses of the oppressed Jews to the hostility of the surrounding society/the
Gentiles (non-Jews), and the reconstructions of Jewish identity in the 19th
century.

The Dislike of the Unlike in the Modern Era Traditional antisemitism,

because of religious differentiation, persisted after the 16th century and the
Reformation, becoming an enduring hatred. The dominant religious majority
population continued to look with suspicion and hatred at the Jews, who tried to
find different paths of emancipation, and struggled for survival and for their quest
for human dignity, equality and national identity. That was quite a challenge,
because new non-religious myths and stereotypes of the Jews were added to the
medieval anti-Jewish images, propagated by the Churches and other religious
authorities for centuries.

Thus, from the seventeenth until the early twentieth centuries, a secular
antisemitism emerged within the socio-economic, cultural, and political processes
taking place in the nation-state. The main contributors to antisemitism in the
modern era were rooted in new ideologies and trends ending with ISM. The first
ones were early racism during rationalism and secularism, followed by
nationalism, imperialism, industrial capitalism, and political antisemitism.

Rationalism and Secularism: The 18th century Age of Enlightenment

_____________________________________________________________
What were the contributions of the intellectuals/philosophes of the eighteenth
century? Why and how did some leading figures of the Enlightenment foster
antisemitism?
_____________________________________________________________

From the Age of Faith in the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, the
Catholic and Protestant churches were conservative institutions that supported
the traditional medieval division of the society into inherited classes, with some

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having more privileges than others. The Enlightenment (sometimes dated, 1687-
1789), was a cultural and intellectual philosophical movement, that followed the
scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, when scientists and thinkers such
as Newton, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes, promoted new ideas and theories
challenging the views and authority of the Churches. Paris, France, was the
capital of the Enlightenment.

Reason versus Faith - A Critique of Religion

During the period of the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, the
philosophes (French word for intellectuals of that time) claimed that that they
have discovered the light of logical thinking exposed by science. They argued,
that one should use the scientific method and reason, over faith and revelation,
to study human nature and reexamine all aspects of life.

Christianity Under Attack Consequently, a secular culture emerged in the

Western world, deconstructing the religious identity dominant in Age of Faith of
the middle ages. Most of the philosophies attacked ignorance, superstition,
bigotry, religious fanaticism, and traditional Christianity. They promoted
humanism, rationalism, individualism, and religious tolerance. In that context,
some Enlightenment thinkers denounced the persecution of the Jews; they also
claimed that Jews and Muslims were all human beings, and they were entitled to
rights despite their religion.

However, antisemitism persisted in the Age of Reason, and it referred to the

reaction of the dominant groups to the Jews' determination to assert and
perpetuate their own religious identity. Despite the spirit of rationalism and
tolerance of the Enlightenment, there were some philosophers, who were hostile
to the Jews, and attacked their separatist ways. They blamed them for
Christianity, and mocked Jewish customs; thus, they helped ensure the
persistence of many odious anti-Jewish biases and the continuity of antisemitism
throughout Europe. There were also publications of antisemitic caricatures
associating Jews with swine, a continuation of the common negative image of the
Jew sow in the 16th century.

Myth of the Jew as an Alien to European Society and a Danger to its Future
The Count Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud (1675-1760), stressed the otherness of
the Jews. He published a book of citations from Greek and Latin authors
(Opinion des anciens sur les Juifs - Opinion of the Ancient on the Jews, 1769). In
this book, the writers described the Jews as alien to European society and a
danger to its future. Those themes were repeated in Nazi Germany in the 1930s,
when Hitler attacked the Jews as the principal threat to the Aryan race.

Early Racism and the Myth of the Jew as Inherently Evil Frances most
prominent philosophe was Franois-Marie Arouet (1694 1778), known as
Voltaire. He championed freedom of religion and freedom of speech, famously

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declaring: I disagree with every word you say, but I shall fight to death for your
right to say it! However, Voltaires opinions on Jews revealed a virulent
antisemitism that made an indelible mark in Europe. He viciously criticized
Judaism and Jewish particularism in traditional terms, and portrayed the Jews
as stubborn, perverted, greedy, and with permanent evil characteristics.

In his ''Letter of Memmius to Cicero'' (1771), Voltaire, pretending to be an ancient

Roman reporting on the Jews, wrote: ''They are, all of them, born with raging
fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with
blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not
some day become deadly to the human race. ... You {Jews} deserve to be
punished, for this is your destiny." Voltaire urged to put a sign, fit to be hanged
on the forehead of the Jews, a precursor for the yellow Star of David identifying
the Jews, during the Nazi era. In the article, Jew, in the Philosophical
Dictionary, Voltaire asserted that the Jews are still vagabonds upon earth ... the
most abominable people in the world. In his popular books, he portrayed them
as superstitious, dishonest, usurious, and lecherous. Yehuda Bauer, academic
advisor at Yad Vashem, characterizes such anti-Jewish hostility as Christian
antisemitism without Christianity.

The popularity of Voltaire helped spread and perpetuate those traditional

negative images of the Jews among the intellectuals of Christian society. Nazi
propaganda will later promote the image of the wandering Jew and Voltaires
antisemitic stereotypes.

Jewish Responses

Germany: The Jewish Enlightenment - Adaptation of the Jews to Modernity

The Enlightenment had an impact on some Jews, who called for a modern
Jewish identity. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was a German Jewish
philosopher, who criticized anti-Jewish stereotypes that flourished during the
Enlightenment, and campaigned for Jews' civil rights, arguing that the state didnt
have the right to interfere with the religion of its citizens. Mendelssohn advocated
integration of the German Jews into the general gentile (non-Jewish) society by
learning German and cultural exchange, and aspired to adapt Jewish religious
traditions to modernity.

Mendelssohn founded the Jewish rationalistic Enlightenment movement

(Haskalah - Hebrew name for education), and has been considered the father of
Reform Judaism. In the second half of the 19th c., extreme adherents of the
Enlightenment in Germany, modernized Jewish religious, and founded Reform
Judaism.

Moses Mendelssohn's descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix

Mendelssohn, whose father converted to Christianity. In 1754, he met Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, who became his great friend, and made Mendelssohn the

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model for Nathan der Weise.

Gotthold Lessing (1729-1881) was an important German philosopher who

attacked bigotry and conservative dogmatism. He wrote Nathan der Weiss
(Nathan the Wise; 1779), a didactic play, which made a case for religious
tolerance and equality of three great ethical religions. The main symbolic
characters of the book are Nathan (Judaism), the Templar (Christianity), and
Saladin (Islam).

The Jews in Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe, where 72 percent of the world Jewish population lived, was the
heartland of Jewish life. Eastern European Jews led a distinctly different life, than
the Jews in western and central Europe. Most of them lived in small Jewish
villages (Yiddish, sing. shtetl), and spoke Yiddish (a language spoken by
Ashkenazi Jews; combines German dialects, Hebrew, Aramaic and other
European languages, and written in the Hebrew alphabet). They were deeply
religious, and easily recognized by the Christian majority. They had long beards
and side-burns (peot), wore black brimmed hats and long caftans, ate kosher
food (refers to food that Jewish laws allow and dont allow to eat), and used
Hebrew in their religious service. Most of them were poor middlemen, peddlers,
and artisans.

