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The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Matthew Jefferies

Antisemitism

Publication detailshttps://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315613048.ch8Lars FischerPublished online on: 28 May 2015

How to cite :- Lars Fischer. 28 May 2015 ,Antisemitism from: The Ashgate Research Companionto Imperial Germany Routledge.Accessed on: 25 Mar 2018https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315613048.ch8

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AntisemitismLars Fischer

If a lack of conceptual clarity and transparency is rarely likely to benefit historical debate, seldom does it wreak quite as much havoc quite as quickly as it does when it comes to scholarship on the prevalence and significance of antisemitism in Imperial Germany (or any other context, for that matter). There is obviously no suggestion that scholars must all conceptualize the topic in the same way in order to have a meaningful debate, but any discussion will be extremely difficult unless scholars reveal their respective conceptualizations to each other. It is no coincidence that most of the ongoing debate about antisemitism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Imperial Germany hinges not so much on disagreement as to what actually went on, but rather on what it meant, that is to say, how it should be interpreted. Much of this chapter will therefore discuss a range of conceptual issues. Although there is obviously considerable overlap between them, I have tried to organize these around a number of basic questions or juxtapositions.1

Modern or Perennial?

Scholars have long debated whether antisemitism as an ideology and political movement emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century is best understood as a modern phenomenon, not unconnected but nevertheless distinct from other long-standing forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiments, or simply as yet another permutation of The Longest Hatred. This debate may now be rather less sharp among serious scholars than it used to be but nevertheless remains important, and on this issue students, and occasionally even more advanced scholars, sometimes rely on habit and convention rather than careful reflection and a reasoned decision.

If the debate has mellowed somewhat this is not least because assumptions about modernity and its proliferation in general have become much more differentiated in recent decades. It is generally worth bearing in mind that the study of antisemitism, like all scholarship, never transpires in a vacuum but is subject to broader overarching trends. As historians’ assumptions about modernization in general, and secularization in particular, change fundamentally, so too do their assumptions about the modernity or otherwise of antisemitism. One obviously would not want to fall into the trap of assuming that changes in interpretation and emphasis are specific to the study of antisemitism when in fact one is dealing with the way in which broader conceptual trends have impacted upon the study of antisemitism as one among many areas of scholarship.

1 The best survey of these and other relevant conceptual issues can be found in Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg, 2001), pp. 26–111.

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It is undeniable that the modernist thesis existed for some time in a stark and undialectical version that effectively implied that modern antisemitism reared its head in the 1870s and almost instantly displaced all other forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiment. Its ability to do so, the argument went, hinged fundamentally on its secular and racialized nature. As a secular ideology and movement, modern antisemitism superseded previously widespread anti-Jewish attitudes that ultimately hinged on religious enmity between Christians and Jews. Fundamentally racist in its approach, modern antisemitism blocked off all possibilities that Jews might integrate into non-Jewish society since their distinct traits were now considered to be racial in nature, and racial features were by definition immutable.

As already indicated, implausible as these suggestions now sound in this stark formulation, it should be borne in mind that they were made at a time when mainstream historiography in general was enamoured of rather simplistic notions positing a rapid and irrevocable transformative process towards modernity and secularization. If scholars now place much more emphasis on continuity as well as discontinuity, on the coexistence of modern and pre-modern phenomena and dynamics, and the complex and conflicting ways in which individuals and groups formed identities that negotiated and straddled both the old and the new, it is not so much because scholars of antisemitism specifically realized that modernization and secularization were rather more complicated developments than previously assumed, but because the historiographical agenda as a whole has moved in this direction.

Consequently, serious modernists and perennialists alike now acknowledge the messy nature of these developments and have considerably modified their positions. In some ways their debate is now one designed to determine whether ultimately the glass was half full or half empty. Does the evidence for existing continuities, when everything is taken into consideration, ultimately outweigh the significance of the change that took place or not? Is the antisemitic ideology and movement emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century ultimately ‘just’ the same old antisemitism in a slightly updated guise or do the characteristics that set it apart make it qualitatively a different beast, its many commonalities with other forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiment notwithstanding? The resurgence of the Blood Libel in the nineteenth century, and especially after 1891, is an obvious, particularly striking, case in point for the complex interaction of old and new that would merit more comprehensive, systematic analysis, the existing scholarship notwithstanding.2

As far as racial discourse as a distinct feature of modern antisemitism is concerned, much disagreement among historians has resulted from overly narrow assumptions as to what constitutes racialized discourse. Scholars on both sides of the argument have suggested that the criterion here is the prevalence or absence of fully fledged racial ideology in its starkest, most pure formulation(s). Perennialists have then concluded from the fact that racialized notions frequently coexisted with other mutually attenuating if not contradictory assumptions that the racialized dimension within modern antisemitism, such as it is, does not qualify as a distinguishing factor. Yet modernists too have increasingly come to question the importance of this particular distinguishing factor. Marcel Stoetzler suggests that ‘the overlap between Jew-hatred that is articulated within the rhetoric of race and those forms of Jew-hatred that do not use that same rhetoric is so strong that such a conceptual distinction obscures more than it clarifies’.3 On his account, what makes modern antisemitism modern

2 For Germany, see Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: murder and Anti-semitism in a german Town (New York, 2002), pp. 112–15, 123–33.

3 Marcel Stoetzler, The state, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s germany (Lincoln, NE and London, 2008), p. 192.

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lies not in ‘any of its formal aspects (being formulated in racial as opposed to theological languages etc.)’, but rather in ‘its specific social content’.4 Modern antisemitism is modern, then, because it adapts to contend with modernity and address issues raised in and by modern society.

