THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION OF ANTISEMITISM has come, not surprisingly, from the antisemites: antisemitism is the inevitable reaction of non-Jews to the misdeeds of the Jews. The Jews did reject the message of Jesus Christ and Muhammad. They kept apart from other people, lived by their own law, and did not mingle with others. They believed themselves superior, having been selected to have a special covenant with God.
It is difficult to think of minorities anywhere in the world that have been popular throughout history, but on top of the frequent antagonism against minorities, the “usual xenophobia,” Jews have been on the receiving end of special animosity and hatred. And it is also true that antisemitism did not disappear when Jews tried to escape the stigma of being Jews by conversion, whether it was in sixteenth-century Spain or in the age of assimilation in Germany and France.
That Jews stuck together even in the pre-Christian period seems evident and that they were a stiff-necked people even the Bible says. With the rise of Christianity, the accusations of deicide followed and, in the Middle Ages, the charge that Jews in their secret books were ridiculing Jesus as well as Mary. Generally speaking, it was argued that the Jews believed that the Talmud and the other commentaries to the Old Testament were more important and binding than the Bible. The Talmud was said to be full of blasphemous (from a Christian point of view) and immoral commandments; the non-Jew could be defrauded, robbed, even killed with impunity; his life was worth no more than that of an animal.
For several centuries, Jewish religious spokesmen have tried without much success to explain that most of the allegations were either exaggerated or totally false. But not all accusations were groundless. Being a compilation of the comments of generations of commentators, much of the time contradicting each other, the Talmud did indeed contain nonsensical and even immoral sayings, but no more so than the writings of other religions of that period. It was true, for instance, that the Talmud contained anti-Christian statements; this proved very embarrassing, so for a time the rabbis claimed that the Jesus mentioned in the Talmud referred to someone else and that the “gentiles” who appeared were really pagans. This caused new problems because according to the Talmud—which had been in part composed when most Jews did not yet live in the diaspora—it was forbidden for Jews to do business with gentiles, which was hardly a practical proposition in subsequent centuries. Eventually, the anti-Christian references were censored and deleted.
With all the Talmud’s strange and contradictory commandments and taboos, however, decisive in the final analysis was the principle of dina di malkuta dina—the law of the land (in which the Jews lived) was supreme and overruled all other interpretations and comments. Another circumstance seldom remembered was that as time passed, fewer and fewer Jews were familiar with the Talmud, and by the nineteenth century, it had become a virtually forgotten book (or rather a series of books encompassing many thousands of pages), accessible only to a few experts if only because of the variety of obscure languages in which it was written. It is an irony of history that not only the antisemites but also the great majority of the Jews who have written about antisemitism have had only the faintest knowledge of the Talmud. Nevertheless, the Talmud remained up to the Nazi era the cudgel with which the enemies of the Jews could beat their victims
In the course of time other accusations followed, the most prominent of which was the so-called blood libel—that the Jews had to kill Christians (preferably children) around Passover because they needed the blood of Christians for their ritual ceremonies. This and other accusations continued sporadically until the early twentieth century. That on various occasions the churches and even the pope had declared these charges unfounded was not of much help in changing attitudes.
The situation in Muslim countries was different inasmuch as neither the Talmud nor the blood libel figured in the persecution of the Jews. The Jews had not killed the prophet, they had only schemed against him, and because they had rejected his message, they were to be considered an inferior group. This charge of rejection was, of course, correct, and it theologically resulted in the inferior status of the Jews in the Islamic world.
Motivations for Jew-hatred other than theological ones appeared in the Middle Ages, and they became more frequent and more prominent as the influence of religion waned in the nineteenth century. One of the main accusations from early history concerned usury—money lending on the basis of excessive profit. Both Christianity and Islam banned usury, yet economic progress, and even normal economic activity, was impossible without the investment of capital—kings and poor peasants and everyone in between frequently needed money, and it was in this connection that the Jews came to fulfill an important function in society. Though the Old Testament also forbids usury, this ban was interpreted as a ban only on lending money to other Jews. Hence, money lending emerged as a predominantly Jewish occupation during several centuries in various European countries.
