The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  When anti-Semites called for legal discrimination against the Jews, they therefore had to define what they meant by a Jew with considerable care since the progeny of mixed marriages were already quite numerous – even if, contrary to the fears of some anti-Semites, the average number of children produced by mixed marriages was significantly fewer than the number produced by ‘pure’ Jewish or Christian marriages. By 1905 there were already more than 5,000 mixed couples in Prussia alone and by 1930 between 30,000 and 40,000. Estimates for the number of children produced by such mixed marriages in the first three decades of the twentieth century range from 60,000 to 125,000. In fact, only a minority of the children born to such couples were raised as Jews, though that was irrelevant from a racialist viewpoint. The criteria devised by the Pan-German leader Heinrich Class in 1912 were that everyone who had belonged to a Jewish religious community on the date of the Reich’s foundation in 1871 was a Jew and so, too, were all their descendants: ‘Thus for example the grandson of a Jew who had converted to Protestantism in 1875, whose daughter had married a non-Jew, for example an officer, would be treated as a Jew.’ The fact that he felt the need to write such a sentence was in itself significant.

  Nor was German political culture especially receptive to anti-Semitism, though anti-Semitic parties enjoyed a brief flurry of success in the 1880s and 1890s. Nowhere in the world were the egalitarian and secular teachings of Karl Marx (himself an apostate married to a Gentile) more widely accepted than in Germany; by 1912 the German Social Democrats were the biggest party in the country’s far from impotent parliament, the Reichstag. Admittedly, some German socialists were not wholly immune to anti-Semitism, having inherited from the generation of 1848 a tendency to elide the categories of capitalist and Jew. Yet the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party was consistent in its opposition to notions of racial discrimination. While one American state after another introduced legal and even constitutional bans on interracial marriages, the Reichstag rejected a proposal to introduce similar legislation for the German colonies. Indeed, Jews suffered no form of legal discrimination under the Kaiserreich. Moreover, their access to higher education and thence to the professions was as good as it was anywhere else in Europe, if not better. Jews were far more likely to be the victims of discrimination and, indeed, violence in Tsarist Russia, as we shall see. That was precisely why so many Jews at the turn of the century left the Russian Empire for Germany, Austria-Hungary and destinations further west. Indeed, it is impossible to understand what befell the Jews in the twentieth century other than in the context of this westward exodus, which was often accompanied by a weakening of traditional Jewish practices, most obviously endogamy.

  To some German Jews – not only Arthur Ruppin but also Felix Theilhaber and others – the increase in mixed marriages was just one symptom of a general ‘downfall of the Jewish religion’, which also manifested itself in apostasy, suicide, low fertility and physical or mental degeneracy. Indeed, it was Ruppin’s growing conviction that assimilation spelt the death of Judaism that converted him to Zionism. But in the eyes of others, interracial marriage was in fact the best answer to the Jewish ‘question’. In his 1874 story Between the Ruins, the Pressburg-born Jew Leopold Kompert had portrayed the love between a Jewish boy and a Christian girl as a symbol of assimilation and an antidote to superstition and prejudice. As the Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer put it, ‘This last of all Jewish problems’ would be resolved by ‘young men’s inclinations and young women’s choice in love’. Other German proponents of intermarriage included the Zionist Adolf Brüll, who believed that an infusion of soldierly ‘Aryan’ genes would strengthen the character of East European Jews. In the words of Otto Weininger, himself a convert to Christianity, ‘the pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals, and the Jew, par excellence, is the breaker down of such limits’. Even some anti-Semites succumbed to this very instinct. The late nineteenth-century German publicist Wilhelm Marr, author of The Victory of Jewry over Germandom (1879), is usually credited with coining the term ‘anti-Semitism’. Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche, Marr feared that ‘The future and life itself belonged to Jewry; to Germandom, the past and death.’ Yet in his revealing autobiographical essay entitled ‘Within Philo-Semitism’, Marr admitted to having had Jewish girlfriends while still at school and later as a young man in Poland. He also recalled flirting with two young Jewish women on a transatlantic steamer. Marr married three times in all: one wife was the daughter of an apostate Jew, one was a ‘half Jewess’ and the third a ‘full Jewess’. As Rudolph Loewenstein once observed, ‘the sexual factor is one of the most powerful unacknowledged motivations underlying anti-Semitism’. In short, between Germans and Jews there was what deserves to be called a ‘love-hate’ relationship. Those who projected trends in inter-marriage, fertility and apostasy were not unreasonable in thinking that the Jewish ‘question’, in Germany at least, was answering itself – through a willing dissolution.