That said, with modern society evolved a complex of widespread ideas that in most people’s perceptions and value systems privileged notions of ethnic belonging, hereditary community and rootedness in the Heimat, combined, to varying degrees, with various titbits of popularized racial discourse. The interesting question, then, is not so much the extent to which attitudes towards Jews were fully racialized, but rather how this complex mapped on to widespread notions about Jews and the prospects of their successful integration. Here the significance of the deep-seated assumptions that found their expression in the juxtaposition given its classic formulation by Ferdinand Tönnies as that between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (community and society),5 and the closely related contrast of Kultur and Zivilisation,6 though obviously by no means ignored in the literature to date, is still awaiting a comprehensive in-depth assessment. The ascription of Jewish characteristics in keeping with typologies and juxtapositions of this kind is evidently crucial to the dynamics of antisemitism, irrespective of whether those engaging in, or subscribing to, this ascription ‘may or may not imagine these characteristics to be inscribed into the DNA’.7

Further research along these lines is much more likely to help identify what was or was not distinct about antisemitism from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards than a litmus test seeking to distinguish who did and did not subscribe to racial theory in its purest and most radical formulations. Then again, it is also worth bearing in mind that in a very important sense even the Nazis themselves ultimately came a cropper with their supposedly scientific racial theories, and found no better way of distinguishing Jews from non-Jews than simply on the basis of their ancestry. In this sense, they too were ultimately inconsistent in their adherence to racist ideology and yet few would surely doubt that they were serious about it and meant business.

Is Antisemitism a Form of Racism?

This issue is obviously closely related to the one just discussed. If the significance of racialized discourse proper as a distinguishing feature of modern antisemitism has arguably been exaggerated and the organized antisemitic movement was in fact capable of integrating a whole range of anti-Jewish worldviews, then it is hard to see how antisemitism could be in any straightforward way equated to racism. At best, then, one might suggest that racism is one of modern antisemitism’s traits and/or that racists can also be antisemites and vice versa.

Yet there is a rather more fundamental issue at stake here. Christine Achinger has suggested that ‘what we usually subsume under modern “antisemitism” are in fact two different kinds of phenomena that, although interrelated, should be distinguished analytically: what I call “anti-Jewish racism”, and “antisemitism” in the narrow sense of the word’. What, on Achinger’s understanding, is the difference between the two? ‘While

4 Ibid., p. 191.5 Ferdinand Tönnies, gemeinschaft und gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1887); idem, community and civil

society (Cambridge, 2001).6 Norbert Elias, The civilizing process: sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations (Oxford, 1994),

pp. 5–30.7 Stoetzler, The state, p. 304.

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the former typically targets unassimilated recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe for their self-segregation, cultural maladaptation, poverty and backwardness, the latter operates with a diametrically opposed set of stereotypes: it is directed against the wealthy, assimilated Jew who … has blended into the fabric of the nation where he is pulling the strings of modern economy and politics as part of a secret conspiracy. Whereas the former refuses to become part of modern society, the latter is nesting at its heart and manipulates it to his nefarious ends.’8

Achinger has undertaken a careful analysis of the ways in which the phenomenally popular best-selling novel soll und Haben (Debit and credit) by Gustav Freytag constructs the portrayal of two groups in contrast to the Germans – Poles and Jews. Her crucial finding is that while ‘both groups serve to define German national identity through opposition … the characteristics of both groups and their function for the national self-image are radically different’.9 While the Poles are presented as ‘an external enemy … the Jews represent the enemy within … The Poles are a visible “other”, whereas the Jews become more dangerous the more assimilated and invisible they become. The power of the Poles is concrete, it is the power of sickles, scythes and cavalry, while the power of the Jews is abstract, they are in league with uncontrollable, impersonal and incomprehensible social forces.’ Ultimately, in Freytag’s scheme of things, while ‘the Poles come to stand for a feudal past that the project of a “German” modernity wants to leave behind, the Jews are in league with forces at the heart of modern society itself, it is they who are to blame if the desired harmonious and homely modernity can never truly be realised’.10

Both Poles and Jews, then, are othered by Freytag’s account in order to construct, by contrast, German identity, yet they are othered in distinct ways that facilitate the clarification and consolidation of differing aspects of German identity. Needless to say, all forms of othering have something in common, simply by merit of being forms of othering. Yet one might ask the very simple question why any one group would bother to construct and maintain more than one other if all forms of othering were fundamentally the same. A group requires a range of others to formulate and stabilize a variety of aspects of its own identity, and the typology indicated by Achinger’s account illustrates that there is good reason to assume that racism and antisemitism in fact speak to quite distinct needs and insecurities in the forming and maintaining of group identities. As Achinger astutely points out, the same holds true, incidentally, for the relationship between antisemitism and what is now commonly referred to as Islamophobia (Achinger suggests that a better designation would be ‘anti-Muslim racism’).11

Kernel of Truth or Projection?

Many scholars of antisemitism assume that it constitutes a distorted response to Jewish behaviour or characteristics, that is to say, that a kernel of truth inheres in the antisemites’ perception and portrayal of ‘the Jews’. Others insist that what actual Jews may or may not get up to is ultimately neither here nor there as far as the antisemites’ attitudes are concerned since antisemitism is fundamentally a form of projection. This latter contention is sometimes

8 Christine Achinger, ‘Threats to Modernity, Threats of Modernity: Racism and Antisemitism Through the Lens of Literature’, european societies, 14 (2012), p. 242.

9 Ibid., pp. 250–51.10 Ibid., p. 251.11 Ibid., pp. 241, 253–4.

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misunderstood or misrepresented as claiming that no connection at all exists between anything that Jews do and antisemitic perceptions. In fact, what the projection thesis really argues is that such connections as do exist between antisemitic perceptions and Jewish realities are coincidental and not causal.

The issue, then, is not whether some Jew(s) may at some point in time in some place have behaved in a manner that may to varying degrees correspond to anti-Jewish stereotypes; the answer to this question would in most (though certainly not all) cases undoubtedly be yes. The crucial issue is whether the way in which antisemites derive their ‘knowledge’ about ‘the Jews’ from such correspondences conforms, or at least approximates, to what one might ordinarily and by any stretch of the imagination seriously acknowledge as an empirical approach. At least two crucial observations militate against the suggestion that this is the case.

