“ANTISEMITISM” IS A RELATIVELY RECENT TERM. Most historians claim that it was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist. This is only approximately correct, because the term was used for at least two decades earlier, even in contemporary encyclopedias. But it is true that Marr popularized the term and gave it wide currency. A radical in his younger years, he published an anti-Jewish pamphlet, “from a non religious point of view” as he put it. He argued that it was wrong to attack the Jews as Christ-killers and that the medieval accusations about the defilement of hosts and ritual murder were equally stupid—his attacks were directed against what he called the “Jewish spirit” and its nefarious impact on German culture and life in general. He was concerned with modern, not medieval, antisemitism.
But what exactly did antisemitism mean? It opposed and fought “semitism”—another neologism that has not survived. The term had been taken from the realm of linguistics, but the interest of antisemites in Akkadian (the oldest Semitic language) was as limited as in Phoenician or Tigrinya, the official language of Eritrea. They had nothing against Hannibal or Jesus Christ even though they were Semitic language speakers. It was a synonym for racial Judeophobia as distinct from the earlier religious hatred of Jews.
But the radical antisemites of Marr’s generation—such as Paul Lagarde, Eugen Duehring, and Richard Wagner—while no longer firm believers in Christianity, had not fully embraced a “scientific” racialist theory that did not yet exist at the time. Their concept was something like a halfway house between the old and the new antisemitism.
Even the Nazis for political reasons were not enamored with the term antisemitism; they did not want to antagonize their well-wishers in the Arab world, and during World War Two, Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and others gave instructions to use the term as little as possible. On the other hand, strong elements of racialism can be found centuries earlier, as in Spain with its emphasis on the purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). More recently attempts to replace the term antisemitism with one or several other terms have been unsuccessful; the term had become too deeply rooted too long ago.
The literature about antisemitism is truly enormous; much of it has been polemical or apologetic. Until fairly recently, the attempts to explain the sources and motives of the phenomenon have been few and far between. With a few exceptions, these studies were written by Jews—the reasons are obviously that antisemitism was much more of a problem for Jews than for non-Jews—and this is the case even today despite the proliferation of academic studies on the subject.
Antisemitism is a difficult subject to discuss for a variety of reasons. Its character and manifestations have undergone changes over time and it has expressed itself in different ways in various countries and cultures. The study of antisemitism involves knowledge of both Jewish and general history and sociology—yet very few scholars were equally familiar with both. Most of the studies on antisemitism deal with one specific aspect—its ideological or social or psychological roots—at the neglect of other potential motives. There has been an enormous amount of literature on German (and Austrian) antisemitism, but most of the Jews prior to World War Two lived in Russia, Poland, the United States, and Romania, and only few studies on these countries existed. The situation was similar even with regard to France; an excellent work had been written in the 1950s about French antisemitism—but it was virtually the only one in the field and the second volume never appeared.
Among nineteenth-century Jewish liberals and their Christian friends, it was generally assumed that with the spread of the Enlightenment and the emancipation of the Jews, it was only a question of time until what some called the “Jewish question” would be solved. They realized, of course, that there was considerable resistance against the full integration of Jews into Western societies. But the spread of antisemitic beliefs seemed to them an aberration which, given time and good will on all sides, would sooner or later come to a halt. This was, after all, the age of progress and it was unthinkable that medieval prejudice would persist indefinitely.
Events seemed to bear out these hopes to some extent. The antisemitic parties that had emerged in Germany toward the turn of the century had declined and disappeared before the outbreak of the First World War. After the Dreyfus case, in France too there was a significant decrease in political antisemitism. In other Western countries such as Britain and the United States, antisemitism was a social issue but not one of great political significance.