Money lending is a necessary and even vital institution but not a popular one in society; it made those doing it vulnerable to charges of being “bloodsuckers” and “parasites.” When Shakespeare created the figure of Shylock Jews had been expelled from England for just over three hundred years, but the figure of the usurer out to get his pound of flesh was engraved in public consciousness. The issue at stake was not really whether money lending was necessary but whether the Jews had entered it out of greed (as antisemites claimed) or because most other professions were barred to them. Seen in historical perspective, it would appear that in most of Christian Europe their choice of professions was indeed extremely restricted; they could engage in trade (but not all forms of trade) and money lending. In countries where other professions were open to them, such as Muslim Spain and the Ottoman empire, one finds more Jewish blacksmiths than Jewish money lenders. The high tide of Jewish usury was before the fifteenth century; as cities grew in power and affluence, the Jews were squeezed out from money lending with the development of banking. Following centuries of church condemnation of Jewish usury, the Jews were expelled from many countries and regions, their communities were impoverished, and very few individuals had the necessary capital to engage in money lending. Money lending continued, of course, and the Lombards took 250 percent interest (this, however, did not cause a wave of anti-Lombardism).
Few Jews were found in occupations of primary production such as agriculture or mining. As long as they were permitted to own land, there were Jewish landowners in countries such as Spain and France; the most famous commentator of the Bible, Rashi, owned vineyards in France. Elsewhere, Jews could in principle own land but they could not employ non-Jews as laborers. In many countries, they could not work as artisans except for the small Jewish market because the urban guilds feared their competition.
It is also true that agriculture, being primitive, afforded only a minimal existence, the lowest of all living standards, and throughout the Middle Ages, people fled from the countryside in many countries (Landflucht). In the circumstances, farming had little if any attraction. However, the Jewish exodus from the countryside began even earlier, and economic historians have given us various explanations for why this happened.
First, literacy was a religious commandment for Jews, and it was, of course, far easier to comply with this obligation in an urban surrounding than in the isolation of the countryside. There is much reason to believe that many Jews did stay in agriculture but eventually became Christians or Muslims; this could explain the fact that the number of Jews remained static throughout the Middle Ages while the general population doubled or trebled. Finally, there was the temptation of a higher living standard in the cities, even though the prospects of finding congenial and rewarding work there were limited. Jews could and did own land in the Muslim world throughout the Middle Ages and also, in certain circumstances, in Poland. But more often, Jews worked as agents of the big landowners, usually from the nobility, as middlemen, or in agricultural trade.
What about the accusations of Jewish money lenders taking excessive rates of interest, the main charge on the part of the churches? Leading economists from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes have favored imposing a ceiling on interest rates, and there are national laws to this effect to this day. The rates of interest taken in the Middle Ages were very high, certainly excessive by modern standards. But the risks at the time were enormous and there was little security in a feudal society. When Jewish usurers loaned money to kings or noblemen, there was always the danger that they would never see their money again, be arrested or expelled, or have their money confiscated. They had no power, and the laws were only sporadically observed. There was no protection in this profession and no one was more exposed and vulnerable than the Jews.
In early modern history Jews were no longer prominent in money lending, and in the nineteenth century, with their gradual emancipation, attacks against the Jews changed in character. As Jews left the ghettos and streamed into professions that had been barred to them earlier, and as their material position improved, with some becoming rich and influential, the main charge against them was the allegation that Jews aspired to world domination. Jews, it was claimed, had pushed themselves into the front ranks of the political establishment, especially the left-wing and liberal parties. There were exceptions—the one prominent British politician of Jewish descent, Benjamin Disraeli, was hardly a man of the left, nor was the chief ideologue of the nineteenth-century German Conservatives, Friedrich Stahl. But by and large the charges were correct; there were not many Jews among the parties of the right or in the confessional-religious parties because these groups did not want them as members.
Did Jews in politics pursue any specific Jewish agenda? The answer is obvious. The Jewish communities were small in number; they could not constitute a power basis for any aspiring politician. Jews in European politics did not appear as representatives of any specific Jewish interests. On the contrary, Jewish politicians often tried to distance themselves as much as possible from their coreligionists; Rosa Luxemburg’s letter to a Jewish friend—in which she said, essentially, do not come to me with your specific Jewish complaints—was an extreme case but not altogether untypical. It was genuine, not opportunistic. She must have felt self-conscious with her Polish Jewish background, but even more decisive was the fact that she seems to have felt closer to the wretched, persecuted Indians in Putamayo, Colombia, according to her own writings, than to the East European Jews who perished in the pogroms.
