RELIGION DECLINED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY but antisemitism did not; the doctrine of antisemitism gradually changed its character. It had been almost exclusively religious and this was found more and more unsatisfactory by staunch antisemites. Why, they asked, should a Jew who converted to Christianity be regarded as an equal? This issue had arisen in sixteenth-century Spain when the doctrine of the purity of the blood (limpieza de sangre) had been made a statute; Jews could not be trusted even if they abjured their religious faith. Perhaps their conversion was genuine and perhaps it was not. And even if it was genuine, radical antisemites would argue that the character of the Jews was such that they could not be considered equal to the “old Christians.” There was something beyond their religion that made their assimilation difficult and perhaps impossible. Ironically, it was also argued that Jews or descendants of Jews were behind the religious sectarianism that had been so influential in Germany and France at the time—in other words, Jews were believed to have been behind the advent of Protestantism.
Limpieza de sangre laws prevailed even though they were opposed by many high-ranking churchmen, including the Jesuits. But the doctrine of the purity of blood was restricted at the time to the Iberian peninsula, where it applied also to the Moors. Furthermore, it was whittled down gradually over the ages and dismissed altogether in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Modern race theory has its origins in the work of philologists and ethnographers from the late eighteenth century onward. For some time it was believed that the cradle of Western civilization and religion (such as Zoroastrism) had been in the Caucasus, but subsequently the opinion prevailed that their beginnings must have been somewhere in Northern India, Central Asia, or Persia.
One of the leading protagonists of the concept of the importance of race in history and of the inequality of races was Count Gobineau, a French diplomat whose influential work on the subject was published in 1853. Joseph Gobineau also believed that the mixture of races was fatal and that it had caused the decline of nations and civilizations. Gobineau was not of much use to the antisemites, however, because he only rarely referred to the Jews and what he said about them was by no means always hostile.
Nor were the findings of linguists such as Max Mueller, a German professor teaching Sanskrit in Oxford, or of the French historian Ernest Renan, of much help to the antisemites because these precursors put the emphasis on cultural rather than biological concepts. Mueller, who coined the term “Aryanism,” declared that there was no such thing as an Aryan race. Nor was it acceptable for German racialists to subscribe to a theory that claimed that their origin should have been somewhere in Central Asia; the Nordic race that had produced all that was great in civilization including the Renaissance and the French Revolution surely must have originated in Northern Europe.
Human biology and genetics had not really come into their own at the time; this would happen only later with the work in Britain of Francis Galton and, above all, Karl Pearson. When race theory initially emerged, it was largely based on speculation. Among its early protagonists in Germany, where it was most popular, were not scientists but economists such as Eugen Duehring, composers such as Richard Wagner, students of the Bible and oriental languages such as Paul Lagarde, amateur historians and philosophers such as the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They were quite aware of the uncertain foundations on which their theories rested, and Chamberlain wrote that while there might not have been an Aryan race in the past, the task ahead was to create one. Some of them vaguely talked about a “religion of the future,” but hardly anyone wanted a total confrontation with Christianity—as advocated by Nietzsche, who had, however, no sympathies for the racialist antisemites. Most of them thought it possible to de-Judaize the Bible by ignoring the Old Testament and declaring Jesus Christ an Aryan rather than a Jew (for the Jewish people could not have possibly produced a figure like him). Still others were dreaming of a future German national religion, but even the Nazis at a later period preferred not to press this divisive subject.
The early racialist antisemites had no clear program concerning the treatment of the Jews. Wilhelm Marr, who had coined the term “antisemitism,” thought that it was too late to do anything about that. The Jews were already dominating the economic and political life of the country (Germany) as well as the cultural scene, and he concluded his book with the words “Finis Germaniae,” the end of Germany. We do not know whether this pessimism was genuine or sham. Lagarde and, in particular, Duehring regarded the Jews as parasites that had to be exterminated one way or another. At the very least they wanted a reghettoization, but deportation would have been preferable in the view of many. Some suggested the island of Madagascar as a possible haven for the Jews, an idea that was taken up for a short time by the Nazis before they opted for physical extermination. Emperor Wilhelm II in his Dutch exile advocated the murder of the Jews by means of poison gas. But the kaiser was not a stable and consistent thinker; his antisemitism did not prevent fairly close relations with leading Jewish industrialists and bankers such as Albert Ballin and Max Warburg. While in office he had always opposed anti-Jewish legislation.