Firstly, arguably one of the most important factors that does allow us to make a clear distinction (though, again, of degree rather than of kind) between modern antisemitism and previously dominant forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiment is, as already noted, the shift in emphasis towards a preoccupation principally with the invisible Jew. In response to Jewish emancipation, real or prospective, it is no longer Jews as clearly discernible aliens that primarily arouse concern but the very fact that Jews are becoming (or might become) increasingly indistinguishable from non-Jews, thus enabling them to subvert non-Jewish majority societies from within, potentially unobserved until it is too late.

Ironically, then, the ideologues of modern antisemitism themselves emphasize the hidden nature of the problem. For many of them, the fact that their privileged knowledge about the true role of the Jews is at odds with empirical evidence only demonstrates how far Jewish subversion has already turned the world upside down, making it increasingly unintelligible. Their extraordinary obsession with the documentation of (alleged) Jewish transgressions can only really be understood as the flipside of a fundamental paradox within their worldview: they claim to fight an essentially invisible foe and yet would like to convince others that this foe is in fact hidden in plain sight. Against this backdrop it is not without irony that historians have been so willing to suggest that a kernel of truth, however tiny, and however dramatically distorted, does inhere in the antisemitic worldview. It is almost as though the antisemites are being credited with a greater measure of common sense than that to which they themselves would lay claim.

Secondly, there is a fundamental epistemological issue at stake here. Put very bluntly indeed, the question is whether one assumes that human beings fundamentally do or do not have the ability to perceive of reality without in the very same process already imposing their attempts to make sense of it on that reality. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this problem lies in the notion that there is such a thing as an exception that confirms the rule. When one classifies something as the exception that confirms the rule, what is one actually doing? One is saying that something that can be clearly observed and that on its own terms would mean A does not in fact mean A because one knows enough about the bigger picture to know that what one has observed is not representative of that bigger picture. Hence the fact that what one has observed in and of itself would mean A cannot change the truth that it in fact means B.

To put it slightly differently: we do not and cannot discern the meaning of a phenomenon we observe simply from the observation of the phenomenon itself; we can only do so by contextualizing it, by applying various techniques that we have acquired to make sense of the world to this phenomenon as we would to any other phenomenon of which we are trying to make sense. The crucial question for this context here, then, is not what phenomena – as potential kernels of truth – signify on their own terms but how one has learnt to make sense of phenomena more generally. What is it that makes a person decide which phenomena simply

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conform to the rule and which are the exceptions that nevertheless confirm it? After all, even if all the Jews one met in one’s lifetime happened to be perfectly wonderful, this in and of itself would not rule out the possibility that Jews in general are rather beastly creatures. Conversely, even if all the Jews one met in one’s lifetime happened to be exceptionally dreadful human beings, this in and of itself would not rule out the possibility that Jews in general are really quite wonderful. Consequently, introducing an antisemite to a nice Jew will in and of itself achieve nothing, because he will only assume that this particular Jew is the exception that confirms the rule. The real question is how an antisemite can be brought to reconsider what is the rule and what the exception.

As Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out in the 1940s,12 antisemitism is ‘by no means altogether irrational’ but depends on a form of ‘applied rather than spontaneous irrationality’.13 ‘One cannot “correct” stereotyping by experience’, Adorno consequently concluded, ‘merely … taking a real look’ does not subvert the false projection. Instead, in order to do so, one ‘has to reconstitute the capacity for having experiences’.14

It stands to reason that one opportunity for the closer exploration of these issues should be the closer examination of conversion narratives, that is, accounts of the reasons for their change of heart given by former self-avowed antisemitic ideologues and activists who subsequently leave the antisemitic movement. Though a seemingly obvious point of reference, remarkably little systematic research has been undertaken in this area.

While there is a strong case to be made that no causal connection exists between Jewish realities and antisemitic projections, well-established patterns of non-Jewish perceptions of Jews that do have some base in empirical observation, however partial and decontextualized, may help explain the choice of ‘the Jews’ as a foil in the first place. Though not entirely unconnected, these are two distinct issues that should not be confused. There is no reason why the grounds for the choice of the foil and the content of the projection need be inextricably linked. At this juncture, psychoanalytic modes of analysis have a crucial role to play in explaining how antisemitism, as a projection, represents a form of displacement that springs from the complex web of social relations in which the antisemite sees himself or herself embroiled and yet is in no way causally connected to actual social relations between Jews and non-Jews.

Not least, this helps explain the paradox that antisemites persecute those they identify as Jews as Jews (and not, in their own minds, as symbols for something other than Jewry and Jewishness) and yet the qualities they ascribe to ‘the Jews’ are clearly displaced attributes that are in no way specifically connected to Jews and Jewishness. We therefore need to find a way of striking a balance between understanding the universal significance of what is being projected on to ‘the Jews’ without forgetting that those at the receiving end of antisemitic vitriol and violence were (and are) nevertheless real-life Jews (whether self-identified or, for better or for worse, identified as such by others).

12 It is now sometimes forgotten how crucial the 1940s were for the evolution of modern critical theories of antisemitism, in part because this process took place principally under the auspices of sociology and social theory long before history established its current disciplinary hegemony in this field. The enormous wealth of this sociological tradition needs to be made much more accessible again to the academic mainstream to ensure we garner the best of both worlds.

13 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda’, in gesammelte schriften, vol. 8 (Darmstadt, 1998), p. 401.

14 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Prejudice in the Interview Material’, in gesammelte schriften, vol. 9 (Darmstadt, 1998), p. 303. The foundational text for much work currently being undertaken in this critical tradition, and arguably the single most important conceptual text on antisemitism published in recent decades, is Moishe Postone, ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, in Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds), germans and Jews since the Holocaust (New York, 1986), pp. 302–14.

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‘Politics’ or ‘Culture’?