Like in Western Europe, traditional antisemitism, religious hostility and hatred

toward the Jews continued to persist. The Jews were considered an alien
minority, and were still subjected to discrimination and all kind of disabilities.
They couldnt own land or work in certain jobs, paid heavy taxes, and had to live
in specified areas. And sometimes, there were massacres.

Hasidim/Chassidim In eighteenth century Eastern Europe, in the context of

the Haidamak riots (attacks of Ukrainian peasants against Jews), and dozens of
blood libels, Israel ben Eliezer (1700-1760), known as Baal Shem Tov (Hebrew
for Master of the Good Name) founded a new Judaic movement called Hasidism,
a mystical and spiritual Jewish movement with joyful worship. Hasidim (Hebrew
word for Pious ones) were and are followers of Hasidism. Hasidism emphasized
warm religious feeling and fervor in the worship of God over the deed and the
scholarly scriptures of the Jewish law,.

Political Reform versus Tradition

The philosophes also criticized the inegalitarian medieval hierarchical division of

the society into orders or estates, which was supported and sanctioned by
Christian teaching. They attacked the traditional privileges of the nobility and the
clergy, and challenged the concept of a social personal status determined by
heredity. Convinced that man and society are perfectible, the Enlightenment
thinkers wanted to restructure the socio-political institutions of Europes old order
(of the Middle Ages), by using reason and not religion. Thus, they paved the way

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to the French revolution, and the liberal national revolutions of the 18th and 19th
century. Lets examine the political, and socio-economic changes and ideologies
of those centuries.

Nationalism - The French Revolution and Political National Citizenship,

1789
_____________________________________________________________
What was the French Revolution? What effects did it have on the Jews?
_____________________________________________________________

The French Revolution (FR) was a national and democratic revolution, which
shaped modern citizenship. It transformed France into a modern state, national,
liberal, and secular. It advanced liberal ideals and spread the political ideology of
nationalism beyond France and the European continent. As a major social and
political event, the FR dramatically changed both the course of world history and
the character of antisemitism. During the nineteenth century, national-political
considerations were added to the negative traditional religious views of the Jews,
making not only Europe, but other continents complicit in the Shoah.

From Inherited status to Equal National Identity and Citizenship

In1789, driven by liberalism, the people of France challenged the Old Order,
established on inherited privilege, inequities and despotism, and overthrew the
absolute monarchy of Louis XVI. The revolutionary slogan, Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (26 August 1789) led to the
destruction of the hierarchic society of the old regime supported by Christianity,
and guaranteed basic human rights and citizenship to all. By 1791, a
revolutionary consensus had moved France into a drastic reordering of its
government. Individual equal rights and representative institutions were the
socio-political characteristics of the new national France.

New political parties emerged as a consequence of the FR. The Left, liberal,
secular and Republican, was for promoting socio-political changes. The Right
referred to the conservatives who didnt want to change the existing condition,
and supported traditional institutions; its membership drew from the Church, the
army, and the aristocracy. The Center promoted policies between left-wing
politics and right-wing politics. The French Revolution also helped spread two
important political ideologies, liberalism and nationalism.

Liberalism: The Value of the Individual Liberalism was a movement that

opposed the autocratic powers of the absolute monarchy; it advocated liberty,
freedom from arbitrary power, and freedom to think and worship. Liberalism
stressed what all people had in common, supported legal equality, individual civil
rights, and equality of opportunity based on talent and not on birth or religion; it
advocated toleration, embraced the affirmation that all humans have value, and
that all are entitled to equal respect and human dignity. Thus, a persons civil

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rights and citizenship should not depend on that persons religious identity. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, nationalism and liberalism were closely
connected.

Nationalism: Nationality as the New Agent of Political Identity Nationalism

was a dominant political movement, and a powerful ideology in the nineteenth
century. Nationalism involves the unique identity of a people, kinship and popular
sovereignty; as articulated by Ernst Renan, it refers to a state of mind and an
awareness of belonging to one country and a specific community, the nation, that
has common institutions, traditions, language, history, national symbols, and
value system.

Nationalism also defines the unique identity of a people, establishing who is or

can be member of the nation. Sometimes, nationalists would seek to abuse
minorities, to exclude them, or to force them to assimilate into the dominant
culture.

Models for Nationhood and Defining the Community

Until 1787, the French monarchy conferred civil status only to the Catholics, the
baptized. Chrtien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, one of Louis XVIs
ministers, advocated extending the civil status to the Jews, but still admitted to
Louis, There still exists in the hearts of most Christians a very strong hatred of
the Jewish people, a hatred based on the memory of the crime of their ancestors
...

The Politics of Citizenship vis--vis the Minority In the summer of 1789,

after the outbreak of the French Revolution, members of the National Assembly,
Frances new representatives, met to talk about the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen, which guaranteed basic human rights, and about national
self-image. Thus, they discussed the Jewish question ("la question juive"), and
the eligibility of Jews for citizenship. Some representatives wondered whether the
Jews could be sincerely loyal to the nation.

Myth of the Jew as a Religious Alien Unfit to be a Loyal Citizen Abb Jean
Maury was among the Christians objectors, who contextualized the debate on
national loyalty as a religious conflict. His religious values identifying the Jews as
non-Christians fostered prejudice and discriminatory action. Consequently, Abb
Jean Maury led the anti-Jewish groups, and argued that the Jews were
religiously alien, and inherently evil.

Religious Identity as the Agent of Citizenship and Nationhood The Jesuit

Abb Henri-Baptiste Grgoire supported Jewish emancipation and citizenship.
But, he contended, that the Jews first must convert to Catholicism, in order to get
rid of their degenerative physical, moral and political characteristics. Thus, Abb
Henri-Baptiste Grgoire defined the Jews as religious outsiders, to be excluded

8
from the nation, because of what they are not - because they are not recognized
as insiders, who are Catholic. Grgoires condition reflects the medieval religious
solution to the Jewish question, as expressed by Holocaust scholar Raoul
Hilberg: Conversion - You/the Jews, should live like one of us.

Myth of the Jew as a Parasite Grgoire saw the Jews as a threat to religious
identity; he compared them to parasitic plants, which eat away at the substance
of the tree they attach themselves to. Nazi propaganda would portray the Jews
as poisonous mushrooms, to feed the flames of hatred against them.

Jewish Emancipation - A Revolutionary Secular Solution

Understanding Human Diversity in Constructing National Identity

Stanislas, duc de Clermont-Tonnerre was a passionate advocate of Jewish
emancipation, and took a powerful stand against prejudice. On 23 December
1789, he declared before the National Assembly that only prejudiced people
opposed freedom for Jews. He insisted that individual Jews become citizen of
France, as follows: ...Is it not profound persecution of the citizen to want to
deprive him of his dearest right because of his opinions? ... The Jews should be
denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals. They must
be citizens ... the law must recognize a right that prejudice alone refuses.

Citizenship as a Legal Institution, and not of Descent Jewish emancipation

meant legal and civic equality of the Jews with all other citizens. After more
public debate on the Jewish question, France was the first country in which a
decree in September 29, 1791, made all Jews emancipated, free and equal
citizen before the law, regardless of religion. While in the past, the authorities
assured Jewish status and security with a charter or permits, a constitution or
laws would fulfill that function in most of Western and Central Europe.