Many Jewish politicians were in the vanguard of progress, human freedom, and internationalism. This invited attacks on the part of those who did not share their enthusiasm, who thought that these revolutionary Jews had no respect for the traditional values of a nation, were not good patriots, and were, in general, a ferment of decomposition. Their bona fides were questioned: they did not really care about the exploited and oppressed masses they claimed to represent but were really out to gain power for themselves and their cliques, many of them also of Jewish provenance. The fact that these Jews had not only distanced themselves from their community but often turned against it was ignored—perhaps, the accusers speculated, it was a mere stratagem to mislead the non-Jews.
It was argued that Jews had amassed great riches—and thus enormous power—not through honest labor but by speculation and the exploitation of the toiling non-Jews. Jews were successful entrepreneurs and able to adapt more quickly to the changing economic and financial climate precisely because their status had been marginal in the days of the ghetto and because they had not been permitted to grow deep roots. This was coupled with the accusation that the Jews were corrupting society, that mammon was their idol, as the young Marx put it.
The enormously wealthy Rothschilds were often in the European public eyes, because there were five Rothschild sons who presided over financial establishments in Frankfurt, London, Vienna, Paris, and Naples in the early nineteenth century. In contrast, the great majority of European Jews were small traders and peddlers, although they worked very hard and their sons often became professionals, lawyers, and physicians. More than any other stratum of society, Jews were upwardly mobile. About half of the doctors in Vienna and more than half in Warsaw in the early twentieth century were of Jewish origins. The social and economic rise of the Jews was bound to generate amazement and envy; the Jews, as one antisemitic French author wrote, had become the kings of our time. Consequently, it was claimed that European antisemitism was directly connected with their rise; a correct conclusion albeit a trite one: had the Jews remained poor like the Dalets (Untouchables) in India, they would hardly have inspired fear and envy.
Jews became prominent in the cultural life of their native countries. They were among the leading publishers of books and newspapers, the dominant art dealers and musical impresarios. They were among the literary and musical critics; they set the tone, they could make and unmake the careers of writers and artists. This, too, was bound to provoke opposition and resistance—who had invited them, who had given them that much power? Was it not a fact that Jews lacked true creativity? Was it not true that they failed to understand the spirit and deeper emotions of the culture of their country? According to their critics, the Jews were a negative, destructive force and true genius escaped them. They were sarcastic, but true humor remained alien to them. And there were warning voices even from among the Jews that they had arrogated to themselves the role of managers of the culture of other nations.
Such general accusations quite apart, there were constant complaints about negative features of the “Jewish character” that, the critics of the Jews claimed, made true integration difficult or impossible, hard as the Jews might have tried. Jews were said to be greedy, arrogant, and aggressive; they had to push themselves always to the top of the line; dignity, modesty, and altruism were qualities alien to them. They were by nature dishonest and disloyal. They were cold rationalists, incapable of deeper feeling; true spiritual life, the realm of the soul, was outside their ken. They took care of each other but remained always critical or hostile to non-Jews. They were overly ambitious and competitive, quite incapable of team spirit or team effort, always devious, never straightforward.
There was a great deal of fear and suspicion of the Jews because of their alleged unbridled sexuality. It was said that they were fatally attracted to Aryan women and were out to violate and defile them. They were allegedly behind the white slave trade, especially in Eastern Europe (at one time after World War One, 17 percent of Warsaw’s prostitutes were said to be Jewish—a regrettable figure, but not unusual given that the percentage of Jews among the general population was almost twice as high). Jews were accused of being behind much of organized crime, perhaps in view of their international ties and connections.
Lastly, critics cited the physical appearance of the Jews as inferior to other races. Swarthy, with hooked noses, blubbery lips, and round shoulders, they were fat and flatfooted, could not properly walk or stand straight; it was claimed that their body language was excessive and ostentatious. Often dirty and smelly (of onion and garlic), loud in their behavior, they were said to be physical cowards, generally wishing to escape a fair fight. Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister killed by antisemites in 1922, once wrote: “All of us wish we would look like Germans.”