Among scholars of modern antisemitism, this juxtaposition has the dubious honour of being a useful shorthand while at the same time implying a facile and problematic dichotomy. As a shorthand it signifies approaches to antisemitism that focus primarily either on antisemitism as a (party-)political ideology and movement, on the one hand, or on attitudes towards ‘the Jews’ prevalent in society more widely, on the other. This distinction is particularly pronounced among historians of Imperial Germany because organized party-political antisemitism was a startlingly new phenomenon, on the one hand, but, initial successes notwithstanding, ultimately failed to establish itself as a significant political movement prior to 1914, on the other.15 And yet everything we know about the significance of antisemitism in twentieth-century Germany illustrates that this cannot possibly be the whole story as far as the prevalence of antisemitism in German society is concerned.

Imperial Germany presumably maintains such a fascination for scholars of antisemitism not least because it offers such a rich case study for the interplay between these two dimensions, the political (in the narrower) and cultural (in the broader sense of the word). In terms of their perceptions of and attitudes towards Jews, the number of Germans (and Europeans more generally) prior to 1914 who, by the standards many would accept today, were not antisemitic is negligible. And yet, these Germans who today would widely be seen as antisemites in terms of their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, Jews nevertheless displayed a range of political stances vis-à-vis ‘the Jews’, the many commonalities in their underlying attitudes notwithstanding. Consequently it was perfectly possible to subscribe to a whole range of attitudes that scholars today would classify as antisemitic stereotypes and yet be an outspoken opponent of antisemitism as a political movement.

Conversely, as my own research has shown, it was also possible to be an outspoken opponent of (party-)political antisemitism without ever genuinely taking issue specifically with the antisemites’ stance vis-à-vis the Jews.16 While a self-avowed antisemitic movement existed, the term antisemitism became a generalizing party-political label covering anything and everything done or said by a member of the antisemitic camp. By this logic, support for agricultural tariffs or the imperial government’s armaments policy was no less ‘antisemitic’ than the call for specific anti-Jewish measures. Consequently, it is no foregone conclusion that anti-antisemitic activism necessarily targeted the antisemites’ anti-Jewish orientation. Put slightly differently, ‘political’ anti-antisemitism was perfectly capable of co-existing – even within one and the same head – quite peacefully with ‘cultural’ antisemitism.

Consequently, assessments of antisemitism as an organized political movement in Imperial Germany are likely to sound very different from assessments of antisemitism as a broader social phenomenon. These assessments are obviously not mutually contradictory, but merely reflect differing approaches and the fact that the goalposts have been placed in very different places; yet they obviously have the potential to cause considerable confusion unless the criteria applied in each case are made transparent.

What renders this entire shorthand problematic, however, is the assumption that one could distinguish between the political and the cultural in such a neat fashion. Anti-Jewish attitudes prevalent in society more widely may not offer a sufficient explanation for the success of organized forms of political antisemitism, but are surely one of its necessary

15 For the classic formulation of this argument, see Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-semitic political parties in imperial germany (New Haven and London, 1975).

16 See Lars Fischer, The socialist Response to Antisemitism in imperial germany (New York, 2007); idem, ‘The Social Democratic Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany: The Case of the Handlungsgehilfen’, Leo Baeck institute yearbook, 54 (2009), pp. 151–70.

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preconditions all the same. As Shulamit Volkov explained when reviewing Rosemarie Leuschen-Seppel’s study of German Social Democracy’s stance vis-à-vis antisemitism and ‘the Jews’,17 Leuschen-Seppel concluded that ‘while the [Social Democratic] party was practically immune against antisemitism on the political level, it consistently succumbed to it on the cultural level’. This failure, Volkov added, surely ‘must be seen as fatal indeed’, given that, on her account, the continuities that did exist between antisemitism in Imperial Germany, on the one hand, and Weimar and Nazi Germany, on the other, drew precisely on ‘the persistence of a cultural system of norms, vocabulary, and associations’, rather than any direct continuity of organized political antisemitism.18

That said, people at the time clearly had a neatly ‘political’ understanding of what did and did not constitute antisemitism. Antisemitism was indeed defined not in terms of what people thought about Jews but in terms of what they thought should be done to them; not in terms of people’s perceptions of ‘the Jews’, in other words, but in terms of their prescriptions for them. Short of either belonging to the antisemitic movement, and/or blaming all the world’s woes on the Jews and expressly demanding special measures against them, one did not qualify as an antisemite. Consequently, when looking at primary sources it is important to bear in mind that contemporaries’ comments about the strength or weakness of antisemitism are highly likely to refer specifically to organized political antisemitism as a movement and not – or not primarily – to the prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiments in day-to-day life.19

The historian of the labour movement and Engels biographer, Gustav Mayer (1871–1948), having fled to England in 1936, reflected upon this issue when writing his memoirs in the mid-1940s. As a youth, he wrote, he never doubted that ‘the remaining differences between German Jews and Christians – the “Aryan” did not yet play a role – would wane over time … Never would it have entered my mind to doubt that, just as trains would get ever faster and postage ever cheaper in future, people would cast off their prejudices ever more completely too.’20 Interestingly, even though he subsequently reflects critically upon this perception, in his account of his youth he fundamentally downplays the significance of antisemitic occurrences. ‘Usually, I was the only Jewish pupil in my class and since I was also one of the youngest and smallest, I had a hard time amongst these youngsters for whom only physical strength really counted and who did not consider it dishonourable to pick on someone who was physically weaker.’ Note the way in which Mayer here connects his Jewishness, on the one hand, and his youth and physical weakness, on the other. For whatever reason, he is evidently disinclined to explain the bullying to which he was clearly subjected exclusively with his Jewishness, but then neither does he deny the link between the two. He goes on to mention one particularly hideous incident when ‘the son of a tenant farmer who was four years older and two heads taller than I, during a break, cheered on by the pupils on the neighbouring benches, forcibly rubbed pork dripping into my mouth because he knew that my religion prohibited me from eating it’. In later years, Mayer went on, physical violence became less of an issue and the behaviour of

17 Rosemarie Leuschen-Seppel, sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus im Kaiserreich (Bonn, 1978).18 Shulamit Volkov, review in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche geschichte, 9 (1980), p. 546.19 When it comes to primary source material documenting Jewish perceptions of antisemitism,

one of the richest resources readily available to those who read German is the electronic repository of German-Jewish periodicals covering the period between 1806 and 1938 at http://www.compactmemory.de/.