Industrial Capitalism and Class Antagonism - The Industrial Revolution

_____________________________________________________________

Focus Question: What was the Industrial Revolution, and what effects did it
have on European economic and social life?
_____________________________________________________________

In the late eighteenth century, another significant revolution, the Industrial

Revolution (IR), brought about by new power-driven machines in large industrial
factories, and a more capital-intensive economy, transformed most of the modern
world. While the French Revolution radically changed the political regime of
some states, the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Machine fundamentally
altered their socio-economic structures, and caused social, urban, demographic,
and financial changes.

During the Industrial Revolution, industrial capitalism emerged, as private

9
investors in trade and industry became more involved in the mechanization of the
goods. At the same time, economic liberalism, which promoted free enterprise -
laissez-faire, and competitive labor market without government regulations,
flourished. There were abusive situations in factories, characterized by very poor
working conditions, child labor, long hours and low wages to the workers.
Consequently, the few of the industrial middle class became very wealthy, while
most, the unhappy industrial proletariat, the working class, remained very poor.

Thus, industrial capitalism significantly deepened the social division between the
rich entrepreneurs, bankers and owners of factories and mines, and the poor
factory workers, causing class antagonism. The laborers protested their harsh
working conditions and demanded reforms.

Socialism and Government Regulation

Social reformers of the 1800s, appalled by the dreadful socio-economic

conditions resulting from industrial capitalism, advocated socialism. According to
Socialism, a political and economic system of the left, the government owns the
means of production and operates them for the welfare of all the people. The
goal of socialism was to legally obtain better working conditions, and to distribute
the wealth more equitably, in order to lessen the gap between rich and poor.
And, this was quite different from National Socialism or Nazism that motivated
the Holocaust. Some governments enacted laws to remedy the abuses of
industrial capitalism.

Marxim/Communism and Government Control

Karl Marx (1818-1883), a Jewish convert to Protestantism and from a family of

rabbis (Jewish teachers and religious leaders), was an influential socialist and
political critic; he is considered the father of radical Socialism, an extreme-left
doctrine. Marx believed in the slogan, from each according to his ability; to each
according to his needs. He demanded the abolition of private capital and a
classless society. Marx also advocated the necessity of a proletariat revolution to
overthrow capitalism, to be replaced by communism. According to this new
socio-economic and political system, the government controls the means of
production, and economic planning.

Later, because of Marxs Jewish parentage, Hitler identified Marxism with the
Jews, and attacked Communism and Bolshevism (Russian communism) as
Jewish inventions, and as ideological enemies. In 1933, the Nazi regime would
fight Communism in Germany; in June 1941, equating Jews with Communism, it
would claim that it was fighting the Jewish Bolshevism in the Soviet Union.

Nationalism and Industrial Capitalism as Sources of Antisemitism

_____________________________________________________________

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Focus Questions: How did Jewish life change in the 1800s? What were the
positive and negative aspects of the political and socio-economic changes in
Jewish life in the 1800s? Why and how did the Jews come to have an evil image
in the Industrial Revolution? What role did nationalism and industrial capitalism
play in the rise of modern antisemitism?
________________________________________________________________
________

Antisemitism in the nineteenth century emerged in the context of nationalism and

industrial capitalism in the nation-state. It refers to the reaction of the dominant
population majority to the new legal egalitarian status of the Jews, their economic
successes, and their assimilation within the general society.

Extreme nationalists and antisemites opposed Jewish integration, and excluded

the Jews from the general population, by portraying them as the others,
outsiders, and thus, a threat to the nation. Jews were also blamed for the modern
changes, often the scapegoat for economic and political changes. That hostility
to the Jews culminated into political antisemitism, with identification of the Jew
with the enemy and Judas during the Dreyfus Affair, and with the myth of a
Jewish world-conspiracy, the Protocols. That kind of antisemitism would be
duplicated by the Nazi regime.

Traditional Christian hatred of the Jews Until the French and Industrial
Revolutions, the Jews were a visible, despised and discriminated religious
minority of outsiders. During the Middle Ages, Christian anti-Judaism was based
on the deicide accusation, the stereotype of the Jews possessed by the Devil
(having tails and horns), the refusal of the Jews to recognize Jesus as the
Messiah, the supersession myth, the blood libel and other false accusations. The
Medieval Jews lived at the margins of society, and with diverse legal, social, and
economic barriers to their participation in the general civil society; they were
restricted to certain professions, and many Jews were functioning in the Gentile
(non-Jewish) society as middlemen; then, conversion to Christianity was the
solution to the Jewish question.

With the French Revolution, the new principle of a national identity as a legal
fact, regardless of religion, seemed to have solved, at the political level, the
Jewish question What to do with this Jewish minority among us? The
revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity, as the vision statement for
the modern nation, legally allowed the entry of the Jewish people into the modern
world.

In the early 1800s, Napoleons armies and conquests spread the political ideals
of liberalism and nationalism in Europe. They enabled Jewish emancipation
(legal equality) in most western and central European states. In northern
Germany, Jewish emancipation was granted in 1871 with the founding to the
second Empire under the emperor, or Kaiser (Caesar) Wilhem I and Otto von

11
Bismarck, former Prussian prime minister

Emancipation in Western and Central Europe - A Tragic Delusion?

Jewish emancipation refers to the abolition of inequities applied to Jews up to the

18th century, and to the granting of legal rights and citizenship to them. The Jews
left the ghetto, attended public schools, adopted the language and ways of the
dominant culture and became involved in the political and economic activities of
their nation. They considered themselves to be assimilated citizens and Jewish
by religion.

Legal emancipation combined with rapid industrialization and urbanization, gave

rise to a Jewish population explosion, a Jewish poor proletariat (working class) in
Eastern Europe, and a Westernized Jewish assimilated middle class. Many Jews
became successful entrepreneurs, factory owners, lawyers, journalist, scientists,
teachers, shopkeepers, and bankers. The most powerful Jewish bankers were
from the Rothschild family, or the House of Rothschild. Members of that family
created the first global bond market and established multinational banks in
London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples.

The name Rothschild, as symbol for great wealth, inspired the song, If I Were a
Rich Man, in the musical A Fiddler on the Roof. The name of the song in Yiddish
is, Ven ikh bin Rotshild, meaning If I Were a Rothschild. The play was also
translated into Japanese.

Antisemitism as Retaliation to Jewish Emancipation However, Jewish

emancipation had other results. Among the Jews, traditionalists disagreed with
cultural assimilation, and there was a split into Orthodox, Conservative, and
Reform Judaism, reflecting Judaisms struggle to reconcile itself with the modern
world. Among the general population, antisemitism again raised its ugly head.
This time, it can be seen as the response of the host society to the Jews'
determination to assert their national identity, and their resentful reaction to the
economic successes of some Jews.