Race doctrine received a fresh impetus toward the end of the nineteenth century when social Darwinism and eugenics became fashionable and the specter of “degeneration” was conjured up. These ideas were very much part of the Zeitgeist. The supporters of Houston Stewart Chamberlain included the German emperor as well as Teddy Roosevelt and George Benard Shaw. Chamberlain, it should be noted, lived until 1927 and managed to meet Hitler at the beginning of his political career; in a letter written after this meeting, Chamberlain hailed him as the savior of Germany.
But the preoccupation with race did not necessarily lead to antisemitism. The leading book about “degeneration” was written by a prominent Jewish essayist, Max Nordau, and he saw the root of the evil not in biological factors but in a variety of cultural modernist fads and fashions. Not all the critique of modernism was reactionary and unjustified; eugenics at the time probably had more supporters among the left, including the Social Democrats, than among the Conservatives, and among its proponents were also Jewish sociologists and ethnologists. In other words, while these biological and genetic concepts could become part of a new antisemitic “German ideology,” this was by no means the only possible political consequence.
By and large, racialist antisemitism had only limited political impact during this time. Various antisemitic leagues and parties sprouted in Germany and to a lesser degree in neighboring countries. The leaders of these parties spent as much time fighting each other as fighting the Jews. They were instrumental in convening two international antisemitic congresses in the 1880s, but few participants came from outside Germany and these meetings were largely ignored.
The German antisemites succeeded in getting a few of their own elected to local parliaments and even the Reichstag, mainly in Saxony (where few Jews lived) and in Hesse (where a somewhat larger percentage of Jews made their home, mainly in the countryside). They had their greatest success at the general elections of 1893, when sixteen of them were elected to the Reichstag. But there was no unity among them and in later elections they did not achieve remotely similar results.
The racialist antisemites continued to be active in various fields, and they created something like a political subculture with social clubs, youth and student groups, as well as newspapers and a literature of their own. They exerted some indirect influence, for instance on the Conservatives, but generally they were not taken seriously and simply not considered respectable in a society such as Wilhelmian Germany. They focused their propaganda on certain social issues, such as the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe following the pogroms. But most of these emigrants had no wish to settle in Germany and were merely in transit to the United States, Britain, or South Africa. Another issue was the appearance of department stores that emerged around the turn of the century; many of them were in Jewish hands and they constituted serious competition and even a threat to the survival of small shops.
More important perhaps than the impact of racialist doctrine on the development of modern antisemitism was the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy. This concept goes back a long time; some have traced it to King Solomon and the days of the Bible. In the Middle Ages there had been rumors about an executive of leading rabbis meeting once a year in France and deciding what crimes to commit to cause maximum harm to the hated Christians. The Jews were miserable, downtrodden, and isolated, however, and it was difficult to persuade anyone that they constituted a serious danger. It was only in the wake of the French Revolution that some reactionary clerics claimed that the great upheaval had been the result of a plot by Freemasons and, above all, the Illuminati. The Illuminati were a Bavarian Masonic group founded in the eighteenth century by one Adam Weishaupt about whom little is known; it is doubtful whether they still existed in the nineteenth century. However, the Jews could hardly be made responsible for the French Revolution since they were not involved in the political life of France or any other country. It was only toward the middle of the following century that political conspiracy theories became truly fashionable. One typical example was the so-called speech by the chief rabbi in a novel entitled Biarritz (published in 1869) by the German journalist Hermann Goedsche, who wrote under the pen name of Sir John Retcliffe. According to Goedsche’s novel, the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish body consisting of representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel, meets every hundred years near a certain grave on the Jewish cemetery in Prague. At this meeting, the planning of a world revolution aimed at creating a global dictatorship is discussed. This is to be achieved by means of international financial intrigues as well as revolutions to overthrow religion, the monarchy, and the army first of all in Prussia and Russia. However, two unwanted observers somehow penetrate the meeting, a German named Dr. Faustus and an Italian converted Jew named Lasali. This chapter of the novel was reprinted countless times in various countries; the antisemitic ideologues who used it did not deny that its origin was in a trashy horror novel, but they argued that it must have been based on some real events.