20 Gustav Mayer, erinnerungen. Vom Journalisten zum Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Zurich and Munich, 1949), p. 7.

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most of his fellow pupils was simply characterized by a ‘marked lack of camaraderie’.21 Mayer then adds that, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems evident to him that the seeds of the catastrophe that would subsequently befall German (and European) Jewry were essentially already contained in the everyday life of his childhood years, but had not yet crystallized to a political phenomenon.22

The Shoah is by no means the only factor, though, that needs to be borne in mind when evaluating contemporaries’ statements about the extent and significance of antisemitism. In this context, Miriam Gebhardt’s findings deserve much more attention than they have received to date. She examined German Jewish letters, diaries, memoirs and autobiographies from the period 1890 to 1932. Insofar as these sorts of documents each reflect differing contexts, intentions and conventions, comparing them offers an insight into the choices made by their authors by including or excluding certain themes from some but not others.23 Notably for the context here, it transpires that antisemitism features much more prominently in diaries than it does in memoirs or autobiographies. This is partly due to the more immediate, less discriminate focus and usually more detailed nature of daily diaries. Yet Gebhardt argues that the differing intentions attached to diaries and memoirs are in fact a more important explanatory factor. As a general rule, prior to 1933, these sorts of memoirs were meant to offer a wholesome and successful narrative of integration into German society and their authors therefore had no interest in making antisemitism part of the narrative.24 Indeed, personal experiences of antisemitism were assumed to reflect a personal failure to integrate sufficiently.25 Why else would one be singled out for ill treatment as a Jew?

Gebhardt notes that schools emerge from the diaries as the most frequent site of antisemitic discrimination, yet this hardly features at all in the memoirs and autobiographies. Consequently, questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in Imperial German schools are obviously going to be answered very differently, depending on whether the answers are based mainly on diaries or mainly on memoirs.26

Finally, thinking about the ‘cultural’ sphere in particular, the issue of intentionality (or lack thereof) needs to be borne in mind. Not everyone who unthinkingly reproduced culturally and socially well-established anti-Jewish stereotypes in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries was a willing executioner in waiting; but then neither does this in and of itself render those stereotypes and their unthinking reproduction unproblematic – quite the opposite in fact. As Jay Geller points out in his discussion of Marx in The other Question, ‘Marx … would … argue that the objects with which one engages daily – including the phrases that populate our reading, writing, and conversation and the social interaction between Gentile (whether or not of Gentile descent) and Jew (whether or not the individual accepts such an identification) – are among the “circumstances that make men” … if not necessarily, “in the last instance.”’ These phrases ‘may seem to be as merely incidental … as day residues seem to be to the content of dreams, but like those remains they prove to be not merely at hand; they shape the hand that would employ them’.27 In short, ‘once these “quasi-

21 Ibid., p. 12.22 Ibid., p. 13.23 Miriam Gebhardt, Das Familiengedächtnis. erinnerung im deutsch-jüdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis

1932 (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 26.24 Ibid., p. 110.25 Ibid., p. 109.26 Ibid., p. 229.27 Jay Geller, The other Jewish Question: identifying the Jew and making sense of modernity (New York,

2011), p. 211.

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objects” emerge, they affect the possible directions that an argument or analysis can pursue: constraining or even foreclosing some, expanding or opening up others’.28

Philosemitism and Anti-Antisemitism

As if all this did not make life quite complicated enough for scholars of antisemitism in Imperial Germany, they also need to take into account the discourse on so-called ‘philosemitism’.29 The pioneers of the antisemitic movement in the 1870s promptly denounced their opponents as ‘philosemites’. This was a smart and highly successful move as a result of which the entire subsequent discourse on the matter ultimately took place on the antisemites’ terms. This juxtaposition of antisemitism and philosemitism implied that one could only be either the Jews’ foe or their friend, and that only those who were friends of the Jews could have a reason to oppose antisemitism. That one might not care much about the Jews one way or the other and still find antisemitism problematic is an option nobody seems to have given any serious consideration. Philosemitism, then, was a dirty word, and it increasingly came to be seen as the counter-problem to the problem of antisemitism, suggesting that one had to oppose one as much as the other. Anti-antisemites therefore tended to preface their criticism of antisemitism with the clarification that they certainly would not want to be thought of as philosemites. In short, exceptions apart, those who considered themselves opponents of ‘political’ antisemitism in Imperial Germany would almost certainly have been not only ‘cultural’ antisemites but also committed anti-‘philosemites’. Against this backdrop, much speaks for the suggestion that one is well advised to refer to opponents of ‘political’ antisemitism as anti-antisemites and use the term ‘philosemites’ and it derivatives only in inverted commas to reflect the polemical usage of these terms at the time.

To grasp any of the intricacies just discussed, we obviously depend desperately on thick descriptions that allow us to reconstruct with precision what exactly various seemingly familiar terms and concepts really meant when used by various people in a variety of contexts. Moreover, it may not be terribly helpful to want to divide Imperial German society neatly into one antisemitic and one non-antisemitic camp. Analytically, it makes more sense to assume we are in fact dealing with a much broader spectrum or continuum of attitudes towards ‘the Jews’, including a whole range that are deeply problematic in their own right and yet fall short of constituting fully fledged antisemitism.

In the first instance this is obviously simply a question of where one places the goalposts. If one assumes that all problematic attitudes towards Jews are per se antisemitic, then the distinction just suggested clearly makes no sense. Indeed, from a post-Shoah perspective it may seem problematic to introduce such a distinction at all and I would hasten to insist that it indeed no longer works after Auschwitz. After Auschwitz all forms of ignorance or inadvertent complicity have lost any such innocence as they may ever have had.

Yet the crucial question when trying to understand the state of play in Imperial German society is to assess the full range of prevalent attitudes towards Jews precisely in order to explore the extent to which their interplay may or may not have rendered German society more susceptible to what was to follow. We may wish that more people had shown

28 Ibid., p. 387, note 164.29 For a more detailed discussion, see Lars Fischer, ‘Anti-“Philosemitism” and Anti-Antisemitism

in Imperial Germany’, in Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp (eds), philosemitism in History (New York, 2011): pp. 170–89.