As the Jews entered the general society as legal citizens, a socio-politic

antisemitism emerged, supported by traditional religious stereotypes, and by the
Conservatives (aristocrats, generals, clergy, big industrialists), who wanted to
maintain the Christian character of the nation-state. Those antisemitic
conservatives were nationalists, who, regarding Christianity as a known and a
norm, suspiciously questioned Jewish national loyalties. On Good Fridays,
villagers burned a drawing of Judas, singing, Sticks! sticks! to burn the
everlasting Jew! In May 1806, and in February 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte called
for a meeting of 112 Jewish notables (the Sanhedrin), who stated that the Jews,
"Frenchmen of the Mosaic religion," were reliable citizens. In 1819, anti-Jewish
riots, which started in Germany, spread to France.

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The Catholic Church supported antisemitism and fought Jewish emancipation,
but it never advocated killing the Jews, as the Nazi regime did. The French
monarchists falsely denounced the Jews as disloyal citizens. And, both the
Church and the monarchists blamed the Jews for starting the French revolution.

The Jews as Forever Aliens and a Threat to the Nation By the end of the
19th century, nationalism grew politically extreme, separating itself from the
liberal notion of equality to all. Extreme nationalists started to evoke a mythic and
romantic Christian past, which excluded the Jews. They denounced minorities,
and viewed the Jews with distrust. They claimed that the Jews cannot belong to
the national community, because they were different, outsiders, forever aliens,
and a threat to the nation. In the 20th century, the Jews as a threat to the nation
would be at the center of Nazi ideology.

Negative Impact of the Industrial Revolution

Jews as Scapegoats for the Modern Changes The rapid socio-economic

rise of the Jews in western and central Europe, and the perception of their
disproportional numbers in the press, industry, finance, medicine, law, and art,
aroused anger, and strong anti-Jewish responses among the dominant
population. Richard Levy (2010:27) explains that, Emancipation provided the
catalyst for the development of antisemitism, because it seemed to signal a
portentous reversal in the relations between Jews and non-Jews. Jews had not
merely gained equality, they had been empowered, thanks to their liberal allies or
pawns. And, some people who opposed the modern economic and politic
changes of the 19th century blamed the Jews for those changes. Later, Hitler will
blame the Jews for Germanys defeat in World War I.

Myth of the Jew as Creator of Capitalism in Context of Class antagonism

The emergence of industrial capitalism in the 19th century was accompanied by
a clash between economic ideologies, class antagonism, and resentment of the
proletariat. Many disgruntled Gentiles (non-Jews) looked at the Rothschild family
as monsters who owned the world. Their financial success bred resentment, and
made them the favorite target of repugnant antisemitic attacks, such as the
assault on the Rothschild house in Frankfurt, during the 1819 Hep-Hep riots
against German Jews. Hep, hep Jude verreche (hep, hep, perish Jews) was the
rallying cry of the perpetrators, who wanted to abolish Jewish emancipation.
Many Jews were murdered. Those pogroms (Pogrom is a Russian word meaning
to wreak havoc, to demolish violently; mob attacks against Jews, often
sanctioned by the government) spread from Germany to Denmark, Poland,
Latvia and Bohemia.

The perception of similarity among group members made the Jewish Rothschild
name synonymous with enormous amount of money and Jewish power. That
perception enabled overgeneralization, and thus gave rise to the popular

13
stereotypes of the Jews as creator of capitalism, and born with the capacity to
make money. As such, the Rothschild will be referred as the reason to attack all
Jews. This led to widely spread antisemitic literature by well-known radical
socialists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and
others. In his book, Les Juifs, rois de l'poque : histoire de la fodalit financire,
1845 (The Jews, Kings of the Era, History of Financial Feudalism), the French
writer Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885), upset that the Rothschild helped
building the French railroads, accused the Jews of being aliens ruling France.
The Nazi regime will intensify that mode of Jewish demonization, and incorporate
parts of the 1934 American movie, The House of Rothschild, into their
propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew)

Jewish Response: Bonds of Solidarity - The AIU, 1860

In 1840, Jews in Damascus, Syria, were falsely accused of blood libel, for killing
a Catholic monk and his Arab servant, and using their blood to bake Passover
special bread (matzo). Two Jews died under torture, and another converted to
Islam to save himself. Later, they were found innocent. Still, the Damascus Affair
led to the 1848 anti-Jewish attacks in France. In 1858, the papal police abducted
Edgar Mortara, a Jewish child, and converted him to Catholicism, by force.

In 1860, as a consequence of those two last antisemitic events, Adolphe

Crmieux, a French Jewish minister of Justice, founded the Alliance Isralite
Universelle (AIU), an international Jewish organization. The AIU sought to protect
the human rights of Jews around the globe, but especially promoted French
education and culture among the Jews in the French Empire (Frances colonies
and protectorates in the Middle East and North Africa). The AIU set up a network
of French schools in French Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, encouraging the
rapid emancipation and assimilation of the Jews there.

Imperialism - Antisemitism and the French Empire

_______________________________________________________

Focus Question: What were the effects of French imperialism on the Jews in
Frances North Africa?
_______________________________________________________

Until European colonization, the Islamic world (in the Ottoman Empire, North
Africa and the Middle East) had also regarded the Jews as inferior outsiders, and
classified them as dhimmi, protected people, who had to pay special taxes and
were forced to live in overcrowded special quarters {Mellah in Morocco, Harat al-
Yahud (Ghetto Fighters House Archives:58004), the Hafsia or Hara (Arabic for
Jewish quarter)}. As in early Christian antisemitism, the Muslims grounded their
anti-Jewish sentiments in their religious beliefs.

14
Jewish Emancipation - Dignity, Equality and French Naturalization

During the era of imperialism and colonialism, North Africa came under Frances
control (Algeria, as a French Department, from 1830 to 1962; Tunisia, a
protectorate, 1881-1956; Morocco, a protectorate, 1912-1956). The Jews
welcomed Frances colonial rule as an assurance of survival, and benefited from
it. The French Republic introduced the concepts of equality, modernization,
emancipation and economic progress in France doutre mer (France over the sea
for French North Africa); it raised the Jews from their condition of inferiority as
dhimmi, facilitating Jewish emancipation and assimilation, as it did in the
metropole (France in the European continent).

Within less than a generation, the Jews of North Africa leaped from a way of life
quite similar to that of the Arab population into a new European culture. They left
the Hara and the Mellah, and moved to the newer European areas, where the
French colonists lived. Integration into French schools and universities led to
social mobility and rapid occidentalism: new cultural values, westernized clothing
and new habits in occupation, housing and life style; French became the mother
tongue. Many became traditional rather than observant Jews. A new Jewish
identity emerged resembling the Occidental colonizers.

These French-assimilated Jews found access to new jobs in the colonial

economy as clerks, teachers, industrials and doctors. Tens of thousands of them
became French citizen (all of them in Algeria), and volunteered to fight for France
during World War I. They considered themselves Juifs Europens (French for
European Jews). And, during the Shoah, the pro-Nazi Vichy regime legally
considered French North Africa as an integral part of France, implementing there
the final solution to the Jewish question. Thats why, at the Wannsee Conference
of January 20, 1942, where Heydrich noted the number of Jews to be killed, he
listed the figure of 700,000 Jews for "France/unoccupied territory, including by
that the Jews for Frances unoccupied territory in North Africa. That inclusion was
correct, as per the historical facts, but the wrong number was copied in the
Wannsee Protocol, which had other mistakes; the figure of 700,000 Jews for
"France / unoccupied territory, represented in reality the calculation of the
numbers of Jews living in all France of that time - 300,000 for the Jews living in
Metropolitan/mainland France, and 400,000 for the Jews in Frances unoccupied
territory in -North Africa.