There were still occasional attacks against Jews, and the question was asked what could be done to dry out the antisemitic swamp? Liberal German Jews founded in the 1890s an association for the defense against antisemitism which patiently tried to refute the accusations against Jews—no, they were not bloodsuckers and parasites but honest, law-abiding citizens as much patriotically inclined as all other Germans. The intention was laudable but the results meager. For the antisemites were not primarily interested in facts and figures nor in rational argument, and the fact that many Jews received the Nobel Prize (adding to Germany’s cultural prestige) did not greatly impress them. They instinctively did not like them, did not regard them as their kin, and had grave suspicions regarding them. Was it not true that there were no Jewish peasants but a great many businessmen, lawyers, and physicians? Did they not exert an influence quite disproportionate to their number in German cultural life—in publishing houses, the press, and the theater? Was not the German artisan and small trader squeezed out by the (often Jewish-owned) department stores? Some of these observations were quite correct—there were few if any Jewish peasants in Germany; others were untrue or irrelevant and they contributed little to the interpretation of antisemitism—there was no more antisemitism among German businessmen or lawyers or physicians than among the rest of the population.
The socialists and the nineteenth-century radicals were, if anything, even more optimistic with regard to the disappearance of the Jewish problem. With the victory of radical democracy and the social revolution, all other problems would disappear. They regarded antisemitism at best as the socialism of fools, or as a stratagem to distract the toiling masses from fighting their real enemies—the exploiters, capitalism, and the reactionaries. Among leading nineteenth-century socialists there was a great deal of anti-Jewish feeling and this refers not only to the (non-Jewish) so-called utopian socialists such as Pierre Proudhon and Charles Fourier but also to thinkers of Jewish background such as Karl Marx.
Marx’s grandfather had been a rabbi but Judaism (the religion of usury, of egotism, of money as its fetish, as he put it) was for Marx an embarrassment, and he wanted to distance himself as far as possible from this despicable tradition. Marx wrote his “Jewish Question” (1844) when he was a very young man unencumbered by knowledge of Jewish history; he knew about the Rothschilds but knew little and cared less about the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe. In later life Marx did not deal with the Jewish question as such, though when he referred to Jews in private correspondence his tenor was almost always negative.
However, the socialist parties of Germany, Russia, and other European countries, while not paying much attention to the Jewish question, always rejected antisemitism. Neither the Jews nor antisemitism fitted well into the framework of Marxist ideology (historical materialism), and attempts to explain the relationship between Jews and capitalism were left to economic historians such as Werner Sombart. While Max Weber saw the Protestant ethic as the mainspring of modern capitalism, Sombart connected it also to the “Jewish spirit.” To overcome this apparent contradiction, Sombart argued that the Puritan and the Jewish spirit were really one and the same, just as the Jewish Sabbath and the English Sunday were the same. The Jewish spirit was profit oriented and thus paved the way for the modern entrepreneur—the Jewish (and Puritan) merchant was the counterpart to the Aryan warrior-hero. As for America, it was totally verjudet, owing everything it was to the Jewish spirit.
While Sombart was a man of firm and often original opinions, his attitude to historical facts was not beyond reproach. He knew little about Jewish history and, like most of his contemporaries, he was not dealing with Eastern Europe, where the great majority of Jews lived at the time. He overrated the historical role of the court Jews, underrated the role of Christian bankers in history—be it Huguenot, German, or Italian (like the Fugger and Medici), or the Quakers or Dutch. He left out of his purview the entrepreneurs who had been instrumental in developing the American economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and earlier the British—among whom there had been hardly any Jews at all. And he ignored that while at one stage the Rothschilds had indeed played a very important role in European commercial life, the private banks, Jewish or non-Jewish, had been squeezed out by much larger state banks or other entities that were not in the hands of a family or a clan or tribe.
Sombart’s study of the origins of capitalism and its connections with antisemitism was too complicated for much use by the political antisemites, even though Julius Streicher of Stuermer fame used to quote him. For a while Sombart found more interest in his theses among Jews than among non-Jews.
But the most radical attempts to explain the rise of antisemitism came from different quarters—namely from Jews who did not share the optimism of their coreligionists who firmly believed in the coming blessings of emancipation. Leon Pinsker, a Russian physician, had early in his life been among those who fought for full emancipation of the Jews of his homeland; he had believed that the spread of education among Jews and non-Jews alike would bring more or less automatically a solution of the Jewish question. But the rise of antisemitism in Western and Central Europe, and above all the major pogroms of 1881 in Southwest Russia, taught him that such optimism had been misplaced.
