There were outbursts of anti-Semitism even in parts of Europe where there were hardly any Jews. In 1904 there were only thirty-five Jewish families in Limerick in the west of Ireland, an insignificant number in proportion to the population, but this did not stop the local priest, in his sermons, from accusing the Jews of having murdered both St Stephen and St James (which was probably true since they were both Jewish and both died in Jerusalem in the first century AD) and of trying to take over Ireland the way they had taken over France. This led to acts of aggression against Jews in the streets of Limerick and the boycott of their business.49 A few years later, in 1911, in Tredegar, in South Wales, Jewish shops were attacked and looted against a background of industrial unrest.50
In London’s East End, where 40,000 Jews huddled in the 1880s, there was obviously more concern and scope for racist sentiments. Thus, John Colomb, Conservative MP for Tower Hamlets, set the tone in a speech in the House of Commons (10 March 1887) where he complained that no other great states ‘permit the immigration of destitute aliens without restriction’ and called for it to be stopped. The Pall Mall Gazette (February 1886) warned that ‘foreign Jews are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native born East Ender’.51 In 1903 a former president of the street sellers’ association complained that the Jewish immigrants monopolized certain trades.52 Arnold White, an English journalist with strong populist imperialist sentiments, noted in The Modern Jew (Heinemann, 1899) that Jewish immigration was threatening the British way of life. An agent of the German-Jewish philanthropist Maurice von Hirsch, he also supported Hirsch’s efforts to create a Jewish colony in Argentina: Jews could have their own territory as long as it was far from England. There was, unquestionably, anti-Semitism in ‘liberal’ Britain, yet it was also the only country in the nineteenth century that elected a Prime Minister of Jewish birth, with an unmistakable Jewish name (Disraeli) and an appearance that conformed to the stereotype of the Jew.
In Hungary anti-Semitism was more ingrained. In 1848 when Budapest erupted in favour of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ there was also anti-Semitic rioting in Pozsony (Pressburg in German), then regarded as part of Hungary (but now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia). The riots were sparked by the granting of full civil rights to Jews in March of that year. This led Lajos Kossuth, the ‘Father of Hungarian Democracy’, to ask that the demand for full equality be postponed: ‘let [the Jews] be patient a little longer in the interest of the homeland and the freedom of the people’.53 They were patient for a further nineteen years and finally obtained their emancipation in 1867, but no thanks to Hungarian nationalists, for it was the Emperor Franz Joseph who sought Jewish support by suppressing overt anti-Semitism and ennobling rich Jews.54 Nevertheless, in the 1870s and 1880s there were sporadic anti-Semitic incidents, fuelled in part by the resentment of petty landowners whose land had been bought by Jews.55 As for the newly ennobled capitalists (by the end of the century 346 Hungarian Jewish families had obtained noble titles), they provided the regime with much support.56 ‘Liberal’ and philo-Semite came to be nearly synonymous in Hungarian common parlance.57
Hungarians were right to feel anxious. The compromise of 1867 with Austria had given Hungary real powers within the new Austro-Hungarian Empire, but ‘true’ Hungarians, who almost completely dominated their own parliament, were only just over half the population of Hungary. In 1906 the Germans consisted of 12.7 per cent, the Slovaks 11.4 per cent, with the rest being made up by Romanians, Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Jews, Croats, and Serbs.58
If local entrepreneurs cannot be found, one can always import them, hence the wave of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland (mostly in Moldavia) as well as Greeks. In the Old Kingdom (Romania or Vechiul Regat) made up of Wallachia and part of Moldavia, which had united in 1859 after the Treaty of Paris of 1856, the Jews were a major urban presence and a significant segment of the petty commercial and artisanal sector of the economy.59
By the beginning of the twentieth century Jews, though they were only 3.3 per cent of the Romanian population, accounted for 19 per cent of the urban population – 32 per cent in Moldavia (with Wallachia one of the main constituent parts of Romania) and half the population of Iaşi, Moldavia’s capital. The Romanian press reported this as if it were a genuine invasion.60 The Jews were resented by conservatives, who regarded them as agents of capitalism and responsible for the ills of modernity.61 In 1867, just as Romania had come into being, the Minister of the Interior, Ion Brătianu, a liberal, took harsh measures against Jewish immigration, denying Jews the right to settle in the countryside, to own rural property or to practise certain professions. Foreigners may not have been able to kick-start Romania on the road to industrialization but they certainly dominated its commerce. Just to make sure that entrepreneurial spirits were kept out of politics the new Romanian constitution (formally modelled on that of Belgium, regarded as the most liberal in Europe) disenfranchised foreigners (unless they were Christians) from acquiring citizenship, effectively barring the Jews from political life. This overt discriminatory practice was eventually abolished in 1879 at the insistence of the Congress of Berlin (and Bismarck in particular after some serious lobbying by the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle). In practice very few Jews succeeded in obtaining Romanian citizenship or even desired it.62 Brătianu had complained that Europe did not understand the situation in Romania, that it was not possible to resolve the ‘Jewish Question’ immediately, and that to allow Jews to become Romanian would mean the end of Romanian nationhood.63
In 1907, following the imposition of a new tax, a major peasant revolt took place that at first took a specifically anti-Semitic form since a large proportion (40 per cent) of estate farmers or arendaşi (originally money-lenders or small businessmen who had invested in the land), at least in northern Moldavia, where the revolt started before spreading into Wallachia, were Jewish. When asked what was his main grievance, an inhabitant of Botoşani replied that it was the lack of land and that this was the fault of foreigners, especially of Jews, ‘who have seized absolutely all the estates and have made the price of arable land go up in the most horrible way’.64 The revolt was put down brutally: 11,000 peasants were killed.65 More than ever the peasantry felt themselves to be outside the Romanian nation. What they wanted was not a nation but land.