Islam and Christianity versus Judaism

Despite emancipation, the Jews of Frances North Africa distinguished

themselves from the Arabs and the French by their religion and their Jewish
tradition. They were able to reproduce their autonomous institutions, such as the
rabbinical councils, preserving intact their religious and communal identity. Like
the Jews in the European continent, they had a strong sense of belonging to a
community bound together by their faith, culture, history, traditions, and a sense

15
of continuity with the Jewish past. Thus, the social and cultural French North
Africa reality was of three distinct social identity groups - les Franais, les
Arabes, les Juifs (the French, the Arabs, the Jews) (Shaked: 185-199).

French Antisemitism And there were manifestations of a continuation of local

antisemitism by Arabs, and anti-Jewish animosity exported by French colonists.
French newspapers spread virulent antisemitism, paving the way to Nazi-inspired
anti-Jewish measures by Vichy France, against the 400,000 Jews in North Africa.
Khaled Abdul-Wahab, the Arab Schindler, was an Arab rescuer during the
Shoah, in Nazi-occupied French Tunisia (1942-43).

Muslim Antisemitism and Attacks against Jews The situation of the Jews in
Muslim and Arab countries became worse in the modern era. In 1783, the Sultan
of Morocco expelled the Jews for the third time after they failed to pay a high
ransom. In 1828, Jews were massacred in Baghdad, Iraq. In Mashhad, (now an
Iranian city), a mob attacked the Jewish quarter in 1839, and burned the
synagogue. In Tunisia, from 1855 to 1864, Mohammad Bey made the dhimmi
laws less restrictive, but anti-Jewish riots (until 1869) forced him to put them
back. Discrimination and attacks against Jews in Arab and Muslim countries went
on in the 20th century. During the Shoah, Haj Amin el-Hussayni (189?-1974), the
Grand Mufti (chief Muslim Islamic legal religious authority) of Jerusalem, made
an alliance with Nazi Germany and met Hitler in Berlin; via radio, he spread
antisemitic propaganda to the Arab and Muslim countries. In June 1941, an
angry Arab mob launched a two-days Nazi-style pogrom against the Jews of
Baghdad, known as the Farhud.

Political Antisemitism, Mass Society, and Mass Politics

___________________________________________________________
What roles did mass society and mass politics play in modern antisemitism? Give
examples.
___________________________________________________________

In Imperial Russia, the czars exploited anti-Jewish sentiments for political

purposes. In the United States, and in Western and Central Europe, an educated
and politically involved mass society emerged, resulting in the rise of mass media
in the form of sensational newspapers, and the mass appeal of political
antisemitism. That was demonstrated with the issue of due process of law and
the trials of Alfred Dreyfus in France and Leo Frank in the United States.

Imperial Russia: Antisemitism in Times of Crisis

In czarist Russia, antisemitism was official government policy, and the level of
anti-Jewish violence rose. The Russian rulers and the dominant group members
equated their identity with a Christian collective, and consequently, they
oppressed the Jewish minority.

16
Until the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the Czars allowed the Jews to live only in the
restricted western part of the Russian Empire, the Pale of Settlement (pale
means enclosed area; it was between the Baltic and Black seas, and included
parts of Russian Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, the Crimea, Bessarabia, and the
Ukraine). There was a quota on the number of Jewish students admitted to
some schools. During the rule of Tsar Nikolai I (1825-1855), Jews were restricted
to certain professions, and forced to join the army, serving for 25 years. The
Christian majority looked at them as a contaminating influence, blaming them for
all the problems in Russia.

Jews Blamed for Economic and Political problems In late Imperial Russia,
severe persecutions of the Jews became widespread. Between 1881 and 1884,
Christian residents launched pogroms on entire Jewish communities in Ukraine
and southern Russia, wrongly blaming the Jews for the assassination of the Czar
Alexander II. Alexander III and Nicholas II intensified Russification. With the
slogan One Czar, One Church, One language, they allowed persecution of the
Jews, portraying them as Christ killers, and using them as scapegoats for the
economic and political problems of the country. Interestingly, a popular Nazi
slogan in the 1930s was One People, One Nation, One Leader.

Exclusionary Violence Violent anti-Jewish riots also broke out at the

beginning of the twentieth century. On Easter weekend 1903, following a deadly
pogrom in Kishinev, Russia, 49 Jews were killed, and more than 500 were
injured. Between 1903 and 1906, there were devastating anti-Jewish attacks in
690 towns, with most of them in Ukraine; the attackers looted, raped, and
murdered, unpunished. Shalom Aleichem (1859-1916), a Yiddish author, wrote
about them in his story of Touvyia the Milkman, from which the successful
musical Fiddler on the Roof was created.

The Jews of the Pale voted the only way they actually could: with their feet.
Between 1881 and 1914, about two million Jews emigrated to central and
Western Europe, and to the United States, where their way of dressing made
them very visible as Jews; some emigrate to Palestine, then a province of the
Ottoman Empire, and later under British Mandate after World War I. In 1910,
there were more than five million Jews in Russia.

The Beilis Affair - A Government Blood Libel: Persecution by Prosecution

Charges of blood libel (false accusation that Jews murder Christian children to
use their blood for Jewish ritual) persisted in Russia, as demonstrated with the
Beilis affair. In 1911, following the discovery of the mutilated body of a 13-year-
old Ukranian boy Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew from Kiev, was falsely accused
of blood libel. The Russian press launched a vicious against the Jewish
community, and the Russian authorities, falsified documents to convict Beilis.
However, in 1913, the jury declared Beilis not guilty. The trial spurred passionate
attention worldwide, and sparked international criticism of the antisemitic policies
of Imperial Russia. At the end, Beilis was freed. Journalists compared the Beilis

17
affair with the case of Leo Frank.

Jews gained equal rights only in 1917, following the Russian Revolution, where
some Jews were important figures. Thus emerged a new reason in Europe, to
hate the Jews as allied with the Communist enemy.

Antisemitism in the United States

Antisemitism existed in the American continent. In the mid-seventeenth century,

Peter Stuyvesant (c. 1612 1672), the last Dutch Director-General of the colony
of New Netherlands, attempted to force the Jews to leave the colony. In 1654, he
portrayed them as a deceitful race, hateful enemies and blasphemers of the
name of Christ. On December 17,1862, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant ordered
to expel all Jews as a class from his military district of Tennessee, Mississippi,
and Kentucky. A few weeks later, President Abraham Lincoln revoked the order,
following protests from Jewish community leaders, members of the Congress
and the press.

In the beginning of the 20th century, unofficial antisemitism was widely spread.
Jews could hold only certain jobs, and couldnt be members of some social clubs.
Some private universities put a quota on Jewish students enrollment, until the
1950s.