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more foresight and a greater sense of urgency in combating (what they considered to be) antisemitism, and the fact that at least a few individuals did go beyond the general consensus raises the tantalizing possibility that many more people could have known better. What nobody can reasonably expect Imperial German citizens to have known, however, is that one way or another this whole process could end in the death camps. That their failure to challenge antisemitism, not just as a political movement but as a widespread complex of anti-Jewish stereotypes, may indeed have helped facilitate this catastrophic outcome is in many ways a tragedy rather than a scandal. Yet for anyone today to show the same ignorance is obviously a scandal of considerable proportions.

Where to Begin?

For students and more advanced scholars alike for whom this topic is virgin territory, a good place to begin is Peter Pulzer’s 2005 article, ‘Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism’.30 This is a slightly revised English-language version of the introduction Pulzer wrote for the new translation of his pioneering monograph, The Rise of political Anti-semitism in germany and Austria, which appeared in Germany in 2004.31 In it he surveys what he considers the important scholarly developments since the original publication of his book in 1964. One need by no means share all his judgements to find this an extraordinarily useful survey that can be used to great benefit as an annotated bibliography. Not least, it allows me to be rather more specific and selective in my choice of the new scholarship than would otherwise have been the case.

Pulzer acknowledges crucial shifts, inter alia, towards ‘a more sophisticated investigation of the place of antisemitism in the main political movements’, that is to say, not just in the antisemitic movement itself, and ‘a new emphasis on cultural history and the history of mentalities that throws new light on the social and cultural implantation of antisemitism’.32 He reiterates the consensus outlined above that ‘antisemitic political parties were relatively unsuccessful in the Wilhelmine Empire compared to the pervasive influence of antisemitism in society’,33 adding that, to his mind, he differs from Richard Levy’s assessment in that ‘I regard the penetration of wide circles of German society by antisemitic sentiment as more important than the fact of the unsuccessful parties’.34

Yet much as Pulzer seeks to do justice to the shifts he acknowledges, ultimately his perspective remains firmly focused on the political (in the narrower sense of the word). ‘The historian of antisemitism’, he writes, ‘needs to find out how a political concept … can become politically effective. Thorough knowledge of the contents of antisemitism can be less useful here than a more general acquaintance with modern political processes.’35 Then again, in an introduction to what is, after all, a volume on The Rise of Political Antisemitism, this is hardly surprising.

30 Peter Pulzer, ‘Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism’, Journal of modern Jewish studies, 4 (2005), pp. 137–78.

31 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of political Anti-semitism in germany and Austria (New York, 1964); idem, Die entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Österreich (1867–1914) (Göttingen, 2004). Pulzer characterizes this translation as ‘much improved’ compared to the first German edition of 1966.

32 Pulzer, ‘Third Thoughts’, p. 140.33 Ibid., p. 143.34 Ibid., p. 145.35 Ibid., p. 160.

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Among the desiderata, Pulzer noted that ‘the ambivalence of sections of the Social Democratic movement towards Jews and antisemitism should be given more emphasis’.36 Here my own work, despite being received with extraordinary hostility in some quarters, has hopefully given some important impulses. Pulzer also emphasized that ‘remarkably little has been written on the attitudes of the liberal parties to antisemitism’.37 The work of Marcel Stoetzler and Christine Achinger, though focusing more on liberal discourse than party politics as such, has certainly brought about a sea change in this respect, albeit one far removed and barely conceivable from the perspective of Pulzer’s remaining faith in the ‘Jewish-Liberal symbiosis’ in Imperial Germany.38

‘The anti-Semitism of liberals is grounded in their liberalism’39

Marcel Stoetzler has presented a detailed discussion of the so-called Berlin Antisemitism Dispute of the late 1870s and early 1880s that was unleashed by public remarks in which Heinrich von Treitschke, one of Imperial Germany’s most respected historians and a long-standing liberal deputy, expressed his sympathies for some of the antisemites’ concerns.40 These remarks by no means went unopposed but, crucially, ‘overlapping theoretical premises were used for the defense of, as well as for the attack on, Jewish emancipation’, thus creating ‘ambiguities and confusions that make the analysis of the Dispute significant far beyond its specific historical context’.41 Not least, Stoetzler explains, the dispute ‘attracted some of the brightest, most articulate, and most politically committed minds of the time’ and consequently ‘it can scarcely be rivalled as a document of social and political thought in Bismarck’s Germany’.42

Stoetzler frames his analysis as ‘a contribution to the wider analysis of the tendency of liberalism to be complicit in its own undoing’.43 As he stresses, ‘antisemitism develops from within; it is not a challenge coming from somewhere outside society and its values. To the extent that antisemitism is anti-liberal, it is an element of the self-negation of liberal society.’44 His ‘deliberately paradoxical’ contention is ‘that Treitschke’s illiberalism is liberal, and his opponents’ liberalism is also illiberal’.45 Since ‘only close inspection can reveal what is interesting here’,46 Stoetzler demands of his readers ‘a childlike, leisurely pleasure in wading through a labyrinth of original text that was written by people who were scholarly trained but found themselves in political combat and who threw into battle all and sundry

36 Ibid., p. 168.37 Ibid., p. 146.38 Ibid., p. 147.39 Marcel Stoetzler and Christine Achinger, ‘German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-Seeking

Jews: The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals’, Nations and Nationalism, 19 (2013), pp. 739–60.40 Stoetzler, The state. A comprehensive edition of the texts published in the course of the dispute

is now available as Karsten Krieger (ed.), Der ‘Berliner Antisemitismusstreit’, 1879–1881, 2 vols (Munich, 2003).