The anti-Semitism increasingly espoused in Europe was neither of the old Christian form nor of the new pseudo-scientific variety, though it used whatever argument was available. Its real strength was in its connection with nascent forms of demotic nationalism, what Carl Schorske called ‘politics in a new key’.66 Modern political anti-Semitism became one of the features of this new politics. Some of the Jews reacted by turning towards Zionist separatism.
Migrants are often disliked, and successful migrants are disliked even more. The Jews suffered as did other ‘non-national’ minorities, such as the Germans, the Greeks, and the Armenians in the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Tsarist Empires, and later the Chinese in much of South-East Asia, and the Gujarati Indians in east Africa.
Abuse came from all quarters. The august journal of the Jesuits, Civiltà cattolica, virtually the unofficial organ of the Pope, launched regular tirades against the Jews, such as this one in 1880:
The Jews – eternal insolent children, obstinate, dirty, thieves, liars, ignoramuses, pests and the scourge of those near and far – … immediately abused [their newfound freedom] to interfere with that of others. They managed to lay their hands on … all public wealth … and virtually alone they took control not only of all the money … but of the law itself in those countries where they have been allowed to hold public offices.67
Leading intellectuals espoused similar views. Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, a reactionary philosopher, in Restauration française (1851) blamed the Jews for inventing commerce.68 The more radical and certainly more liberal Werner Sombart (later he was ambivalent about Nazism) in The Jews and Economic Life (Die Juden und das Wirtschafts-leben, 1911) denounced Jewish money
and (contra Max Weber) maintained that Judaism was even more suited to capitalism than Protestantism.69 Édouard Drumont, founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France (1889) and author of the best-selling La France juive (1886), explained that the Jew, an ‘instinctive’ merchant, will not miss an opportunity to cheat his fellows. Fortunately, Drumont continued, one could always recognize ‘the Jew’ by the ‘famous nose’, the ears sticking out, one arm shorter than the other, the flat feet, ‘the moist and soft hand of the hypocrite and the traitor’ (la main moelleuse et fondante de l’hypocrite et du traitre); and, of course, they smell.70 The success of La France juive was considerable, also because the kind of generic anti-Semitism it promoted was widely accepted. It did not even provoke the consternation of socialists, not even that of Jean Jaurès, who became the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party.71 The nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke declared that Jews ‘bear a heavy responsibility for the vile materialism of our time’.72 Just as alarmed was Theodor Fritsch, author of Die Juden im Handel und das Geheimnis ihres Erfolges (The Jews in Commerce and the Secret of their Success, 1913).73 Paul de Lagarde, a German scholar of the Orient, who, it must be said, hated almost everyone – Catholics, liberals, moderate Protestants, Bismarck, and Imperial Germany – regarded the Jews as the agents of a ‘gigantic conspiracy aimed at the heart of Germany’.74 Some socialists too, for instance Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Fourier, manifested anti-Semitic sentiments.75 The great social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, writing in 1897, held the view (then almost banal, now somewhat eccentric) that the ‘races’ of wage earners could be divided into three groups: ‘the Anglo-Saxon skilled artisan’, who will ‘not work below a customary minimum Standard of Life’; the Negro who will work for low wages, but who will not work at all ‘once their primitive wants are satisfied’; and, finally, the Jew, who ‘will accept the lowest terms rather than remain out of employment’, but then, as he ‘rises in the world’ and acquires new wants, ‘no amount of income causes him to slacken his indefatigable activity’. And this is why they explained that Jewish workers are ‘the poorest in all Europe’, while individual Jews are ‘the wealthiest men of their respective countries’.76 A race-based view of the world was exceedingly common.