The Leo Frank Case The American Dreyfus In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jewish
manager of a pencil factory in Marietta, Georgia, was wrongly convicted of raping
and strangling a 12-year-old Christian girl, Mary Phagan; the mob outside the
courthouse cheered, Hang the Jew. Frank was innocent, but lynched by a mob
in 1915. The Leo Frank trial caused people to focus on antisemitism in the United
States, and led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Antisemitism in the US increased in the 1930s. During World War II, Breckinridge
Long, Assistant Secretary of State, and others deliberately placed obstacles to
Jewish immigration from Europe during World War II (1939-1945).

France: The Role of the Press and Intellectuals, Mass Hysteria, and the
Dreyfus Affair, 1894-1906

In the late 1800s under the Third Republic, France saw an upsurge of rabid
antisemitism. In 1871, Jews were blamed for Frances defeat by Germany, and
the loss of the French regions of Alsace Lorraine. They were also held
responsible for many financial scandals, such as the collapse of the Union
Generale, a leading French Catholic bank. In addition, systematic anti-Jewish
literature increased hostility against the Jews.

Drumont and French Organized Political Antisemitism douard-Adolphe

Drumont (1844-1917), a French writer and journalist, was expressly critical of

18
Jews. In 1886 he authored La France Juive (Jewish France), which became a
best-seller. In his book, Drumont argued that Jews are racially inferior and
believers in a primitive religion. He accused them of having taken control of
France, of deicide and blood libel, and he also held the Jews responsible for all
Frances problems. More than a million copies of the book were sold, spreading
antisemitic propaganda on a large scale.

In 1889, Drumont founded the Antisemitic League of France. Three years later,
he launched the publication of an antisemitic right-wing newspaper La Libre
Parole (The Free Speech), and declared that the Jews would be massacred,
inflaming public opinion against them. Drumont led a forceful campaign against
Dreyfus.

Laffaire Dreyfus (the Dreyfus Affair): The Jew as Judas the Traitor and the
Manipulation of Justice Political antisemitism violently burst forth during the
dramatic and emotional Dreyfus Affair, which bitterly divided French society.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1850-1935), a Jewish officer in the French army was
framed in 1894 by antisemitic officers, and wrongfully charged with selling
Frances military secrets to Germany.

Visual Media: Its Impact on Justice: Drumonts La Libre Parole inflamed public
opinion against the Jews, and equated Dreyfus with Judas Iscariot, who,
according to the New Testament, betrayed Jesus. The newspaper published a
caricature of Judas Dreyfus, with the familiar hook-nose stereotype, and
wearing the spiked helmet of the German enemy. A secret court-martial
convicted Dreyfus of treason, and condemned him to life imprisonment on Devils
Island. In 1895, the army stripped Dreyfus of his rank in a public humiliating
ceremony at the Ecole Militaire. During the trial, and after the verdict was
announced, the right-wing anti-Dreyfusards chanted in the streets an enduring
catch phrase, "Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!"

The Muslim Arab press in the Middle East expressed sympathy to the falsely
accused Captain Dreyfus, and denounced the persecution of the Jews. During
the next 12 years, the Affair sparked a vigorous debate over Dreyfus innocence
in France, and a group of people successfully campaigned to clear him.

Zola Denounced the Miscarriage of Justice In 1898, Emile Zola, a famous

French author and supporter of Dreyfus, got involved after he saw evidence
proving Dreyfuss innocence, showing that a Catholic aristocrat officer was the
real traitor. Zola wrote Jaccuse (I accuse), a forceful and passionate open letter
in a Paris newspaper, accusing the Army high command and the government of
antisemitism and conspiring to protect the real traitor. The Affair split France in
two. On one side were the civil libertarians and the Left Dreyfusards, supporters
of the 3rd Republic. On the other side, stood the Right anti-Dreyfusard militarist,
monarchists, Catholics and antisemitic nationalists. Jaccuse fired passions on
both sides. Eventually, in 1906, Dreyfus was absolved of all blame, and

19
reinstated in the army. Drumont was not reelected to the Chamber of Deputies in
1906.

Petain The liberal victory led to the enactment of the 1905 law separating
church and state. Later, from 1940 to 1944, many anti-Dreyfusards and their
descendants, were members of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, set up after France
was defeated by Germany in World War II. Marshall Henri Philippe Ptain
(Marchal Ptain), who was a young French officer during the Dreyfus Affair,
became head of Vichy France (Chef de l'tat Franais), and actively collaborated
with Nazi Germany implementing antisemitic measures in France and in Frances
North African territories, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. There are nine movies
and five plays about the famous and sensational account of the Dreyfus Affair.

Persecution Through Prosecution: Alfred Dreyfus, Leo Frank and the

Infernal Machine 2011 Conference:
Dreyfus Affair: The Cogs of the Infernal Machine Justice, Media, and Politics
Paris, France. July 5 - 7 , 2011. About the conference
Explore the various facets of these two historic cases with a special focus on the
legal, political, religious, and social issues of the Dreyfus case along with a
close examination of the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair.

See how hatred born by antisemitism can undermine the law turning it into an
instrument of persecution - mocking due process and justice threatening the
political balance of an entire country.

Look at Emile Zolas JAccuse denouncing the wrongful conviction of Alfred

Dreyfus and how a powerful press can shape world opinion responsibly or fan
the flames of hatred and prejudice.

Examine the role of Theodore Herzl and how the Dreyfus Affair helped to shape
his views on the need for a Jewish nation.

The Holocaust - Why not in France? In France, the political right (extreme
nationalists, the Catholic church, monarchists, and conservative army personal)
was antisemitic, but the government was always liberal republican, and never
supported political antisemitism, unlike in Nazi Germany. Moreover, as correctly
described by Rogers Brubaker (1992: ix - 14), France and Germany have been
constructing distinctive, even antagonistic models of nationhood and national
understanding.

If the French understanding of nationhood has been state-centered and

assimilationist the German understanding has been Volk-centered and
differentialist. (p. 1)
In Germany nationhood was an ethnocultural fact; in France it was a political fact.
(p. 4)

20
Despite the rise of antisemitism toward the end of the century {in France}, the
new nationalism did not abandon the traditional, essentially political conception of
nationhood for an ethnocultural conception. (p. 12). Hitlers Germany would go
further with its Nazi ethnoracial ideology; the Third Reich would conceive a racist
conception of nation and humanity, and would decide accordingly who can live in
this world, with deadly consequences on the Jewish people, the mentally and
physically challenged, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the Slavs and other
people.

A National Jewish solution to the Jewish question: Modern Zionism, 1897

For some Jews, the socio-economic and political emancipation had presented
vast opportunities, and was seen as the end of their quest for equality and
national identity in the countries where they lived. However, others chose a
national course of action in the Jewish struggle for human dignity; they
advocated, as per their daily prayer, a Return to Zion the Land of Israel, to
concretize Next year in Jerusalem.

A Jewish nationalist movement and Territorial statehood The idea of a

return to Israel and national emancipation made sense, in the context of the 19th
century European national movements. The success of Germans, Italians, Poles,
Greeks, and others in achieving political independence stirred some Jews to do
the same.

Theodor Herzl and Self-Emancipation Herzl (1860-1904), an assimilated Jew

famously declared, if you will/wish it, it is not a dream. As an Austro-Hungarian
journalist covering the Dreyfus trial, he was shocked into political action by the
antisemitism he witnessed in France. Herzl founded modern Zionism, a Jewish
political national movement, for a return of the Jewish people to Zion ( symbolic
name to the historic homeland of the Jews), and for reestablishing sovereignty of
the Jewish people there. In 1896, he published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish
State), in which he argued, that the creation of a Jewish state was the best
solution to the Jewish question.