The historical role of Biarritz was that, together with an obscure pamphlet by Maurice Joly (published in Brussels in 1865), it became one of the two main sources of inspiration for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols were the main text and the basis of modern antisemitic propaganda and have remained so with countless modifications to this day. Although its origins are still murky, it is believed to have been fabricated by agents of the czarist secret police (the Okhrana) in France before the turn of the twentieth century, but this has never been conclusively proved. They were first published in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903 and subsequently reprinted many times, by the Russian government printing office and mainly by one of Russia’s leading monasteries just outside Moscow.
There are many divergent versions of the Protocols; sometimes the Jesuits are brought in, very often masonic lodges as well as various revolutionaries and representatives of finance capitalism and an array of subversive secret societies. In contrast to the chapter of Biarritz, the Protocols text is not a speech but the alleged verbatim record of twenty-four sessions of the heads of a Jewish world conspiracy that outlines both their plans and their intentions. Sometimes it was explained that this body is identical with the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a Jewish defense organization founded in Paris in 1860; at other times it has been claimed that it refers to the Zionist movement, whose first congress took place in Basel in 1897. Yet other commentators have explained that neither of these bodies was involved, but that it was an organization so secret that most Jews did not even know about its existence. Their declared aim is to overthrow all existing thrones, institutions, and religions; to destroy all states; and to build on their ruins a Jewish world empire headed by an emperor from the seed of King David. Included is a section that could be entitled “Machiavelli for Backward Students”: he who would rule must act with slyness, cunning, and hypocrisy—there is no room for moral values, honor, and honesty, let alone openness in this field. The masses are blind, unable to understand what is good for them.
To achieve their ends, the document alleges, the Jews use all kinds of secret organizations, and their main tools are democracy, liberalism, and socialism. They have been behind all upheavals in history, supporting the demand for the freedom of the individual; they are also behind the class struggle, all political assassinations, and all major strikes. The plotters induce the workers to become alcoholics and try to create chaotic conditions by driving food prices up and spreading infectious diseases. There is also a swipe at nefarious “society ladies.”
The Jews already constitute a world government, the document claims, but their power is as yet incomplete and they incite the nations against each other to trigger a world war. There is a great distance, however, between their proclaimed and their real aims. These fictional leaders are by no means liberals and democrats. Real happiness will be brought not by democratic principles but by blind obedience to authority. Only a small part of the population will receive education, for the spread of learning among the lower classes has been one of the main causes of the downfall of the Christian states. It will be the honorable duty of all citizens to spy and inform on all others. The rulers will put down without mercy those who oppose them; other conspiratorial groups such as the Freemasons will be liquidated, some killed, others exiled to punitive settlements overseas.
But what if the non-Jews discover this diabolical conspiracy in time? What if they attack the Jews once they have understood that all the disasters and intrigues are part of a gigantic Jewish master plan? Against this last eventuality the Elders have an ultimate horrible weapon which is revealed in the ninth protocol. All the capitals will be undermined by a network of underground railways. In case of danger, the Elders will blow up the cities from the underground tunnels, and all government offices and all non-Jews and their property will be destroyed.
This ultimate weapon was too much even for the credulity of the Russian—and later the German—editors of the Protocols. The Russian editors added a footnote to the effect that while at present there were no such underground tunnels in Russia, various committees were at work to establish them. The German editors (after the First World War) said that common sense revolted against this idea, and that it was probably a mere manner of speaking or a figure of speech used to emphasize that the Jewish plotters would not be deterred by using even the most horrible weapons to attain their aims.