This then was the picture (or the caricature) of the Jew depicted in many novels and cartoons in many countries. Repulsive, he clearly belonged to another, inferior race. This physical image or stereotype of the Jew was for obvious reasons far more often used by antisemites in northern countries, where an Aryan race was believed to prevail and physical differences easier to recognize. Farther south in Europe, where one more frequently encountered the “Mediterranean type” (and the consumption of onion and garlic), there was less emphasis on the exterior characteristics of the Jews, and more stress was placed by antisemites on the Jews’ supposed devious mentality and hidden negative characteristics.
Antisemites prided themselves on being able to recognize a Jew even at a great distance; however, in practice this was often not easy. Some leading antisemites looked like Jews and vice versa. In such cases, the deceptive character of the Jew could be blamed. Even the Nazis were willing to concede that there had been a handful of decent Jews, and some of the most violent attacks against the Jews had been made by fellow Jews: Otto Weininger, for instance, author of a classic antisemitic book, committed suicide at age twenty-two (in the very room in which Beethoven had died)—no doubt, according to Nazi thinking, because of despair at having been born a Jew and therefore unable ever to overcome this ineradicable stigma.
But even if there were a few decent Jews, it was clear that there should be no mixing with this race. Antisemites were firm believers in the purity of race; if the great countries and civilizations in history had declined and disappeared, this had happened because the healthy, positive racial kernel had shrunk owing to inferior racial influences. Hence, the inference was made that the mixture of races was the greatest misfortune that could affect a people.
When the state of Israel was established, new accusations emerged against the Jews living in the diaspora. Jews were made responsible for the policies of the Israeli government. Generally speaking, a high percentage of Europeans believed that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their home country (according to a survey in 2002, 72 percent in Spain, 58 percent in Italy, 55 percent in Germany and Austria, 50 percent in Belgium. In no European country save the United Kingdom was the percentage less than 40 percent). Were charges of this kind unjustified? Parallel investigations showed that the majority of Jews outside Israel felt a special relationship toward that country. There was only one step from establishing this undoubted fact to allegations of greater loyalty and to “the Jew cannot be trusted.”
AMONG THE JEWISH PEOPLE, the idea of defense against antisemitism originated centuries ago. Medieval rabbis and communal leaders had tried to persuade kings, nobles, and Christian leaders that the accusations against them were unjustified, that antisemitic texts rested on forgeries. If some Jews had become miserable creatures, this was more often than not because they had to live in inhuman conditions, they argued; given a fair chance, they would prove themselves as decent, as productive, and as honest as other citizens. Sometimes these attempts of persuasion were successful, but more often they were not.
The condition of the Jews eased in the late eighteenth century with the spread of the Enlightenment, which led to the emancipation of the Jews. Invoking the ideals of the Enlightenment, Jews could not only demand equal rights but also protest against persecution and defamation. Attacks against a minority were not in line with the spirit of progress and were often in violation of the law of the land. In 1840 the Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded in Paris, in 1871 the Anglo Jewish Association in London, in 1873 the Israelitische Allianz in Vienna, in 1893 the Centralverein in Berlin. In the United States the American Jewish Committee was established in 1906 and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (the ADL) in 1913. All these organizations, but particularly the Centralverein and the ADL, were meant to defend Jews against antisemitic attacks. The Abwehrverein (Association for the Defense Against Antisemitism) had been created in Germany in 1890, to which leading non-Jewish intellectuals belonged. However, the activities of the Abwehrverein were limited to occasional appeals whereas the day-to-day work was done by the Centralverein, a purely Jewish organization.
How could such a defense be organized? The Centralverein was quite emphatic: it stressed that “we are not German Jews but Germans of Jewish faith.” To be a Jew did not mean to belong to another people or nation or race but simply to be a member of another religion. In other words, the Jews were first and foremost loyal and patriotic citizens of the country in which they lived, and any attempt to undermine or doubt their status was tantamount to defamation.