The 1897 Basel Zionist Congress Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress
in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, and called for the establishment of a home in
Palestine secured by public law for the Jewish people. Following the British
defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, Palestine came under British rule. In
November 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration
announcing its intention to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people.

In 1922, the League of Nations granted to Great Britain a Mandate to secure the
establishment of a Jewish homeland, to facilitate Jewish immigration and to
encourage Jewish settlement on the land. With the advent of Hitler and increased
German immigration in 1936, there were close to 400,000 Jews in British

21
Palestine. The Zionist dream became a reality, with the establishment of the
State of Israel, in 1948.

The Conspiracy Theory of Politics in Mass Politics: The Protocols, 1903

Myth of a Jewish World-Conspiracy The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is

an infamous influential fabricated antisemitic publication that caused the rise of
theories of an international Jewish conspiracy. The forgery alleges that it is the
record of a meeting of world Jewish leaders, the Elders of Zion, at the first Zionist
Congress in 1897. According to the Protocols, the Jews discussed a plot to
dominate the world by manipulating the worlds financial institutions, influencing
the press and destroying civilization. The fictional text about the Jewish minority
conspiring to control the political order in the world was used (and is still widely
used) to incite hatred of the Jews.

In fact, the Russian authorities probably used a forgery made by agents of the
Russian secret police in Paris, during the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, to justify
Russian antisemitic policies and brutal attacks against the Jews. That forged
document, about an international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe, was
first published in the Czarist Empire in 1903. During the 1917 Russian
Revolution, The Protocols became a political weapon to blame the Jews for the
revolution. The Protocols were published in Berlin in 1911; auto magnate Henry
Ford distributed them later in the United States.

Ford and the Protocols in the U.S. In the 1920s, Henry Ford, the founder of
the Ford Motor Company, published a weekly newspaper, The Dearborn
Independent, with strong antisemitic propaganda. The newspaper reprinted The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A book comprised of those articles, The
International Jew, was published under Fords name. The book was translated
into 16 languages, fanning the flames of antisemitism worldwide. Hitler
mentioned Ford in his book, Mein Kampf.

A Lie On August 16, 1921, The London Times exposed the Protocols as a
fraudulent fiction, copied from a nineteenth century French satire against
Emperor Napoleon III. Despite that fact, the Protocols continued to be published
and translated, keeping alive anti-Jewish sentiments and reinforcing antisemitic
prejudices. In the 1920s, the National Socialist Party and German antisemites
used the Protocols as a propaganda tool, to prove that the Jews were
responsible for starting World War I, and for Germanys defeat. German students
had to read it during the Nazi regime, beginning in1933.

A Libel The myth of a Jewish world conspiracy as presented in the Protocols is

still dominating the socio-political discourse in the world, and is widely believed.
Anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli groups have been disseminating the fictional
antisemitic text in Japan, the Middle East, Asia, and other countries, to spread
hatred of the Jews, and hurt them. In many Arab and Muslim countries, textbooks

22
present the Protocols as a historical fact, feeding strong antisemitism.

Deadly Consequences Rubenstein and Roth provide an analysis of the

morally harmful consequences of the conspiracy myth to the Jewish people: In
Hitler's Mein Kampf the Protocols are presented as proof of an alleged Jewish
conspiracy to dominate the world, and the persecution of Jews as a necessary
self-defense. In this way, the "Protocols" come to justify the discrimination and
later the extermination of Jews by the Nazis. ...

By accusing the Jews of being a group secretly conspiring to conquer the world,
it became possible to see any atrocity committed against them as an act of self-
defense. The conspiracy myth thus helped to create the moral and psychological
climate in which genocide became an acceptable political reality. ...historians of
the Holocaust have shown that this document {The Protocols} provided
antisemites with a warrant for genocide. (Rubenstein and Roth. 2010: 87; see
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy
and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York Harper & Row, 1967).

Later, Nazism, with its specific German conceptions of nationalism and racism,
provided the ideological justifications of the Holocaust. And the roots of Nazism
can be found in the writings of German nationalists in the 18th and 19th centuries,
examined in the next chapter.

CONCLUSION
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Antisemitism, the longest hatred and a lethal obsession, continued to have a

disturbing and murderous history in the modern era, from the 18th century until
the early 20th century. The earlier religious stereotypes and diabolical images of
the Jews accompanied antisemitism into the modern nation-state, some of them
in a secular form. These were repeated in racist Nazi Germany under Hitler,
1933-1945.

This chapter examined the diverse range of religious, economic, and political
manifestations of antisemitism in the world, the attempts to solve the Jewish
question, and the variety of Jewish responses to them. It explored the different
causes of the hostility toward the Jews, analyzing how modern trends and
ideologies dramatically shaped and sustained a virulent antisemitism. One
ideology, nationalism, gave rise to the politicization of the Jewish question, and a
stronger, politically organized antisemitism. A combination of old and new anti-
Jewish images and myths were widely propagated by vitriolic writers, antisemitic
newspapers and infamous anti-Jewish publications. Thus, the negative
stereotypes of Jews, from the 12th to the early 20th centuries, became deeply
embedded in European and world culture, and, in times of crisis, would excite
(and justify) hysterical masses against the Jews.

23
The centuries of the absorption of strident religious, political, and national
antisemitism were also the necessarily contextual background for the silence, the
indifference, and the lack of compassion of the onlookers (bystanders) later,
when the Jews will be excluded from the national community, and eventually
annihilated. Yad Vashems academic advisor, Yehuda Bauer (2001: 29-30)
clearly expresses that idea, explaining that The Jews were a rather unpopular
minority. ... moderate antisemitism ... , or even the queasiness that many, if not
most, ... felt in connection with the Jews, was absolutely crucial. It prevented any
effective opposition to the murder of an unpopular minority. ...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCOVERY In what ways were the intellectual, political, and economic
developments of the 18th and 19th centuries related to the reactions of the
dominant population majority to the Jewish minority? (What were the
developments that intensified antisemitism, and helped create a climate in which
the Holocaust could occur?)