In a short pamphlet entitled “Autoemancipation,” published in Berlin in 1882 in German (Pinsker had studied in German universities), Pinsker argued that the Jews were a distinctive element among the nations and as such could not assimilate and be digested. In what way were Jews different from others? They were not a nation and did not have a state of their own. They had renounced their nationality but this had not given them equal status. Their position was abnormal, ghostlike, and it was pointless to blame the antisemites. Judeophobia was demonopathy (as he put it), a psychic aberration like other superstitions and idiosyncrasies. But it was hereditary and incurable, part of the human condition; polemics against it were useless, a waste of effort, for prejudice could not be removed by rational argument. No people liked foreigners and the Jew, having no country and being the foreigner par excellence, would not be able to change this in the foreseeable future. Perhaps one day in the distant future national barriers would no longer exist and all mankind would live in brotherhood and concord. But no previous civilization had been able to achieve this and the world had yet to wait for eternal peace. Hence, he called on the Jews to become a nation.
Pinsker traveled to Western Europe and talked about his ideas with Jewish leaders but found little sympathy—they were far more optimistic concerning the future of Jews in Europe. They advised him to publish his thoughts, which he did in “Autoemancipation.” He died soon after and did not clarify how he envisaged the Jews becoming again a nation; his appeal was made years before political Zionism appeared on the scene.
Pinsker’s views became part and parcel of official Zionist ideology—the assumption that, while reprehensible, antisemitism was in some ways a “natural” phenomenon given the anomaly of Jewish political and social existence in the diaspora, the prevailing xenophobia, and social and economic tensions. And it was also true that the conditions of Jews in Eastern Europe where most of them lived were miserable and Jewish existence undignified. Persecution and oppression over many centuries had had a negative impact on Jewish character and behavior. There was an objective “Jewish question” in countries such as Poland; this was not the invention of malevolent antisemites. Radical Zionists advocated the “negation of the diaspora,” the exodus of European Jewry, at least from those countries where the Jewish question was most acute. But in practical terms, given the limited absorptive capacity of Palestine, this was not a practical proposition.
Such pessimism was, for obvious reasons, more frequent among East Europeans Jews than in Western and Central Europe. There were, after all, no pogroms outside Russia but merely resistance against full emancipation. True, antisemitism had a major revival toward the end of the century and France had its Dreyfus scandal. The Dreyfus case induced Theodor Herzl to work for the establishment of a Jewish homeland and state. The Dreyfus case also persuaded Bernard Lazare, a French Jew whose family had lived in France since time immemorial, to change his views concerning the character of antisemitism.
While not a historian or sociologist or student of politics by profession, Lazare was one of the first to engage in a systematic study of antisemitism (Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, 1894). He disliked antisemitism, he said in his foreword, because it was a narrow and one-sided view, but he sought to account for it. It was after all not born without a cause. Following his research, he reached the conclusion that these causes resided in the Jews themselves, not in those who attacked them, because the Jew wherever he lived was a reclusive and unsociable being. According to their own law they could not accept the law of the land. Furthermore, the policy of the Talmud made them sullen, unsociable, and haughty; in the words of Spinoza—by their external rites, they had isolated themselves from all other nations, even to the extent of drawing upon themselves the hate of all mankind.
True, anti-Judaism from the seventeenth century on had changed its character inasmuch as the social motivation became gradually stronger than the religious hatred. In their majority the Jews remained “unproductive”—brokers, money lenders, usurers, and they could not be otherwise, given their habits and the circumstances under which they had lived. Lazare wrote his book with German and French Jewry in mind; his knowledge concerning Eastern Europe was scanty and third-hand; he believed, for instance, that while the Russian government was antisemitic, the Russians were not.
Thus, the real causes of antisemitism were political, economic, and social. However, as Lazare saw it, the Jewish personality tended to disappear when freed from hostile legislation and obscurantist Talmudism. Jews no longer believed that they were destined to remain a people having an eternal mission to fulfill. This could be a long process and in the meantime antisemitism was against its will acting as a progressive factor. Originally reactionary, it had become transformed and was acting for the advantage of the revolutionary cause. It stirred up the middle classes, the small tradesmen, and sometimes the peasants against the Jewish capitalists. In doing so, it gently led them toward socialism, infusing in them a hatred of all capitalists and, more than that, for capitalism in the abstract.
