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Home , Economic antisemitism, Genocide, History of antisemitism

PATHS TO Also by Lionel B. Steiman

FRANZ WERFEL: The Faith of an , from to Beverly Hills Paths to Genocide

Antisemitism in Western

Lionel B. Steiman Professor ofHistory The University of Manitoba Winnipeg, © Lionel B. Steiman 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 978-0-333-71667-0

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or * transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the , United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. Outside North America ISBN 978-1-349-40362-2 ISBN 978-0-230-37133-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230371330 Inside North America ISBN 978-0-312-21046-5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the . Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-25615 For Bonnie

In Memory of Maxwell Steiman

Contents

Preface viii Introduction xi

1. and : The Saviour and the

2. Segregation and Expulsion: The and the Jews 27

3. The Age of the Refonnation: Luther and the Jews 52

4. The Great Divide: West and East in the Seventeenth Century 71

5. The Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Revolution .. Emancipation 93

6. The Nineteenth Century: , Nationalism, 117

7. Imperial Gennany and Habsburg Austria: Ideology, Politics, Culture 143

8. Russia and : , , the New World 179

9. Nazi Gennany: The 212

Epilogue 238 Notes 245 Select Bibliography 267 Index 277 Preface

There is a vast literature on antisemitism and its history. The phenomenon itself attracted observers long before its awful culmination, but prompted a much deeper and more sophisticated interest in the subject. Recently that interest has turned from the historic Western heartland of antisemitism to the former , to the resurgence of antisemitism in Eastern after the fall of , to Arab antisemitism in the after the establishment of the state of Israel, to black antisemitism in the United States since the of the 1960s, and to the vogue of antisemitism in contemporary Japan and other places where one might not have expected to find it. The focus of the present work remains on Western antisemitism, tracing it from its ancient origins to the of Jewry in the twentieth century. Existing academic literature has documented this development of antisemitism and has analysed its complex role in Western society and culture. Intensive research . by historians, sociologists, psychologists, theologians and philosophers has been sustained by the simple question, how could the Holocaust have occurred? There are wide-ranging collections of articles (such as The Persisting Question (l987) edited by Helen Fein, and Antisemitism Through the Ages (1988) edited by Shmuel Almog), and there are numerous general . Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), by Bernard Lewis; and Antisemitism. The Longest Hatred (1991), by Robert S. Wistrich, concentrate on Europe but both also emphasize the penetration of European antisemitism into the body of Islam and its significance for contemporary Middle East politics. The historian of antisemitism to whom all others are most indebted is . His four-volume history and numerous specialized studies are indispensable. Poliakov began his own work more as historical sociology, focusing on the interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish communities, but the famous History of Anti-Semitism became an extended account of anti-Jewish ideas and actions, interspersed with psychological and political interpretations. Poliakov's underlying convictions still dominate much of the writing on antisemitism. He found little explanatory value in the ever popular 'scapegoat' theory, and for similar reasons dismissed the idea of 'economic' antisemitism. -hatred in his view was an almost indestructible psychological reality, a compound of enduring primordial fears, for whose persistence Christian theology was primarily responsible. This indictment of Christian teaching was begun in the 1930s by James Parkes, an Anglican priest and Church historian whose pioneering study of The Conflict of Church and (1934) and numerous subsequent works delineated the role of the Church in the of Jewry. More accusatory, polemical a.::counts began to appear after the , most notably Europe and the Jews (1950), by Malcolm Hay, a Catholic Scot shocked by revelations of German barbarism. Hay