The Protocols were widely distributed in Russian during the decade before the outbreak of the First World War but their political impact was limited. The Russian government, with all its anti-Jewish feelings, rejected it as unsuitable for propagandistic purposes and it was not initially translated into other languages. The great acceptance of the Protocols began only after the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War.
The Russian empire, which many believed would last forever, disappeared without a trace after the Russian Revolutions of 1917; the new leaders were people few had ever heard of, including many Jews from Trotsky downward in the new hierarchy. Revolutionary coups were attempted in other parts of Europe, such as Hungary and Bavaria, and they too were headed by Communists of Jewish origin. That these Jewish revolutionaries had fought against and dissociated themselves from their communities was of no interest to the purveyors of the Protocols—perhaps it was a mere stratagem.
The Protocols were brought to Europe during the White Russian emigration, probably by an army officer named Shabelski-Bork. Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German and later the chief ideologist of the Nazi party, made a name for himself as a leading early commentator on the Protocols. But the influence of the Protocols was no longer restricted to fringe groups; leading German and British newspapers published them in installments, and the ex-kaiser Wilhelm II, then in his Dutch exile, sent copies to all his friends. True, the London papers were also the first to admit that their correspondents had been taken in by a forgery, but this did not greatly affect the triumphant success of the Protocols. Within a few years they were translated into most languages, including Japanese and Chinese. The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Barsalina, called on his flock to purchase the Arab translation of the pamphlet. Henry Ford sponsored the publication in the United States, where it sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
The Protocols were neither the first nor the last literary product of its kind, but it was certainly the most successful. How to explain its phenomenal success? The postwar environment was of decisive importance. After years of peace and prosperity, the general optimism of Europe had been rudely shaken. To many, the war had come like a bolt out of the blue; millions had died in the senseless slaughter, and there had been unprecedented material destruction. Millions of those who survived found themselves at the end of the war without means and without hope. The war was followed in many countries by further unrest and economic disasters such as inflation and unemployment. In these circumstances, many were looking for an answer, if possible a clear and easily intelligible explanation to their searching questions about the cause of these disasters and the global unrest in general. And now a document had emerged from the very country in which these apocalyptic events had first happened—sufficient reason for many to accept these startling explanations. So many disasters could not possibly have been unconnected and unplanned; surely there must have been a hidden hand behind all this.
That the forgeries were primitive and unconvincing did not really matter. As one contemporary observer wrote, “The ignorant believed them because they were ignorant and the semi-intelligent because it was for the good of the reactionary cause.”
If the Protocols were widely read and partly believed in the countries that had emerged victorious from the war, their success in the camp of the defeated, from the White Russian emigrés to Weimar Germany, is all the more understandable. Who had brought about the downfall of the czarist empire? Who had stabbed in the back the German armies previously undefeated on the field of battle? A scapegoat had to be found. Russian and German right-wingers discovered that they did not have to blame themselves and their own shortcomings for these traumatic defeats. The explanation of an outside enemy had psychologically much to recommend.
But the Protocols offered more than an explanation; they were also a political slogan, a battle cry. Whether Hitler truly believed in the Protocols is doubtful, but he was shrewd enough to realize the enormous propagandistic potential of the basic idea of the Protocols. Some observers have gone further and argued that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia with their dictatorships, propaganda, terror, and ideas of a totalitarian welfare state owed more than a little to the Protocols. But whether Hitler was indeed a pupil of the Elders of Zion is a moot point; he had no need for the Protocols in his struggle against the Jews or as a blueprint for Europe’s future.
The Protocols and kindred literature belong to the species of conspiracy theory of history, a genre of political philosophy and literature that has had enormous attraction since time immemorial. That there have been plots and conspiracies throughout history goes without saying, but the theories that have attracted so many people do not belong to this category. This species consists of conspiracy theories that are manifestly absurd, have nothing to do with the real world, and appeal not only to individuals with an inclination toward paranoia but to a far wider public. They can be found in virtually every part of the world, though a world map of conspiracy theories would show that they are more widespread and popular in some countries and cultures than in others. It has been argued that the high tide of conspiracy theories was in the Middle Ages with its obscurantism and mass hysterias, but this is doubtful in view of the enormous revival they have had in modern times, especially in the last century. This revival is, of course, connected with the fact that the world has become infinitely more complex and difficult to understand and is also related to the revolt against obvious “official explanations” in politics, science, and other fields.