In what ways could Jews be defended against antisemitic attack? The Centralverein published a periodical called Abwehr (defense) Blaetter in which it tried to draw attention to particularly glaring cases of defamation and discrimination. Some Jews realized early on that a dialogue with the antisemites was unlikely to be productive; if antisemitism was based on prejudice, it could not be eradicated by facts and rational arguments. Furthermore, some of the facts adduced by the antisemites could not be refuted—certain Jews had indeed become very rich, and Jews were represented in some professions in numbers well beyond their part of the population by the late nineteenth century. If Jews emphasized their patriotism, this was denounced as tactless obtrusion. Why could Jews not understand that their company was not wanted? Another problem for the defenders was the steady immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe—one of the standard objections of the antisemites was their fear of being flooded by undesirable elements from the East—even if these migrants in their majority had no wish to remain in Europe and wished instead to continue on their way to America and South Africa.
The aim of mounting a defense was to reach the large number of the uncommitted non-Jews, those who had no strong feelings about antisemitism. The Jewish defenders would stress the positive achievements of the Jews, from which Germany had benefited in its economy, culture, and reputation in the world. If the number of Jewish lawyers was out of proportion, so was the number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners. Jews had served in the armed forces of their country in the war of 1870–71 as well as in the First World War. The first (and only) member of the German parliament who had been killed during the very first days of the war, Ludwig Frank, had been a Jewish volunteer, age 40. Alfred and Gustav Flatow, German Jews, had won gold medals at the first Olympic Games in 1896, as had a number of American Jews. (Both Flatows perished in the Holocaust.)
Whether all this had much impact is more than doubtful. For every Jewish Nobel Prize winner the antisemites would refer to a Jewish litterateur who had ridiculed hallowed German traditions and values, or a Jewish businessman who had engaged in speculation and failed or had been involved in corruption and had been apprehended. There were many such failures and corrupt practices and the great majority of these concerned non-Jews. But the Jewish culprits were singled out and there was nothing the defenders could do about it. Much depended on circumstances and the political situation. The fact that the Flatow cousins had won medals in the Olympic Games hardly registered in Germany, but the fact that two Jewish pugilists, Daniel Mendoza and Samuel (“Dutch Sam”) Elias, were the leading boxers of their time undoubtedly had a certain influence on the image of the Jews among the broad English public in the early nineteenth century. There were few Jews in England then and the role of sports in British public life was greater than in Germany and Austria, the sense of fair play more pronounced. The fact that Jews played a leading role in American boxing in the 1920s and 1930s, with Benny Leonard and Barney Ross, Kid Berg and Maxie Rosenblum, probably influenced some attitudes in the United States. But America was a country of immigrants, and antisemitism could not have the same political impact as in Europe.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish defense organizations would admonish fellow Jewish citizens to make a greater contribution to their countries in order to disprove the antisemitic allegations. They would condemn those whose behavior was detrimental to the Jewish community at large, urge them not to attract unwelcome attention and not to provide grist for the antisemitic mills. In addition to the propagandistic work, the defense organizations would take legal action against the defamation of individuals and groups wherever possible.
Differences in circumstances should again be noted. While some of the more farsighted Jewish observers in Germany and Austria were quite pessimistic about the chances of success of this kind of “defense” against antisemitism, there was more optimism in Britain and France. The activities of the Central European Jewish defense organizations may seem futile in the light of subsequent events, but the historical context ought to be remembered; before the First World War the belief in progress was still strong and there was the widespread assumption that antisemitism, a remnant of medieval obscurantism, was bound to disappear, even though there were bound to be relapses from time to time.
Only when antisemitic movements had greatly expanded and the majority of society had been infected did the defensive struggle become quite hopeless. This was the situation in countries in which an “objective Jewish question,” as the Zionists put it, existed. Czarist Russia was one such country, as were Poland and Romania; and the situation also became critical in Germany and Hungary in the late 1920s. In brief, the smaller and less visible the Jewish community was in a country, the better were the prospects for defense against antisemitism. America was different because it was a country of immigrants, even though the functioning of the melting pot remained sometimes problematic.
Was there an “objective Jewish question” in Germany and Austria? There is no easy answer to this question: in contrast to Poland, the answer would certainly be no, since German Jewry was less than one percent of the total population. But there was a strong tradition of antisemitism in these German-speaking countries, and the rise of the Jews certainly contributed to the growth and violence of antisemitism. We also know from many individual recollections that many of the Jews growing up in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were barely aware of antisemitism on the personal level; for them it was not a major threat. Conditions varied from place to place and sometimes according to the sensitivity of the individual. Paul Ree, a friend of Nietzsche, fainted when Lou Andreas Salome, a lady accompanying them, mentioned Jews in his presence. Not everyone was that sensitive.
