The Transformation of the World (187 page)

There is no simple explanation for the simultaneous, but far from uniform, rise of anti-Semitism in the countries of Europe. Anyone who ventured to predict in 1910 where mass murder of the Jews would begin thirty years later would probably have named Russia, Romania, or even France, putting well-ordered Germany much further down the list.
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The various anti-Semitisms were primarily shaped by their national contexts. Judeophobic discourse initially surfaced in a series of national public spaces, resonating differently according to the economic, social, and political circumstances of the country in question. But there was also a supranational level: older conceptions of race had developed in what counted as the international public of the time; individual experiences of “race relations” during trips abroad or in émigré communities were sometimes transferred to other settings; and academic eugenicists or “racial hygienists” organized internationally. To be sure, such “transnationality” had its limits. Sometimes anti-Semitism was more of a subnational, local phenomenon. In 1900, for example, it played a major role in Vienna (which had had an anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger, since 1897) but not necessarily in other Austrian cities.

Continental Europe as a Special Case

Anti-Semitism was found where there were Jews. But a Jewish presence did not lead automatically to anti-Semitic reactions—in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance. Nowhere in the Muslim Orient did Jews face anything comparable to Europe's rising tide of religiously motivated anti-Semitism. Indeed, until the First World War, they enjoyed the protection of the Ottoman state, which for its part regarded them as pillars of support. The real danger for Jews was Christian anti-Semitism, which in the nineteenth century nearly always made itself felt as soon as Ottoman rule was rolled back: in Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania. There anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim violence ratcheted up in close parallel. Jews in the new Balkan states were exposed to persecution by Christian neighbors, the authorities, and the church (above all the Orthodox Church). In many cases they had been integrated into the financial and commercial networks of the Ottoman ecumene, so that, if a region broke away and constituted itself as a separate peasant state, that section of the Jewish population might be threatened in its economic existence. Many Jews from the Balkans found refuge in the territories of the sultan—when they did not emigrate to France, Palestine, or the United States.
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The attacks on Jews in the post-Ottoman Balkans did not remain hidden from the international public. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Great Powers dictated to the Balkan states a number of clauses offering protection to non-Christian minorities. Since no major power was prepared to use force to defend Jews in a faraway land, such threats never went beyond
declarations on paper. Yet, for the first time, new international legal instruments for the protection of minorities made it possible to conceive of limiting national sovereignty in the name of human rights—an anticipation of the future.
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Anti-Semitism in the form it took between 1870 and 1945 was peculiar to continental Europe, where in 1900 four-fifths of the world's 10.6 million Jews lived.
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In Britain, which had few Jews (36,000 in 1858; 60,000 in 1880) as compared with 462,000 in the German lands in 1852 (and 587,000 in 1900), members of the Jewish faith who were unable to swear a Christian oath nevertheless enjoyed full civil rights from 1846 on—a few decades later than in France, the pioneer of Jewish emancipation. In 1858 they also won the right to stand for Parliament—later than in France but earlier than in Germany, where full legal emancipation came only in 1871 with the founding of the German Empire.

In Britain there had never been a “Jewish question” in the Continental sense. English law in the early modern period did not discriminate against Jews as aliens or force them to live in ghettos, and it imposed on them only such restrictions as applied also to Christian nonmembers of the Church of England, mainly Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jews were British citizens, albeit with unequal rights in some respects. Emancipation was therefore not, as in Germany, a long process involving stateled integration of a distinctive minority into civil society, but rather a constitutional act at the level of the central state that extended to Jews the equality of rights that had earlier been granted to Catholics.
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Against this background, no articulated or organized anti-Semitism along German or French lines developed in the British Isles before 1914, and the same was true in principle of the British settler regions and overseas offshoots.

Did anti-Semitism also have more remote effects? In Japan, with its tendency to follow European crazes, there was an imitative anti-Semitism without a physical presence of Jews. The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, translated in 1924, strengthened conspiracy fears and fueled a xenophobic nationalism that small circles in the country had long been cultivating. Jews appeared as accomplices of a West that was supposedly challenging Japan's right to existence.
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In China there was an opposite reaction. The translation of Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice
in 1904 first acquainted people there with a European stereotype, but the Jewish Shylock was sympathetically regarded as a suffering victim inviting global solidarity among the oppressed. Phantom anti-Semitism
à la japonaise
failed to emerge in China.

Anti-Semitism and Racial Orders

It would be too shallow to interpret post-1870 European anti-Semitism as a direct application of race doctrines. Some of the early racial theorists had already lined up Jews in their sights: Robert Knox in 1850, for example, had described them as culturally sterile parasites.
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Other founders of racist discourse, such as Gobineau, could not be described as anti-Semites. The basic ideas of biological
racism were applied to American blacks much earlier than to Jews in Germany or France.
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Before the First World War, the arguments used in support of anti-Semitism were not mainly racist—and, insofar as they were, they represented a consequence rather than a form of racial theory.
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For anti-Semitism to sink roots in society, there first had to be a crisis potential and a political fallout from democratization and the quest for national identities.
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The anti-Semitism of the long nineteenth century did not take material shape in racial orders—on the contrary. The premodern segregation of Jews in ghettos was abolished, and no new formal apartheid appeared in its place. The Jews of Europe, at least outside the Tsarist Empire, no longer lived beneath the Damoclean sword of expulsion. The concentration of their communities into a huge “Pale of Settlement” between the Baltic and the Black Sea—a measure decreed by Catherine the Great in 1791 and reinforced in the Jewish Statute of 1804—was the most important fetter on Jewish mobility during this period.
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Jews in the Tsarist Empire, like other non-Orthodox groups, were denied equal civil rights. Many discriminatory regulations remained in force; others were relaxed or revoked in the reform period under Alexander II. After the assassination of the Reform Tsar in 1881, Jews saw their legal position deteriorate once more and were unable to achieve civil emancipation along French or German lines until the Revolution of 1917. In 1880 Romania was the only other country in Europe where, despite pressure at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Jews continued to live under degrading special laws.
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The last major Jewish ghettos were wound up after the middle of the century: in 1852 in Prague, in 1870 in Rome.