CHRONOLOGY
1687 Newton, Principia
1700s Baal Shem Tov and Hassidism
1687-1789 The Enlightenment
1729-1786 Moses Mendelssohn and the Jewish Enlightenment movement
1783 Sultan of Morocco expels the Jews for the third time
1789 French Revolution begins. In U.S., Washington elected president
1791 Emancipation in France: Jews granted full citizenship
1793 Catherine II the Great confines the Jews to the Pale of Settlement
1798 Napoleon extends French conquests to Rome and Egypt
1804-1815 Emperor Napoleon I
1806 Napoleon I convokes the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Assembly
1812 Napoleon's Grand Army invades Russia in June; retreated in winter
1818-1883 Karl Marx, father of Communism
1830 French occupation of Algeria in North Africa
1840 Damascus blood libel: Jews are accused of murdering a Franciscan
friar
1840s Use of "To Jew" in North America, meaning to strike a bargain or
employ
questionable business practices, according to this prejudicial
usage.
1820-1860 Orthodox Judaism with strict adherence to Jewish law
1840s Reform Movement begins in Germany
1850 Conservative Judaism develops
1858 Edgar Mortara, an Italian Jewish child, is abducted by Papal Guards
and
placed in a monastery
1860 Alliance Israelite Universelle with goal to defend Jewish rights
1871 France surrenders Alsace-Lorraine to Germany

24
1881 French Protectorate in Tunisia
1881-1884 Pogroms in Russia and Ukraine: Jews made scapegoat for Czar
of Russia
1881-1914 Russian Jews flee and emigrate because of pogroms
1886 Drumont publishes the antisemitic book Jewish France
1889 Adolf Hitler born in Austria-Hungary
1894 Captain Dreyfus convicted in France of spying for Germany
1898 Emile Zola writes I Accuse defending Dreyfus
1886 Drumont publishes his antisemitic book, Jewish France
1896 Theodor Herzl, father of modern Zionism, publishes The Jewish State
1897 First Zionist Congress at Basel
1903 St. Petersburgs Znamya published a hoax, The Protocols of the
Elders of
Zion
1903 Kishinev pogrom caused by blood libel
19031906 Pogroms in Russia and Ukraine. Two million Jews emigrate
between 18811920
1913 Beilis, a Jew, is put on trial for the ritual murder of a Christian Russian
boy
1913 Trial of Leo Frank leads to the founding of the ADL
1917 Balfour Declaration

KEY TERMS
Voltaire. Mendelssohn. Hassidism. Conservatives. Nationalism. Socialism.
Jewish question. Jewish emancipation. Class antagonism. Pale of Settlement.
Blood libel. Pogrom. Dreyfus. Herzl. Zionism. Henry Ford. Protocols.

Review Questions
What accounts for the intensity, longevity, and continuity of antisemitism,
called "the longest hatred"? (What were the main sources of antisemitism in the
modern era?)
Evaluate and analyze the political and socio-economic impact of the French
and Industrial Revolutions on the relationships between the Jews and the
surrounding society. What were the main sources of antisemitism in the 19th
century? Why and how did the Jews come to have an evil image in the secular
nation- state? Why were the Jews hated?

Identify and describe the myths and the key elements in the demonization of the
Jews.
How was antisemitism of the 19th century different from medieval Christian
antisemitism?
What were the different responses of the Jews to antisemitism?
What was the Dreyfus Affair, and why was it case significant?
Explore the parallels between the Dreyfus Affair in France and the Leo Frank
case in the United States, with the purpose of identifying and then analyzing the
ways which the law, politics, and the media may incite and abet one another in

25
perpetrating injustice.
What were The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and what was their impact?

REFERENCES
________________________________________________________________
_____

Bauer, Y. (2001). Rethinking the Holocaust. Yale University Press.

Bein, A. (1990). The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem. Madison,
NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers (1992). Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ghetto Fighters House Archives: A street in Harat al-Yahud, the Jewish Quarter
of
Tunis, before World War II. This photo appeared in issue No. 2 (1937) of
the
Yiddish language weekly, "Yidishe Bilder" (Jewish Pictures). Catalog No.
55709.
Registry No. 58004
http://www.infocenters.co.il/gfh/notebook_ext.asp?book=122606&lang=eng
Gilbert, Martin (1976). Jewish History Atlas. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Gutman, Israel (editor in Chief) (1990). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. 3 vols.
Yad
Vashem: Sifriat Poalim Publishing House. New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company.
Hayes, Peter, and Roth, John K. (eds.) (2010). The Oxford Handbook of
Holocaust
Studies. Great Clarendon Street, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Levy,
Richards article).
Lindemann, Albert (1997). Essaus Tears: Modern Antisemitism and the Rise of
the Jews.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth (2003). Approaches to Auschwitz The
Holocaust and its Legacy. Westminstr John Knox Press.
Shaked, Edith. On the State of Being (Jewish) Between "Orient" and "Occident."
Lisa Tessman and Bat-Ami Bar On (eds.) (2001). Jewish Locations:
Traversing
Racialized Landscapes. Rowman & Littlefield. 185-199.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~shaked/Tunisia/Jews.html
Tydor Baumel, Judith and Laqueur Walter (2001). The Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Yale
University Press.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). ushmm:1
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/
The USHMM. Antisemitism in History: The Era of Nationalism, 1800-1918

26
 http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007173
USHMM. Jewish Population of French North Africa
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007310
USHMM. Vichy discrimination against Jews in North Africa
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007311
USHMM. The Search for Muslims Who Protected Jews in North Africa
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/ihrd/docs/jerusalem-
program.pdf
USHMM. Voices on Antisemitism
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/transcrip
t/?content=20070830&lang=ar
USHMM. Hajj Amin Al-Husayni: The Mufti of Jerusalem
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007665
Yad Vashem (YV). YV:1
http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205742.pdf
YV. The Outbreak of World War II and Anti-Jewish Policy
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/02/middle_east.asp
YV. Racism
http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205761.pdf

SUGGESTED READINGS
________________________________________________________________
_____

Baldwin, Neil (2001). Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate.
New
York: Public Affairs.
Bartov, Omer (2000). Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern
Identity.
New-York: Oxford University Press.
Ben-Itto, Hadassa (2005). The Lie That Wouldnt Die: The Protocols of the Elders
of
Zion. London: Vallentine Mitchell.
Berenbaum, Michael, andAbraham J. Peck, eds. (1998). The Holocaust and
History: The
Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press.
Black, Edwin (2010). The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the
Holocaust.
Wiley and Sons.
Black, Edwin (2006). Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of
War,
Profit, and Conflict. Dialog Press.
Crowe, David M. (2008). The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath.

27
Westview
Press: A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Flannery, Edward H. (1985). The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-three Centuries of
Antisemitism. Paulist Press: New Jersey.
Halasz, Nicholas (1955). Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria. New
York:
Simon and Schuster.
Holborn, Hajo (1982). A History of Modern Germany, 1648-1840. Princeton:
Princeton
University Press.
Hilberg, Raul (2003). The Destruction of the European Jews. 3rd ed. 3 vols. New
Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press.
Jaher, Frederic Cople (2002). The Jews and the Nation: Revolution,
Emancipation, State
Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France. Princeton:
Princeton
University Press.
Katz, J. (2006). From Prejudice to Destruction: Antisemitism, 1700-1933.
Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Katz, Jacob (1973). Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish
Emancipation,
1770-1870, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; reprint New York:
Schocken Books, 1978. [942.1 KAT]
Kiernan, Ben (2007). Blood and Soil. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Landau, Ronnie S. (1994) The Nazi Holocaust. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc.
Levy, Richard S. (ed.) (2005). Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of
Prejudice and
Persecution. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio Press.
Levy, Richard S., ed. (1991). Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of
Texts.
Lexington, KY: D. C. Heath.
Nicholls, William (1993). Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate. Northvale, NJ:
Jason Aronson.
Sachar, Howard M. (2005). A History of the Jews in the Modern World. New
York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Segel, B. (1995). A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion.
Ed. R. Levy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Wistrich, Robert S. (1991). Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. London: Thames
Methuen.
Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. New York:
Oxford Press, 1990.
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Copyrights: Edith Shaked, 2010-2014

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