If antisemitism in the nineteenth century generated among European Jews an eagerness to defend themselves, there was also the wish to escape the stigma and the burden once and for all. Many thousands left the Jewish community; those who abandoned Judaism came especially from among the wealthier and the more assimilated circles, and mostly lived in the big cities rather than in the smaller communities. German Jewry lost most of its establishment in the nineteenth century through mixed marriages and conversion. Many of those who did not convert did consider taking this step at one stage or another in their lives, including several leading figures in the field of Jewish studies, such as Leopold Zunz and in the following century Franz Rosenzweig; leading thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud; and even the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who played with the idea of advocating mass baptism a few years before he began fighting for the creation of a Jewish state.
Once the walls of the ghettos had been breached and the hold of Jewish religion had waned, what was there to keep the community together other than piety vis-à-vis parents and ancestors? There was, of course, also the feeling that it was somehow indecent, perhaps even cowardly, to leave a community under attack, especially if one did not particularly care about Christianity; few Jews converted out of deep religious conviction.
To be a Jew was for many a burden, a source of frequent embarrassment, except for the firm religious believers. Most Jews believed that they had certain things in common with fellow Jews, but how deep was the affinity, how to define it? Were they a thousand-year-old family of affliction, in the words of Heinrich Heine? They were certainly no longer a nation, having lived for so long in the diaspora, and the differences between various branches of Jewry were so great that most of them no longer believed that they were a people anymore.
Although the social life of assimilated Jews was predominantly with other assimilated Jews, there was a vague feeling of solidarity when Jews in other countries were attacked. This made it difficult, perhaps impossible, to define the peculiar form of cohesion that still existed among them—perhaps a shared mentality, or the fact that the outside world usually regarded them as Jews irrespective of how they defined themselves. But there was really little specifically Jewish about assimilated Jews, and the glue that bound them to other Jews was not very strong. While the attraction of religion in general had declined in most parts of the world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jewish religion, despite efforts to modernize and reform it, was probably even less attractive than other religions for those who were not deep traditional believers. In brief, as far as many assimilated Jews were concerned, the burden of being Jewish outweighed the positive elements. Why hang on to traditions that had become meaningless?
The problems of assimilation and its discontents are of interest in the present context where they impinge on Jewish self-hatred and Jewish manifestations of antisemitism. Much has been made of this fascinating phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred, but it ought to be remembered that it was not frequent in Germany and Austria except among some intellectual and literary circles, and outside these countries it was even rarer. Those who drifted away from Judaism in Europe and North America did so not because of acute hatred but because being categorized as a Jew had become meaningless, or worse, an embarrassment. And even if they were antagonistic toward Judaism and their fellow Jews, it was hardly wise to engage in public attacks against Jews because this would only attract attention to their own Jewish extraction. Freud called them “badly baptized” (schlecht getauft). In its extreme manifestations, when the self-loathing turned to militant antisemitism among individuals such as Arthur Trebitsch, an early Jewish Nazi, or Otto Weininger or Maurice Sachs in France, it was a problem more for individual psychopathology than for historical or cultural analysis and generalization.
Jewish self-hatred is a problem that has been insufficiently investigated; some literary critics and historians have attributed to Jews a specific propensity toward self-hatred, but this is far from certain. Few people live at total peace with themselves and the saying Le moi est haissable was coined not by a Jew but by Blaise Pascal. True, Jews uprooted from their heritage and yet not accepted by their surroundings were likely to be affected more than others; and internationalist feelings were for sound reasons more widely found among Jews than Jewish patriotism. But in principle, the phenomenon was not a specific Jewish one.
ALTHOUGH SOME HIGHLY ASSIMILATED JEWS in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accepted part of the antisemitic critique of Judaism as lacking in spirituality, the same critique could be said about early Zionism. Political Zionism was rooted less in the deep spiritual longing of Jews in Eastern Europe to return to their ancient homeland than in the recognition of the anomaly of Jewish existence. This anomaly was cultural and psychological as well as socioeconomic, and its historical roots were obvious. Jews had lived in segregation for many centuries and it would have been miraculous if persecution and isolation had not left traumatic scars.