41 Stoetzler, The state, p. 3.42 Ibid., p. 8.43 Ibid., p. 5.44 Ibid., p. 9.45 Ibid., p. 12.46 Ibid., p. 3.

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they could muster’.47 Stoetzler’s central conclusion from his painstaking analysis is that ‘even the most extravagant examples of liberals or democrats who turned into antisemites … should … not be treated as isolated cases explicable only on an individual level’. Rather, ‘their antisemitism should … be taken seriously as part of the continuum of responses to capitalist-industrial modernization that emerged from within liberal and democratic traditions in Germany (in distinction to but also intertwined with the antisemitism of conservatives, which never ceased to exist next to it)’.48

Stoetzler summarizes the complex constellation at hand as follows: ‘Because Treitschke expects antisemitism to accelerate the assimilation of German Jews (his first objective) and strengthen national consciousness of all Germans (his second objective), he endorses it. The tension in his argument between whether or not he believes Jewish assimilation to be possible implies that the second objective can still be achieved independently from the first: if inclusion does not work, exclusion will.’ Treitschke’s opponents, on the other hand, ‘do not want the second objective (strengthening of the Germans’ national consciousness) to be realized without the first (inclusion and assimilation of the Jews). Treitschke’s liberal critics oppose antisemitism primarily because they think it weakens national unity. Statements that reject antisemitism for reasons other than its adverse implication for nation building are few and far between.’49 Given this orientation, Treitschke’s critics ‘had to concede a significant extent of consensus between themselves and him’.50

Christine Achinger comes to very similar results in her aforementioned work on Gustav Freytag’s best-selling novel Debit and credit, first published in 1855. Her analysis adds methodological depth and sophistication to the argument insofar as she deploys literary theory as a means of ‘inform[ing] our thinking about the social imaginary and provid[ing] impulses for empirical research’ in order to ‘sharpen our understanding of social discourses more generally’.51 If one follows the conventional periodization, that is, the assumption that modern political antisemitism emerged in the mid-1870s, Achinger’s research really contributes to the pre-history rather than the history of modern antisemitism proper. Yet a joint piece by Achinger and Stoetzler in which they pool their research illustrates the far-reaching congruence between their findings. They make a compelling case that the ambiguities revealed by their two chronologically, thematically and methodologically distinct case studies reflect ‘a systematic fault line within liberalism itself’.52 Liberals’ antisemitism in nineteenth-century Germany, they argue, ‘is consistent with and grounded in their overall social, cultural, economic and political assumptions rather than a contingent, illiberal peculiarity of their thinking’;53 it is, in other words, ‘grounded in their liberalism, and … not merely contingently related to it’. It is distinctly liberal insofar as it is ‘primarily motivated by ideas about social cohesion and homogeneity and about socio-economic ethics and patterns of behaviour that are adequate to a modern, capitalist society that is sustainable, i.e. warrants its own reproduction and cohesion’. To the extent that notions of race may feature in this context, they are in fact a ‘shorthand … for the fundamentally “cultural” imagery thus described’.54

47 Ibid., p.13.48 Ibid., p. 221.49 Ibid., p. 286.50 Ibid., p. 303.51 Achinger, ‘Threats to Modernity’, p. 240.52 Stoetzler and Achinger, ‘German Modernity’, p. 740.53 Ibid., p. 753.54 Ibid., p. 755.

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The ease with which Achinger’s and Stoetzler’s findings map onto one another is all the more interesting in light of Henning Albrecht’s study of social conservative antisemitism between the late 1850s and the 1870s.55 While his thesis is not unproblematic – and the extent to which he actually manages to substantiate it in his book is a moot point – a number of his suggestions and implications are extremely intriguing. Albrecht seeks to refute the conventional wisdom that antisemitism became a party-political cause only from the 1870s onwards by demonstrating that the social conservative wing within the conservative movement already conformed to the criteria generally applied to modern political antisemitism as early as the late 1850s. On his account, this has been overlooked in part simply because most of the relevant scholarship has focused either on the period up to and including the revolutions of 1848–49 or on the period from German unification onwards. Indeed, it has been widely accepted that the issue of Jewish emancipation sailed into calmer waters in the intervening years.56

Albrecht also implies, however, that this oversight, if it can be called that, springs in part from apologetic impulses designed to exonerate German conservatism. All too often, antisemitism within the conservative spectrum from the 1870s onwards has been downplayed as being primarily an opportunistic response to the fact that the conservatives were courting the same constituencies as the newly established antisemitic parties. On Albrecht’s reading, this antisemitism in fact sprang from an already well-founded ideological and practical tradition of political antisemitism within the conservative movement established by the social conservatives in the 1850s and 1860s.57

Perhaps the most intriguing implication to emerge from Albrecht’s argument is that modern political antisemitism, if we follow his account, did not originate in a crisis of the capitalist economy – as the conventional periodization that begins the tale of modern political antisemitism with the crash of the Viennese stock exchange in 1873 has long suggested – but is in fact a product of capitalism in rude health.58 This would obviously tie in rather neatly with the contention that antisemitism develops from within society, and that not only in times of crisis but also in times of growing prosperity.

Whether Albrecht would share this assessment is hard to say. If I understand his account correctly, his social conservatives are pick-and-mix modernists that look remarkably like Achinger’s Freytag and Stoetzler’s Treitschke, affirming what they consider to be the benign aspects of modernity while holding ‘the Jews’ responsible for its less palatable consequences. The constituency, on the other hand, that Albrecht’s social conservatives seek to mobilize with their antisemitic campaigning consists of those who are (or feel) disadvantaged by the modernization process and are thus inclined to turn on modernization as a whole. Albrecht’s account vacillates somewhat between these two potentially contradictory trends. Perhaps he would argue that, in terms of the target group, the social conservatives’ pre-1870 antisemitism was a response to crisis all the same. Then again, capitalism is constantly in flux, of course, and new groups are forever finding themselves disadvantaged by change. If one made the existence of such groups the decisive criterion, one could only conclude that capitalism is either always in crisis or never. In any case, it is evident from Albrecht’s account that the social conservatives’ own interest in political antisemitism springs not so much from their conservatism but principally from their serious engagement of the ‘Social Question’. Given their aforementioned adherence to

55 Henning Albrecht, Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus. Hermann Wagener und die preußischen sozialkonservativen 1855–1873 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich, 2010).