To the west of Poland, anti-Semitism was a postemancipation phenomenon, much like the aggression against blacks in the postbellum American South. It forms part of the context of intensified demarcation between those who “belong” and those do not, national majorities and migrant or cosmopolitan minorities. By 1900 a unified racist vocabulary could be mobilized to justify these highly disparate cases of exclusion in program and praxis. This by no means necessarily led to imperial outcomes. It was in the logic of radical racism (and can already be found in Robert Knox) to avoid imperial rule as it necessarily involved close contact with ethnic Others. Before the German war of extermination in eastern Europe after 1941, there had been no case in history of an imperialism or colonialism that had sought to rule over other peoples
in order to
suppress or annihilate them on racist grounds; colonialist programs had always, in one way or another, had some constructive tones. The civilizing mission was a stronger impetus for colonial expansion in the nineteenth century. And conversely, it was extreme racists who advocated sending black Americans back to Africa or, at a later date, deporting European Jews to Madagascar. In 1848, plans to annex even larger parts of Mexico failed because of fears of ethnic swamping, and until the late 1890s the threat of contamination by “inferior races” meant that whitesupremacist ideology curbed rather than encouraged further possible territorial expansion.
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Also the early promise of independence to the Philippines—a
unique case in colonial history—was not given only for philanthropic reasons. Some of its advocates were mainly concerned to separate the United States as quickly as possible from its “racially alien” colony.
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Two Emancipations in Peril

Comparison between the emancipations in North America and Central Europe may be taken a little further, drawing on the work of George W. Fredrickson.
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The abolition of slavery and the liberation of the great majority of European Jews from a ghettoized underdog existence required help from outside: in the first case from abolitionists, in the second from enlightened representatives of the upper state bureaucracy. Common to both was a conception of reform as a civilizing mission: Afro-Americans were to be “raised up,” Jews to be “improved” in their cultural level, while maintaining a proper social distance from the dominant majority.

In the United States, the end of the Civil War finally offered an opportunity to implement this program under the auspices of “Radical Reconstruction.” Integration of the Jewish minority into American society took place under unevenly favorable conditions. During the interval when the old hatred of Jews had abated and modern anti-Semitism had not yet emerged, ideological hostility remained at a relatively low level. It was certainly far from comparable to the racism that affected all blacks, including “free” African Americans in the North, and grew more intense after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, coinciding almost to the year with the new rise of anti-Semitic discourse in France or Germany and anti-Semitic pogroms in the Tsarist Empire. On both sides of the Atlantic, the international economic crisis after 1873 and the decline of liberal forces in the domestic politics of at least the United States, Germany (following Bismarck's break with the Liberals), and the Tsarist Empire were aggravating factors. Jews, just as blacks, were robbed of important allies.

Jewish minorities in the nation-states of Europe found themselves in a more vulnerable position than African Americans in the United States. It is true that many had come to occupy respectable and respected positions in the business world and in public intellectual life, but this very success made them objects of greater resentment among the majority population than African Americans experienced in their almost invariably lower place in the social hierarchy. In the view of white supremacists, “Negroes” had only to be deprived of rights and subjected to intimidation; open struggle was not necessary to contain them. It was easier to establish whether someone belonged to the group of African Americans, especially because of the taboo on cross-color sexuality and the persecution inflicted on those who violated it.

This strict insistence on the purity of the white race found its way into European anti-Semitism, with a delay of a few decades. Since Jews could not be identified by their appearance, pseudoscientific elements of “racial biology” came into play, much more elaborate than the criterion of skin color routinely applied
in the United States. Finally, contacts between the African American diaspora and colonized Africa did not seem sufficiently threatening to make whites fear some harm to the national interest, whereas the multifarious international links among Jewish communities provided fuel for national-populist conspiracy fantasies about Jewish capital and the Jewish world revolution. In both Germany and the United States, a majority of the population directed its antipathy against those who contradicted common visions of the national character. African Americans were
not sufficiently
modern in a society obsessed with modernity, while Jews appeared
too
modern in the eyes of mainstream German society.
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When the immigration of “caftan Jews” from eastern Europe, with premodern “Oriental” habits, increased around the turn of the century, the two stereotypes merged into one.

African Americans in the South saw a turn for the worse in their situation barely a decade after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, whereas on the whole the newly unified Kaiserreich offered to German Jews physical security and
relatively
good opportunities for advancement. Omens of a new era in the history of European Jewry appeared immediately after the end of the First World War. In 1919–20, during the Civil War in Russia and Ukraine, counterrevolutionary “white” troops and militias engaged in the mass murder of Jews, often regarding them en bloc as Bolshevik sympathizers. These killings were not simply a fresh wave of pogroms but, in their scale and their sadism, went far beyond what was familiar from the period before 1914. The unleashing of a destructive soldiery on whole Jewish communities had been a rare exception in the nineteenth century.
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In the 1920s, when the position of African Americans had begun slowly to improve, an exterminatory anti-Semitism was brewing also in Germany and parts of east-central Europe (especially Romania), having until then been limited to isolated rhetorical threats without any support from the state. There was a line from pre-1914 anti-Semitism to the post-1933
Judenpolitik
of the Nazis, but not a direct and untwisted one.
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