These then were Lazare’s views in 1894 and it should not come as a surprise that his book is still sold even today in antisemitic bookshops in France, Britain, and other countries—a Jew, revealing the truth about his own people.
But only a few years later, Lazare became the first, and for a while most prominent, fighter for the rehabilitation of Captain Dreyfus, and he no longer believed in the progressive role of antisemitism. He was shocked above all by the fact that the attacks of the antisemites were directed not primarily against the new Jewish immigrants to France from Eastern Europe (whom he had earlier called contemptible and useless) but against those fully emancipated Jews who had lived in France for many generations. It showed that emancipation was not working and that the Jews, scattered among other peoples, were bound to attract hostility. This led him to the belief in a Jewish nation and even in Zionism.
At about the same time that Lazare suffered his bitter disappointment, a document was fabricated (possibly in France) to which we shall have to return later on—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which became the bible of antisemitism in the twentieth century. This document had little to do with religious hatred and did not propagate a racialist science; it revealed, no more and no less, the idea of a Jewish conspiracy to conquer and rule the world. However, it is also true that before World War One the influence of the Protocols was limited to certain circles in czarist Russia—no one outside of Russia had heard about it or would have been ready to give much credence to its message. In the years before 1914 there was (as pointed out earlier) the general belief among Jews in Europe and America that gradually reason and harmony would prevail; only a very few accepted the analysis of antisemitism shared by Pinsker, Herzl, and Lazare.
Pogroms again took place in Russia from 1904 to 1906, but even there the belief prevailed that the “objective” Jewish question would somehow be resolved—by emigration, the gradual emancipation of the Jews, and their ensuing transformation into a “productive people.”
In the writings of the antisemites at the time there was a tone of despair—why was there so little willingness on the part of the population to accept their message and to realize how great the Jewish peril was? Only the war changed all this; in Germany the Jews were accused of shirking their patriotic duties fighting at the war front, but above all it was the impact of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the threat of further Communist revolutions in Central Europe (Hungary, Bavaria) that gave a great impetus to the spread of antisemitism.
The stories about a Jewish world conspiracy which had been dismissed a few years earlier now received much greater credence. Many of the leaders of world revolution were of Jewish origin; the fact that they had wholly distanced themselves from their religion and community mattered little. These revolutionary leaders did not regard themselves as Jews but as soldiers in the army of world revolution, yet this was not the way others saw them. Nor did it matter that in the 1920s and 1930s, with the victory of Stalin over Trotsky, Jews were squeezed out of the leadership of the Communist party. The stereotype of the Jewish revolutionary as a ferment of decomposition had grown deep roots and, if need be, Stalin could be made a Jew or at least a hatchet man of Lazar Kaganovitch, allegedly the real force behind the scenes.
There was a new wave of pogroms immediately after the First World War especially in the Ukraine, and later on radical antisemitic parties appeared, such as the Nazis in Germany but also in countries such as Romania and Hungary. Anti-Jewish legislation was passed in several East European countries.
Even though antisemitism became a political factor of great importance after World War One, there were no significant new attempts at trying to explain it. A few fine books were published about the demonization of the Jews in the Middle Ages (see J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews). The Zionists continued to point to the existence of an “objective Jewish problem” in Eastern Europe and, with the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, suggested emigration to that country. The Communists continued to argue that only with the world revolution would the Jewish question be solved; until then, they suggested Biro Bidzhan, a Soviet district in the Far East, as an alternative place for Jewish settlement. The liberals continued to hope that the upsurge of antisemitism, which after all had not affected all countries, would pass in due time. A few Christian theologians (James Parkes, Lukyn Williams, Peter Browe) showed interest and competence dealing with premodern antisemitism but their work did not have a great echo at the time.
A few historical studies on antisemitism and apologetic books and articles were published, but it was only with the Nazi takeover in Germany that a new impetus was given to the study of antisemitism. Hugo Valentin, a Swedish-Jewish historian, published a historical and sociological study that was translated into English and pirated by the Japanese in Manchuria; it became something like a standard text in the absence of other serious books.