56 Ibid., p. 23.57 Ibid., p. 26.58 Ibid., p. 113.

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a pick-and-mix modernism not dissimilar from that of the likes of Freytag and Treitschke, it is all the more surprising that Albrecht, while seeking to hold German conservatives fully to account, at the same time totally exonerates the liberals.59

Antisemitism in Imperial Germany is arguably a more exciting field of study now than ever before, chiefly because a critical mass of scholars and scholarship is finally affording us precisely those thick descriptions that we need for an in-depth assessment of its prevalence, dynamics and significance. It is no secret, of course, that scholars remain divided on the issue of how dominant a feature and how grave a threat antisemitism was in Imperial Germany, but one of the huge advantages of working with carefully – and transparently – conceptualized thick descriptions is that we can acknowledge, and indeed benefit from, one another’s scholarship while continuing to disagree fundamentally about the conclusions we draw.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Achinger, Christine. gespaltene moderne. gustav Freytags soll und Haben. Nation, geschlecht und Judenbild (Würzburg, 2007).

—. ‘Antisemitismus und “Deutsche Arbeit” – Zur Selbstzerstörung des Liberalismus bei Gustav Freytag’, in Nicolas Berg (ed.), Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900 – Über antisemitierende semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig, 2011), pp. 361–88.

—. ‘Threats to Modernity, Threats of Modernity: Racism and Antisemitism Through the Lens of Literature’, european societies, 14 (2012), pp. 240–58.

—. ‘Allegories of Destruction: “The Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger’s sex and character’, germanic Review, 88 (2013), pp. 121–49.

Albrecht, Henning. Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus. Hermann Wagener und die preußischen sozialkonservativen 1855–1873 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich, 2010).

Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and strangers: The east european Jew in german and german Jewish consciousness, 1800–1923, 2nd edn (Madison, 1999).

Berg, Nicolas (ed.) Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900 – Über antisemitierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig, 2011).

Bergmann, Werner and Wetzel, Juliane. ‘“Der Miterlebende weiß nichts.” Alltagsantisemitismus als zeitgenössische Erfahrung und spätere Erinnerung’, in Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker and Peter Pulzer (eds), Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 173–96.

Bering, Dietz. The stigma of Names: Antisemitism in german Daily Life, 1812–1933 (Cambridge, 1992).

Blaschke, Olaf. Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1997).Claussen, Detlev. Vom Judenhaß zum Antisemitismus. materialien einer verleugneten geschichte

(Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1987).Engel, David. ‘The Concept of Antisemitism in the Historical Scholarship of Amos

Funkenstein’, Jewish social studies, 6 (1999), pp. 111–29.Fischer, Lars. The socialist Response to Antisemitism in imperial germany (New York, 2007).—. ‘The Social Democratic Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany: The Case of

the Handlungsgehilfen’, Leo Baeck institute yearbook, 54 (2009), pp. 151–70.

59 Ibid., p. 127.

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—. ‘Anti-“Philosemitism” and Anti-Antisemitism in Imperial Germany’, in Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp (eds), philosemitism in History (New York, 2011), pp. 170–89.

Funkenstein, Amos. ‘Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 19 (1981), pp. 56–72.

—. perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993).Gebhardt, Miriam. Das Familiengedächtnis. erinnerung im deutsch-jüdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis

1932 (Stuttgart, 1999).Geller, Jay. on Freud’s Jewish Body: mitigating circumcisions (New York, 2007).—. The other Jewish Question: identifying the Jew and making sense of modernity (New York,

2011).Gilman, Sander L. and Zipes, Jack (eds). yale companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in

german culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven and London, 1997).Heschel, Susannah. ‘Jewish Studies as Counterhistory’, in David Biale, Michael Galchinsky

and Susannah Heschel (eds), insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 101–15.

Hoffmann, Christhard, Bergmann, Werner and Smith, Helmut Walser (eds). exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in modern german History (Ann Arbor, 2002).

Holz, Klaus. Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg, 2001).

Jelavich, Peter. ‘Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany: Cultural Code or Pervasive Prejudice?’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 99 (2009), pp. 584–93.

Kaplan, Marion. ‘Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany’, central european History, 34 (2001), pp. 471–501.

Mack, Michael. german idealism and the Jew: The inner Anti-semitism of philosophy and german Jewish Responses (Chicago, 2003).

Massing, Paul W. Rehearsal for Destruction: A study of political Anti-semitism in imperial germany (New York, 1949).

Postone, Moishe. ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, in Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds), germans and Jews since the Holocaust (New York, 1986), pp. 302–14.

Pulzer, Peter. ‘Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism’, Journal of modern Jewish studies, 4 (2005), pp. 137–78.

Rotenstreich, Nathan. The Recurring Pattern: Studies in Anti-Judaism in Modern Thought (London, 1961).

Scheit, Gerhard. Verborgener staat, lebendiges geld: Zur Dramaturgie des Antisemitismus (Freiburg, 1999; 2nd edn, 2006).

Smith, Helmut Walser. The Butcher’s Tale: murder and Anti-semitism in a german Town (New York, 2002).

—. The continuities of german History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth century (Cambridge and New York, 2008).

Stoetzler, Marcel. The state, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s germany (Lincoln, NE and London, 2008).

—. ‘Cultural Difference in the National State: From Trouser-Selling Jews to Unbridled Multiculturalism’, Patterns of Prejudice, 42 (2008), pp. 245–79.

—. ‘Antisemitism, Capitalism and the Formation of Sociological Theory’, Patterns of prejudice, 44 (2010), pp. 160–93.

— (ed.) Antisemitism and the constitution of sociology (Lincoln, NE and London, 2014).— and Achinger, Christine. ‘German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-Seeking Jews:

The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals’, Nations and Nationalism, 19 (2013), pp. 739–60.Wiese, Christian. challenging colonial Discourse: Jewish studies and protestant Theology in

Wilhelmine germany (Leiden and Boston, 2005).