The enormous success of conspiracy theories in literature and the cinema tends to show that the belief in abstruse explanations must be part of the human condition and corresponds to a human need. Some of these theories are entertaining and harmless (the UFOs or the Bermuda Triangle); others are far from innocent because they are used as political weapons against groups of people deemed hostile. They certainly have become an integral part of contemporary antisemitism, adapting themselves to new developments and circumstances, and we shall again have to deal with them later in this book.
Before World War One conspiracy theories played only a minor role in antisemitic propaganda; they existed but their appeal was limited. True, Jews were considered disloyal to their respective countries by the antisemites, but this did not amount to a giant global conspiracy. The details of the Dreyfus case, for example, need not be recounted in detail. A captain in the French general staff, Alfred Dreyfus was arrested in October 1893 and accused of having passed military secrets to the Germans. In December of that year a military tribunal behind closed doors sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, where he spent four years in solitary confinement. However, following some investigations by a few courageous writers, first Bernard Lazare and later Emile Zola, it appeared that the evidence against Dreyfus had been faked by two fellow officers—one of whom committed suicide, the other escaped abroad.
This should have been the end of the case, but the general staff tried to maintain a cover-up at all costs and in 1899 Dreyfus was again found guilty by a military tribunal. A few days later he was paroled by the French president. It took another seven years for Dreyfus to be restored to the army and to be awarded the Legion of Honor.
The case split the country and led temporarily to riots and outbreaks of antisemitism. It was not so much the question of whether Dreyfus was guilty that motivated the anti-Dreyfusards, but the conviction that the good name of the army should be protected at any cost. French Jews were accused by the antisemites of trying to save one of their own even though he was guilty. In fact, French Jewry had not shown great courage and hesitated a very long time to join the defenders of Dreyfus, as did the socialists.
The Catholic church and the traditional right were heavily involved in the affair and were bound to suffer as the intrigue against Dreyfus collapsed. It led to a strict division between church and state; antisemitism in France was weakened but continued to exist. Edouard Drumont, the leading antisemitic writer of the period, and his disciples continued to publish books and articles according to which the goal of the Jews was the downfall of France. But the echo they had was limited. Even while Dreyfus was deported, Jews continued to serve as senior officers in the French army—posts closed to them in Germany.
During the early years of the twentieth century, it was widely believed in enlightened circles that antisemitism was a thing of the past. True, from time to time rumors about ritual murders would occur in distant rural places such as Tisza Eszlar in Hungary, in Konitz and Xanten in East Germany, as well as in some Bohemian villages. But these throwbacks to the Middle Ages quickly led to protests and were dismissed. There was social and cultural antisemitism: Edward, Prince of Wales, was derided by part of the British press because he surrounded himself with Jewish financiers. Some Jewish businessmen in South Africa were accused of having provoked (or at least assisted) the outbreak of the Boer War. But these were marginal events. Antisemitism as a central issue existed only in czarist Russia and a few other backward regions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, such as Romania.
All this changed with the outbreak of the First World War. The war had various causes but it was difficult to attribute it to Jewish intrigues. During the early months, even antisemitic newspapers in Russia, France, and other belligerent countries refrained from continuing their propaganda because internal peace (Burgfrieden) had been declared. But once it appeared that the war would last years, antisemitic attacks reappeared. In Russia hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from the regions close to the front line, especially in Lithuania and Northern Poland. Many thousands died during and as a result of the deportations. Tens of thousands of Jews from Austrian Galicia fled to Vienna to escape the advancing Russian armies; this sudden influx added fuel to tensions in a city in which antisemitism had been deeply rooted for a long time.