  THE ECONOMICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM

  Anti-Semitism in 1901 was, it is almost superfluous to say, about more than just fears of miscegenation. Economic grievances were just as important. It was the extraordinary social and geographical mobility of Ashkenazim in the aftermath of their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emancipation that created core constituencies for anti-Jewish policies. Those who felt the Rothschilds and their ilk had made illicit profits by manipulating the stock exchange were not especially interested in racial hygiene. Authors like the Frenchman Alphonse Toussenel, writer of The Jews, Kings of the Epoch (1847), were radicals – men of the Left, indignant at the leading role played by Jewish bankers in what Toussenel called a new ‘financial feudalism’. Marx himself wrote a review article ‘On the Jewish Question’, which identified the capitalist, regardless of his religion, as ‘the real Jew’. Similar hostility to the Jews as ‘parasites’ was expressed by both the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The unscrupulous Jewish financier is a figure who crops up in the literatures of most European countries in the nineteenth century; not only in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben but also in Balzac’s La maison Nucingen, Zola’s L’Argent and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. Zola’s Gundermann, for example, is the quintessential ‘banker king, the master of the bourse and of the world… the man who knew [all] secrets, who made the markets rise and fall at his pleasure as God makes the thunder… the king of gold’. The inspiration behind Edouard Drumont’s Jewish France (1886) was the collapse of the Union Générale bank four years before, which Dru-mont and others sought to blame on the Rothschilds. To Auguste Chirac and numerous others, the Third Republic was wholly in the grip of ‘Jewish finance’.

  In Germany, too, the most politically successful anti-Semites of the late nineteenth century were those like Otto Böckel, the self-styled ‘Peasant King’, who directed their fire at the economic role of the Jews. His pamphlet The Jews: Kings of Our Time (1886), which had sold 1.5 million copies by 1909, adapted earlier French arguments to the tastes of the Hessian peasants who were the principal constituents for his Anti-Semitic People’s Party. Böckel himself was a Reichstag deputy from 1887 to 1903; at the movement’s zenith in 1893, he was one of seventeen self-styled Anti-Semites sitting in the Reichstag. By this time, it was not only as financiers that Jews were coming under attack, though it is noteworthy that 31 per cent of the richest families in Germany were Jewish and 22 per cent of all Prussian millionaires. German Jews were also strikingly better represented among professionals than among entrepreneurs or business executives. Jews might account for fewer than one in every hundred Germans; but by the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working as newspaper editors, journalists, theatre directors and academics. Indeed, they were under-represented in only one of Germany’s elite occupational groups, and that was the officer corps of the army. Anti-Semitism, then, was sometim
es nothing more than the envy of under-achievers. There was, nevertheless, a countervailing influence on the way Jews were perceived in Germany, and that was the growing number of them who migrated from Eastern Europe to Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1914 around a quarter of the Jews in Germany were defined as foreign or Eastern (which included those who originated in the borderland provinces of Upper Silesia and Posen). Relatively poor, Orthodox in their faith, Yiddish in their speech, the so-called Ostjuden elicited much the same response among German Jews as among German Gentiles: disquiet, bordering on revulsion.

  Jewish professional success was even more conspicuous in Austria-Hungary, where they in any case accounted for a larger share of the urban population. They were more than merely prominent in the Viennese intelligentsia and played a leading role in the Prague business community. The numbers of immigrant Ostjuden were also much larger in Vienna than in Berlin. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was therefore primarily on the basis of economic grievances that anti-Semites like the Pan-German Georg Ritter von Schönerer and the Christian Socialist Karl Lueger achieved political success in pre-war Austria-Hungary. It was Lueger who, as mayor of Vienna from 1897 until 1910, most perfectly encapsulated the challenge of practising anti-Semitism in the context of very rapid social assimilation when he declared: ‘I decide who is a Jew.’ When Neville Laski, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, visited Vienna twenty years later, the Minister for Commerce cheerfully explained that Lueger’s anti-Semitism ‘had been scientific because [when] Lueger said “He is a Jew whom I say is a Jew”… he thereby avoided any anti-Semitism against a useful Jew’.

  As this suggests, economic anti-Semitism inspired quite different policy responses from racial anti-Semitism. The slogan Kauft nicht von Juden! – ‘Don’t buy from Jews!’ – was used by the German Catholic magazine Germania as early as 1876. Three years later the clergyman turned anti-Semitic demagogue Adolf Stoecker called for Jews to be excluded from the teaching profession and the judiciary. Such proposals were especially attractive to Gentile small businessmen, professionals and white-collar employees who felt themselves unable to match the performance of their Jewish contemporaries. The German National Clerical Workers’ Association was among the first German associations expressly to exclude Jews from membership by inserting a so-called ‘Aryan paragraph’ in their rules and regulations. So too did many student fraternities, including some traditionally liberal Burschenschaften. When Bernhard Förster and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg circulated a petition calling for Jews to be excluded from certain branches of the German civil service, 4,000 signatures out of the 225,000 they collected were from university students. Significantly, it was an academic – the historian Heinrich von Treitschke – who in 1879 coined the phrase: ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune!’