The desire to survive in adverse circumstances had shaped the behavior of European Jews and had often brought out negative features. It had a crippling effect not so much on the intellect as on the character and the physical development of this persecuted minority. In order to survive, all kinds of compromises, some morally questionable, had to be made. Such a situation was not a good school for virtue, let alone for heroism as Nietzsche, the intellectual idol of that period, would have wanted it. It was conducive to deep suspicion toward the outside world, not toward good citizenship. In Eastern Europe, in view of their numbers many Jews had become luftmenschen, people living off of air, a term that had been coined to characterize their precarious social situation on the margins of society. They were not fulfilling any useful, let alone necessary, role in society, had no obvious, visible source of income.
Zionism arose out of deep dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and the fear that the anomaly of Jewish existence was not just bound to generate antisemitism but that it could lead to the physical destruction of Jewish communities. The Zionist answer was simple: there was no future for many, perhaps most Jews in Eastern Europe. The social structure of the Jewish communities in these countries could not be changed by reforms carried out locally; the Jews would not willingly become peasants in Poland or Hungary or Russia—quite apart from the fact that the native peasants would hardly have welcomed this. The only realistic way to solve this enormous problem was mass emigration to Palestine.
The Jewish question could only be solved through return to their ancient homeland, where they would establish a new society with a normal and healthy social structure. There would be a Jewish culture, part of Europe (with the official language perhaps German) but certainly different in character from the culture of the descendants of Teuton and Arminius the Cheruscan. Particular emphasis was put by some early Zionists on the return to the land, for the divorce of the Jews from the land and from nature had been, as they saw it, in many ways the root of the evil in the diaspora. Only with the emergence of a Jewish peasantry would the organic tie be reestablished and would a healthy society develop. Zionist leaders such as Max Nordau emphasized the importance of improving the Jewish physique and physical improvement; hence, the stress on physical fitness—Muskeljudentum.
ZIONISM EMERGED as a reaction against the cultural and spiritual tradition of the ghetto and the shtetl, and the one-sided education of the heder (the religious school). It aimed at the restoration of self-respect among the Jews. The absence of a Jewish defense at the time of the pogroms in the 1880s and again at the time of the Kishinev pogrom (1903) had been a deep shock. This dissociation from the East European shtetl extended to the rejection of the (bastard) language (Yiddish) spoken there and the revival of Hebrew.
At the same time, Zionism turned against Jewish assimilationists, those unwilling to acknowledge that they belonged to a nation apart, unwilling to identify as Jews even though they were such in the eyes of others. These opponents of Zionism from among the assimilationists were opposed to a national revival because they felt that they had not that much in common with their coreligionists. They were fearful that this would endanger their status and expose them to charges of disloyalty to their native country.
Young Jews could try to show that they were as good as others in fields traditionally considered un-Jewish, for instance, by establishing their own dueling associations at universities. Still, in the final analysis, it was the majority in the society in which they lived that decided who belonged and who did not. Jews might do their best for the country in which they had been born and grown up, but even if they had influential positions in the academic and cultural life, they would still remain outsiders in the society if the majority did not want them.
In retrospect, the analysis of antisemitism by Zionism was closer to the mark than that by other Jewish circles from the left or the right. Zionists were willing to concede that there were serious anomalies in the Jewish existence in many European countries. They did not argue that assimilation could never work, but they thought it would not solve the Jewish question in time in the countries with the most numerous Jewish communities, where the problem was most acute. Within the Zionist movement were voices claiming that Zionism had gone perhaps too far in its “negation of the diaspora,” and that sometimes it had come dangerously close to accepting the arguments of the antisemites. But this was not the decisive weakness of the Zionist movement. Its real weakness was the fact that it could offer an alternative and escape to only relatively few. Palestine was not in Jewish hands and free emigration was impossible. The age of nationalism had dawned. Zionism had appeared too late on the political scene to make a decisive contribution to the solution of the Jewish question—but again, for historical reasons, it could not have appeared much earlier. This was the historical tragedy of the Zionist idea.
Since Zionism came so late, the establishment of a Jewish state was bound to provoke resistance. The Arabs were many and the Jews were few; Zionist aspirations collided with the claims of others and this was bound to lead to a renewal of hostility. According to Herzl, the aim of a Jewish state was the restoration of dignity to the Jews and the chance for a life in peace. But there was to be no peace.