Interest in the antisemitic phenomenon was displayed in other quarters hitherto not preoccupied with this topic, such as the circle later called the Frankfurt school of critical theory. This was a group of enlightened Marxists who found the Communist party line on the Jews too simplistic but still believed that the roots of antisemitism had to be found in the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois society. The Jews were mainly occupied in the sphere of circulation (they had been merchants and bankers) rather than production, and for this reason it was easier to make them responsible for all the shortcomings and sins of capitalism. These ideas were not altogether new; they had been expressed by the Zionists calling for the normalization of the Jewish social structure, the “return to the soil,” etc. They were expressed in more academic language by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in a number of articles before and during the war and also in the framework of a general study of National Socialism by Franz Neumann (Behemoth).
How to explain that the Enlightenment had not made it clear who the real culprits were and why the antisemites had succeeded in deflecting the hatred of the oppressed from the real causes of their misery (displaced aggression)? For these questions historical materialism did not have an answer, hence the gradual turn from a Marxist “primacy of economics” point of view to psychoanalysis. This manifested itself above all in the famous study of the authoritarian personality undertaken by members of the Frankfurt school during the Second World War.
This study claimed that people tending toward antisemitism had a weak ego and felt dependent on authority of various kinds; they were conventional, repressive, and archaic in their attitudes, aggressive against strangers; they gravitated toward superstition and paranoia and believed in power and toughness. These findings were influential among a certain public but were not, however, accepted by leading students of antisemitism, who rejected them as too crude or simplistic and not in accordance with the historical facts. One of the weaknesses of the Frankfurt school interpretation was that, with a few exceptions such as Erich Fromm (who in the beginning was at its margins), they knew little about Jewish history and sociology; they had concepts and theories but not the factual knowledge to deal adequately with a complicated and multilayered subject. Furthermore, their knowledge was limited to a few countries—not those where most Jews lived. The study’s yardstick, the baseline for the definition of an authoritarian personality, had been constructed in such a way as to show that antisemites were often found on the political right. This was true but had been known earlier; in addition, the Communists were also great believers in authority, as were many orthodox Jews and non-Jews. In brief, these findings on an authoritarian personality were not of great assistance on either a theoretical or a practical level.
An ambitious attempt to explain antisemitism was undertaken by Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish refugee, who was neither a Marxist nor a staunch believer in psychoanalysis. In earlier years she had shown little interest in Jewish history and antisemitism, a subject that she found boring. But the Nazi rise to power and her escape to France and America taught her differently, and in her magnum opus The Origins of Totalitarianism antisemitism became the cornerstone of her theory. Arendt dissociated herself from the two prevailing theories of antisemitism—the Jews as a scapegoat version on one hand and the eternal antisemitism concept on the other. Arendt argued that antisemitism was, at least partly, the fault of the Jews who had not resisted the attacks against them. But Arendt’s idea that the Jews need not have become a scapegoat had they taken political action is not readily acceptable. How could the Jews take political action facing a hostile majority? How could they fight for their rights if they did not have armed forces?
“Eternal antisemitism” was something of a strawman because few serious scholars had ever argued along these lines. Herzl and the Zionists had not a priori excluded the possibility of a world without national conflicts and had conceded that, given a few generations of peace, assimilation might succeed in many countries. But they strongly doubted whether in Central and Eastern Europe the Jews would enjoy a closed season that long.
Hannah Arendt saw a basic difference between the earlier antisemitism of the nation-state and the far more dangerous and deadly antisemitism of the age of imperialism and the pan-movements. This thesis was widely discussed for a while but had little impact on the study of antisemitism. As John Gager, a leading scholar of early Christianity, wrote, the notion of an “unbridgeable chasm” between the modern world and antiquity or the Middle Ages ran against the grain of common sense and sound historiography. Furthermore, in the imperialist country par excellence (Great Britain) there was little antisemitism, and the connection between, for instance, Cecil Rhodes (who figured prominently in Arendt’s work) and twentieth-century antisemitism was not readily obvious.