In Germany antisemites spread rumors that while Jews had enlisted in the army like everyone else, most of them had found safe jobs in the rear. The military authorities decided to carry out a “Jewish census”; the results were never published, partly perhaps because of political pressure or because they did not bear out the allegations. All that is known is that the number of Jewish war dead in Germany—12,000—was proportionally the same as that of the non-Jewish victims. However, neither this fact nor the many second- and first-class Iron Crosses awarded the Jewish soldiers were of any help to the Jewish community twenty years later when Hitler came to power.
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 led to a bloody and prolonged civil war. Although many Jews were represented in the Communist leadership, from Trotsky on down, and although these Jews had emphatically dissociated themselves from their communities, the Jews were still widely equated with Bolshevism in the popular mind. For the volunteer White armies, particularly the Cossacks, the Jews were the enemy par excellence. In a major civil war, a great many people tend to be killed, but Jews suffered more than all other groups in this conflict. Pogroms were carried out not only by the Whites but by Ukrainian nationalist groups, by quasi anarchists, and also by the Bolsheviks for whom the Jews were capitalists, the class enemy. The high tide of the pogroms came during the second half of 1919; it is estimated that about 10 percent of Ukrainian Jewry, between 150,000 and 200,000 people, perished.
While the earlier waves of pogroms in 1881 and 1905 had taken place predominantly in the cities, the pogroms of 1918–19 were also in the countryside; one of the greatest massacres was in Proskurov, a small town in the Ukraine, in which 1,700 Jews were killed and thousands injured. Although there had always been a good deal of plundering in the earlier massacres, this became even more pronounced in the civil war pogroms. The White armies were supported not only by the political right but also by the centrist and liberal parties. Their commanders refused to condemn the anti-Jewish persecution, for antisemitism seemed so deeply ingrained that they thought any such attempt would be fruitless. The Ukrainian leadership, especially Symon Petlyura, was in theory more liberal—they advocated the emancipation of the Jews and there were a few Jewish advisers among them. But they had no control over their armed gangs and the same was true of anarchist groups such as the one headed by Nestor Makhno. The supreme leadership of the White armies did not specifically call for pogroms nor did they oppose them; as General Anton Denikin once said, if he had done so he would be accused of having sold out to the Jews.
The Russian officer corps was traditionally antisemitic and the revolution had reinforced these feelings—the Jews were responsible for the Russian tragedy; they had to be punished and eliminated from Russian public life. The political and propaganda branches of the White volunteer armies were particularly active in spreading antisemitism; they brought the Protocols to Central and Western Europe and continued their struggle against the Jews from their new homes in Paris, Berlin, and other centers of the emigration.
Originally there had been few if any sympathies for Bolshevism in the Jewish street; the percentage of Jews among the political émigrés from Russia after 1917 far exceeded their numbers in the general population. But for those who remained, Soviet power, however unfriendly to specific Jewish concerns, constituted the best hope in a hostile world—the Bolsheviks reimposed order and the pogroms came to an end.
To what extent did the presence of many Jews among the Communist leadership contribute to antisemitism? It certainly played an important role in antisemitic propaganda, and it is certainly true that during the 1920s Jews were heavily overrepresented in the ranks of party and state officials. With the rise of Stalin, Jews were removed from key positions and very often “liquidated.” The fact that other minorities were also disproportionately highly represented did not greatly matter—there was no tradition of anti-Latvianism in Russia, nor were Latvians found in the very top positions. Nor did it matter that Jews were equally strongly represented among other anti-Communist parties of the left such as the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, or that the anti-Stalinist opposition was to a considerable extent of Jewish extraction. The Jews were the destroyers of Holy Russia.
Young Jews were attracted by the most radical groups in Russia because of traditional Russian oppression of Jews. The liberals attracted the Jewish middle class, but the Jewish middle class was weak since most Jews in the czarist empire had been poor. And for young people from such a background, the revolutionary party that promised total national and social liberation and equal chances for everyone was bound to be very attractive. This, in briefest outline, was the background of the “Judeo Bolshevism” that played such a crucial role in antisemitic propaganda in the 1920s and later, despite the fact that the Jews had become a prominent scapegoat of the Communist regime.