  Academics were especially strongly represented among the members of the Pan-German League, whose leader after 1908, Heinrich Class, was one of the most extreme anti-Semites of the Wilhelmine era. In his pseudonymously written book, If I Were the Kaiser (1912), Class published a remarkable and ominous list of recommendations to restrict the economic opportunities of Jews:

  Germany’s borders should be closed to further Jewish immigration.

  Jews resident in Germany who did not have German citizenship should be ‘immediately and ruthlessly’ (schnellstens und rück-sichtslos) expelled.

  Jews with German citizenship, including converts to Christianity and the offspring of mixed marriages, should be given the legal status of foreigners.

  Jews should be excluded from all public office.

  Jews should not be permitted to serve in the army or navy.

  Jews should be disenfranchised.

  Jews should be excluded from the teaching and legal professions and from the direction of theatres.

  Jewish journalists should be permitted to work only for newspapers explicitly identified as ‘Jewish’.

  Jews should not be permitted to run banks.

  Jews should not be allowed to own agricultural land or mortgages on agricultural land.

  Jews should pay double the taxes levied on Germans ‘as compensation for the protection they enjoy as ethnic aliens (Volksfremde)’.

  Significantly, Class regarded these ‘coldly cruel’ measures as a remedy for the consequences not of economic crisis but of economic growth. It was the creation of a German Customs Union in 1834 that had made the ascent of the Jews in Germany possible, because Jews – ‘a people born to trade in money and goods’ – knew better than Germans how to take advantage of the enlarged free market:

  As a result of all these factors and a host of other economic circumstances, the opportunities for business rose in an unprecedented way. The generality of Germans adjusted slowly to the new conditions… indeed, one might say that whole classes to this day have not yet come to terms with them – one thinks in particular of the small-town Mittelstand and almost the whole of agriculture. The Jews were quite different… [since] their instinct and spiritual orientation is towards business. Their halcyon day had dawned; now they could make the most of their abilities.

  Apart from anything else, Class’s account illustrates perfectly that fluctuations in racial prejudice could be caused as much by economic upswings as by crises.

  THE GERMAN DIASPORA

  In 1901 the Jewish diaspora was still in the early stages of what promised to be a profound transformation. Over 70 per cent of the world’s 10.6 million Jews were Ashkenazim living in Central and Eastern Europe, of whom more than three million lived in Russian territory. As we shall see, these people had strong incentives to move westwards and, in their hundreds of thousands, they were doing precisely that, forming vibrant new Jewish communities in New York, in the East End of London, in Berlin, Budapest and Vienna. That did not signify the decline of the established Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, however. Demographically, if not in other ways, they continued to thrive. It would be more accurate to say that the Jews, like so much else at the start of the twentieth century, were being globalized. At the same time, similar processes were transforming another diaspora. In their millions – perhaps as many as five million in all – Germans had migrated across the Atlantic in the course of the nineteenth century, establishing large and proudly Germanic communities in the American Mid-West. Yet an earlier German diaspora was meanwhile struggling to come to terms with the experience of relative decline.

  In 1901 there were more than thirteen million Germans living beyond the Reich’s eastern frontier. Around nine million lived in Austria, but around four million lived further east, principally in Hungary, Romania and Russia. There were substantial German communities along the Baltic coast, in Poland, Galicia and Bukovina, as well as in Bohemia and Moravia. There were also Germans to be found in Slovakia, Hungary, Transylvania and Slovenia. Nor were these settlements confined to the Habsburg lands. There were German populations in Russian territory, too, in Volhynia, in Bessarabia and Dobrudja, around the mouths of the rivers Prut and Dniester, and along the southern reaches of the Volga. It is not at all easy to rescue the history of these mostly vanished communities from the exaggerated claims made for them in the 1930s and 1940s by Nazi propagandists. Nevertheless, there is no question that many German settlements could trace their roots back centuries. It had been in the late tenth century, at the behest of King Stephan I, that German settlers had first come to western Hungary. In the twelfth century this process was repeated when the Siebenbürger ‘Saxons’* were encouraged to settle in Transylvania, where they founded towns like Klausenberg, Hermannstadt and Bistritz. At around the same time German communities also sprang up in Slovakia, notably Pressburg (now Bratislava), Kaschau (Kosice) and Zips (Spisská), as well as in Slovenia, notably Laibach (now Ljubljana). Often these settlements had a strategic character; their intention was to create fortified settlements along the Eastern Marches of Christendom. This was most clearly the case along the Baltic coast. By 1405 the Teutonic Knights’ realm extended from
the River Elbe all the way up to Narva Bay. Thorn (Toruń), Marienburg (Malbork), Mümmelburg (Memel) and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) were all founded by the Order. Yet the Germans also put down civilian as well as military roots in Eastern Europe. Numerous towns in Poland, such as Lublin and Lemberg (Lwów), were established in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the basis of German legal models. Though often obliterated by the ravages of twentieth-century war (most completely in Königsberg), the German architectural legacy is still visible today in Toruń – to say nothing of Prague, where the oldest of all German universities was founded by the Emperor Charles IV in 1348.