Nor was Arendt’s critique of Sartre’s existentialist interpretation of antisemitism quite convincing. Writing in 1944, Sartre had argued that a Jew was someone regarded and defined by others as a Jew. This, Arendt claimed, was the mirror image of what the Jewish parvenu thought: he wanted to be accepted by a society that rejected him. Success meant that he ceased to be a Jew the moment others no longer regarded him as such. But in many ways Sartre had only stated the obvious. And it was also true, as Sartre argued, that democrats were not unconditional friends of the Jews in their struggle; they were ready to support Jews but only if the Jews were willing to give up their Jewishness, be it religious or the feeling of belonging to a certain community. As Sartre put it, the democrat was willing to save the Jews as human beings but only if the Jew ceased to be a Jew.
While émigré political philosophers were speculating about the mainsprings of antisemitism, investigations by non-Jewish academics were infrequent. A rare exception was a volume published in the United States in 1942 whose contributors included Carl Friedrich and Talcott Parsons. Friedrich (like Hannah Arendt a few years later) stressed that the new antisemitism was different in character from the old, traditional religious intolerance and persecutions—but he had in mind its racialism rather than imperialism. The same point was emphasized by another book widely read during World War Two, Maurice Samuel’s Antisemitism; Samuel pointed out that the earlier anti-Jewishness had its roots mainly in thinking badly of Jews whereas modern antisemitism was largely based on fear, suspicion, and even hallucinations of Jews as international plotters and corrupters.
Friedrich singled out several factors that were in his opinion of paramount importance—first, antisemitism as a manifestation of cultural decadence, that is to say the wearing thin of faithful belief in ethical norms—or to put it more starkly, a relapse into barbarism. This also referred to the profoundly anti-Christian nature of Nazism and its hostility toward civilization. Friedrich also mentioned the rise of pseudoscientific dogmas of a materialistic type (i.e., racialist theory) and the increasing dominance of the Jewish businessman in capitalist countries on one hand and the prominent role of Jews in left-wing revolutionary movements on the other.
Talcott Parsons emphasized the rabid character of German nationalism and the fact that the lower-middle class was particularly prone to embrace antisemitism. He based his theory in considerable part on the findings of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim concerning the “anomie” of modern society, meaning the disintegration of traditional social structures leading to a feeling of uncertainty and the urge to establish a close tie to the national collective (the folk, the nation). The Jews were everywhere in a minority (and minorities were never gladly received); the Jewish religious belief in being the chosen people had never contributed to their popularity.
Much of the academic effort at the time was descriptive in nature and centered around such questions as how to define the Jews—if they were not a people or a race, what were they, and also what could be done about antisemitism after the war? All this did not contribute greatly to clarifying why the new antisemitism had arisen in the first place and why it had been far more virulent at some times (and in some countries) than in others—questions that confront the experts to this very day.
It is not surprising that the study of antisemitism during the war and the early postwar period focused on Germany, simply because it had been in that country that modern antisemitism had received its ideological underpinnings and that antisemitic practice, i.e., the Holocaust, had been most murderous. Thus, the debate about antisemitism turned into a debate about the mass murder of Jews carried out by Nazi Germany. This produced some pioneering studies about the origins of antisemitism in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany and Austria; over the years hardly a stone remained unturned in this field. The impact of the Holocaust on the study of antisemitism was obvious, probably inevitable, but there had been antisemitism both before and after, and there was the danger that the study of the Holocaust would not only overshadow the study of antisemitism but simplify and even distort it. It was only toward the end of the twentieth century that attention was again given to antisemitism in other parts of the world, including in the Islamic world, and to the analysis of the problem in general. There was a veritable explosion of studies on antisemitism. A bibliography on antisemitism published in the 1930s or 1940s would have comprised a few pages; a list covering the last ten years (1995–2004) enumerates 40,000 items.
As long as there has been antisemitism, attempts have been made to investigate its causes, though these were usually neither systematic nor very sophisticated. The earliest school of thought was the theological—the explanation of Jew hatred against the background of Jewish obstinacy and exclusiveness: they had crucified Jesus and refused to accept his teachings; they had refused to listen to Muhammed and accept Islam. This was a crucial factor over many centuries but it hardly explains antisemitism in modern times.