In many quarters, the sinister power of the Jews was discerned behind that of the bankers in a common trope that united anti-Semites of all political stripes. Thus the Proudhonian and anticlerical socialist Auguste Chirac produced a diatribe against the Jews in his 1883 Les rois de la république, targeting, as usual, Rothschild, ‘the man, the race, who today exercise … a kingly power … not in the general interest but in his own exclusive interest’.77 The liberal anti-imperialist J. A. Hobson was similarly impressed by the alleged powers of the Rothschilds. In his Imperialism (1902) he wrote that European finance was controlled ‘chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience’, that they were ‘in a unique position to control the policy of nations’, and that no ‘great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it’.78 The obsession with the occult powers of Rothschild had, like many obsessions, only a relative connection with reality. Jews were certainly disproportionately represented in French banking and the more famous big bankers were Jews of German extraction who had acquired aristocratic titles: Baron Jacques de Reinach, Baron d’Erlanger, Baron Maximilien Königswarter, Count Cahen d’Anvers, Jacques de Günzburg (of Russian origin) and, of course, the Rothschilds.79 However, the largest banks were truly ‘old French’, banks such as the Crédit Lyonnais, founded in 1863, which by 1900 had become the largest bank in the world.80 Besides the Rothschilds (whose power had much diminished towards the end of the century) there were other important banking families, not all Jewish, for instance Hope & Co, a bank founded by Scots and based in Amsterdam, and the Anglo-German Baring Bank. Historically, Jews had very little to do with the invention of banking. Italians were the founders of arguably the world’s oldest bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena (1472), while Berenberg Bank was founded in Hamburg in 1590, by Protestants fleeing persecution in the Low Countries.
On the whole, Jews were safest under Islam. In medieval Islam there were no special laws for Jews as there were in Christendom and Jews under Islam were in a better economic position than in medieval Christendom.81 In the nineteenth century, under the Ottoman Empire, there were numerous attacks on Jews accused of ritual murder but they ‘almost invariably originated among the Christian population’ and the Jews were usually protected by the authorities.82
Conversion was never forced upon them just as it was not on the other non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman or the Mughal Empire. However, Jews, like Christians, Zoroastrians, Yazidis, and other non-Muslims, had second-class status within the Ottoman Empire, the so-called ‘dhimmi’ status (the word means ‘protected’). In practice that meant equality on matters of property and contract, though a special tax was levied. During the Balkan Wars (1912–13) the Jewish citizens of the Ottoman Empire remained loyal to the Ottomans, mistrusting, probably rightly, the Christian-based nationalism that dominated Balkan League states.83
The real victims of Turkish nationalism were the Armenians not the Jews. The massacre in 1915 of over one million Armenians became one of the first modern genocides and was preceded by numerous acts of violence against Armenians under the orders or the complicity of the Sultan, such as the massacre of some 200,000 Armenians between 1894 and 1896.84 Ottoman Armenians, just like the Jews, were, on the whole, more prosperous than ordinary Ottoman subjects, being more urban and more involved in commercial and craft activities. The rising Turkish nationalism required a uniform nation.85 As its historian Raymond Kévorkian has written: ‘the murder of the Armenians was bound up with the construction of the Turkish nation’.86
One would have thought that prejudice and anti-immigrant feelings would be less pronounced where the majority of the inhabitants were immigrants. In South America, for instance, the white settlers were so dominant and the indigenous people so weak and impoverished that nation-building remained a matter for the whites. Those discriminated against were the indigenous population, Asian immigrants, and former slaves (in Brazil slavery was abolished only in 1888, having imported more Africans, in the course of the previous two centuries, than the United States).
In the United States nation-building was a task of a different magnitude. The biggest conflagration had been between northerners and southerners – a conflict that had nothing to do with ethnic divisions but with the economics and ethics of slavery and the powers of the federal government. The price paid by the North to the South for national reconciliation (and hence nation-building) was to allow the discrimination against blacks to continue, especially in the South. Ethnic rivalries (Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, and others) continued to plague the United States, all to the advantage of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. The brunt of white violence, however, was borne by the blacks.
One example, among the hundreds available: against a background of economic and social tensions over jobs, sparked by the alleged rape of a white woman by a black, widespread riots against blacks took place in Atlanta in September 1906. Local newspapers had conducted a vigorous campaign encouraging violence against black people. The Atlanta Evening News declared in a headline that it stood ‘forever on the rock of protection of our southern white women regardless of condemnation at home or abroad’.87 Much of the northern press north condemned southern racism. The Washington Star called the Atlanta riots ‘the Odessa of America’; the Philadelphia Press judged the riot ‘a deplorable exhibition of race ferocity and savagery’.88 The event received international coverage, including a front-page illustration in the mass-circulation French daily Le Petit Journal of 7 October 1906.89
Racial prejudice and racist language continued for decades. As recently as 1948 Strom Thurmond, running for president as the States Rights
Democratic Party candidate declared:
I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.90
Thurmond obtained less than 3 per cent of the vote but was elected senator for South Carolina in 1954 and remained in the Senate for forty-eight years. He was still in office at the age of 100, by which time he had accepted desegregation and voting rights for blacks.
Non-white immigrants too felt the blows of American xenophobia. The Union Pacific railroad employed Chinese and white immigrants in their coal mines in Rock Springs, Wyoming. In a dispute between the white miners (members of the Knights of Labor, then the largest American trade union) and their Chinese counterparts, on 2 September 1885 some of the white miners rioted, burned down the Chinese quarter and killed twenty-eight of its inhabitants. This sparked a series of anti-Chinese riots the length and breadth of the Rocky Mountains.91 Anti-Chinese legislation had been formidable even before the incident. In California and much of the Far West there were special taxes against the Chinese (even a laundry tax) and they were excluded from schools, from public-works programmes, denied the right to own land and even to testify in a court against whites.92 In 1862 the governor of California, Leland Stanford, in his inaugural address to the legislature, declared:
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