Social tensions and economic rivalries—the fact that Jews in many countries were on the margins of society and engaged in economic activities bound to provoke hatred and envy—were factors of undoubted importance. One obvious example from early modern history is the opposition and resentment of the non-Jewish urban population against Jews in Central and Eastern Europe who tried to enter the cities from which they had been expelled and to compete in urban occupations such as commerce and handicrafts.
Social tensions may explain antisemitism in nineteenth-century Russia and Poland. But antisemitism affected Jews irrespective of whether they were rich or poor, usurers or beggars. It explains neither the expulsions from Spain, France, Britain, and other countries nor the persecutions in Nazi Germany. It is not surprising that the rise of a wealthy court Jew such as Joseph Suess Oppenheimer in early-eighteenth-century Germany generated envy and ill will. But it has been estimated that at this time one-third of the Jews in Germany were peddlers and perhaps one-quarter were beggars, and they were not popular either even though no one wanted to share their fate.
Demographic factors have to be taken in account, such as the influx of Jews into big cities in the nineteenth century. In 1850, 9,000 Jews lived in Berlin but in 1925 their number had risen to 180,000; the figures for Vienna were even more striking—about 2,000 in 1850 and 200,000 in 1925. Vienna was a center of antisemitism, but Berlin was not, nor was Frankfurt, which had the second largest Jewish community in Germany. Antisemitism often received a fresh impetus at a time of economic crisis but even more frequently in a political crisis. And very often social and political crises had little or no effect on the fate of the Jews.
The psychological approach to explaining antisemitism (Jews as strangers, the dislike of the unlike, the authoritarian personality) is helpful in some instances but not in others—Jews were disliked when they were weak and when they were strong, when they made an effort to assimilate and when they stuck to their traditional beliefs and way of life. Nor does that approach explain the great intensity of antisemitism in some countries and ages and its weakness or absence in others. Sigmund Freud came to believe late in life that Jews were hated because there was much jealousy of the people who had committed prehistoric patricide (killing God, the father), pioneered monotheism, and believed themselves chosen by God. But this concept was not shared by many students of antisemitism, and what some of Freud’s disciples had to say about narcissism and antisemitism, about the role of the superego and other analytical concepts was more or less ignored by students of antisemitism.
Was the key to antisemitism perhaps found in the specific (negative) character of a Jewish race? It is true that life in the ghetto and the shtetl produced certain common attributes and that oppression did not bring out the best in people. But the Jews are still not a race in any meaningful sense; the differences among them are enormous in every respect after two thousand years of life in the diaspora. Stereotypes about peoples and national character are seldom true, and they are even less true concerning the Jews.
All this does not mean that antisemitism is an impenetrable mystery and that there is no way to account for it. (It is a mystery only to the extent that the existence of peoples in general is.) But it does mean that there is no monocausal explanation, that in different times and places different factors were at play. At times anti-Jewish hostility was predominantly irrational, at other times it was quite rational, and usually there was interplay between these two. The motivation of the great medieval pogroms in Central Europe of 1096 (the First Crusade) and 1348–49 (the Black Death) was predominantly religious in character. But this does not explain why the Jewish communities in the Rhineland were attacked and those in France, where the movement had originated, were not. In both instances there was widespread plundering which tends to show that economic motives must have been involved. And since the crusaders also killed many thousands of other people on their way—Christians and Muslims—is it correct to consider the massacres of 1096 manifestations of antisemitism?
In Spain Jews could escape persecution by conversion, whereas in the massacres in the Ukraine in 1648–49 conversion made no difference. Were the attackers out to capture the souls of the Jews or their money? It is certain that in the two great pogroms (more perhaps in 1348 than in 1096) both religious fanaticism and social tensions were involved, but no one can say for certain how much of one and how much of the other.
The murder of millions of Jews in Europe during the Second World War had a crucial impact on the concept and interpretation of antisemitism. But this is a topic to which we shall return later on in this study, following a survey of the origins of antisemitism; more recent manifestations of this phenomenon cannot be understood without going back to its roots, the constant factors, and the mutations that occurred over the ages.