viii Preface ix

was convinced that the murder of Jewry was not just a Gennan but was the inevitable culmination of centuries of antisemidc persecution rooted in Christian doctrine, a charge he documented in his passionate account of over a thousand years of anti-lew ish teachings by leading churchmen. Rosemary Ruether's Faith and Fralricitk (I 974J defined the tenns of a continuing scholarly debate on tbe Christian origins or antisemitism. John Gager's The Origins ofAnti-Semitism (1983) k'ICflled those origins squarely in the . while Jeremy Cohen •. in The Friars and the Jews (1982). indicted the medieval friars for giving a practical twist to the more abstract snti· of the theologians. There also appeared important genera' studies of Christianity and antisemitism. The Anguish of c/u: Jews (1965; 1985) is a survey of twenty-three centuries of antisemllism by an American Catholic priest, Edward H. Flannery; and 's First Love (1970), presents a more passionate and more darnning account. of Christian persecution, by a liberal Catholic historian and prominent figure in Austrian cultural life, Friedrich Heer. More recently, Benzien Netanyahu (The Origins of the in Fifteenth Ceruury (1995)) has insisted tbat !he fOOts of modem antisemitism lay not in Christian religious belief but in popular pre• Christian racial attitudes which acquired a religious expression, and that the antisemitism of Chrislianity grew not from its theology but from efforts by the early Church to accommodate the racist masses it sought to convert. Popularcultl.lfe and intellectual life in genera! cannot be separated from the role of Christian teaching and practice in the " The classic ac{:ount of medieval culture from this perspective is Joshua Trachtenberg's The Devil and the Jews (1943), which documented the widespread presumed association of Jews with various forms of devilry including ritual murder. This book: appeared before historians had exposed the theological underpinnings of Christian antisemitism, but when they had. it became possible to analyse Ihe role ofthrology in relation to the major developments in other areas of cultural and intellectual life. with a view to establishing a more holistic conception altne nature of antisemitism. Gavin 1. Langmuir, a leading historian of medieval antisemitism, did so in IWO important works published in 1990: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. and History, , and Antisemitism, The challenge for historians of post&medievai antisemitism was to account for the persistence of a hatred rooted in religion when religion itself seemed to be in decline. In From to Destruction (1980), Jacob Katz showed how traditiona1 were brought up to date and clothed in dress more suited 10 a secular age .. Katz also focused on the role of nationalism. showing how religion was Iransfonned into a component of national identity , and how both contributed to the rise of political antisemitism, which Peter Pulzer had analysed against its political and economic background ofliberaJism and industrial expansion (The Rise of Political A,uj·Semitism (1964»). Pulzer saw political antisemitism as a reaction against these and other aspects of modernity with which Jews were identified. x Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History

Because racist antisemitism was central to the ideology of national socialism, the literature on antisemitism has focused on the historical relationship between antisemitism, nationalism and racial theory. George L. Mosse has influenced this discussion more than anyone else, notably through The Crisis ofGerman Ideology (1964) and Toward the Final Solution (1978). In the opening chapters of Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), Daniel J. Goldhagen argued that an 'eliminationist' antisemitism had long pervaded German culture and society, but his book is more about the perpetrators of the Holocaust than the history of antisemitism. John Weiss provided much more of that history in Ideology of Death (1996), but he too concentrated exclusively on . Spectacular events such as the in France and ritual murder trials in Eastern Europe had left the impression of a rising tide of antisemitism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In The Jew Accused (1991), Albert S. Lindemann rejected this view and challenged other assumptions about the nature of antisemitism and its relationship to modern politics and society. While Lindemann minimized antisemitism as an autonomous force in history, Paul Lawrence Rose (Revolutionary Antisemitism (1990» portrayed it as an inherent element of modern German culture. Understandably, historians have concentrated on the history of . They have tended to ignore or to minimize antisemitism in the history of North America or have interpreted it as a symptom of social growing pains, a side• effect of rapid economic expansion or sudden depression. Leonard Dinnerstein (Antisemitism in America (1994)) and, to an even greater degree, Frederic Cople Jaher (A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness (1994)) have moved beyond this view. Both emphasize the role of antisemitic ideology in American history, and Jaher in particular singled out the continuing power of Christian bigotry. Few Canadian historians recognize such a force in their own country, and their work, as in the collection edited by Alan Davies, (1992), continues to reflect the view of antisemitism as a temporary manifestation without deep roots. The present work views antisemitism, in North America as well as Europe, as part of the Western cultural tradition, and portrays its development from ancient times to the twentieth century. It is a work of synthesis; it relies on major scholarly works in English, as indicated in the notes, but attempts no comprehensive summary of this literature. Its underlying assumptions are that antisemitism was a necessary condition and a significant cause of the Holocaust, but that its roots lie in the past, and that its historical development anywhere can be understood only in that particular context. * I wish to thank the University of Manitoba, and particularly its Department of History, for supporting my work. My special thanks go to Henry Heller, John Kendle, Tom Vadney, Sandra Woolfrey, Barry Kaye, Barney Sneiderman, Claudine Majzels and, most of all, Mark Gabbert for their invaluable assistance, suggestions, encouragement, and generous criticism. Introduction

The Texan scratched his head, but conceded defeat. 'Even a Jew magician couldn't tell you how to to Memo's from here,' he drawled, and offered to take the bewildered travellers to their elusive destination himself. I Within his somewhat quaint ethnic reference there resonated, however innocently, the ancient belief that Jews practised the arts of magic, the twin of an even older belief that, as SOns of Satan, they were given to such devilish practices as drinking the blood of Christians. Picturesque bits of slang may be all that remain of such beliefs today, but for centuries they determined Christian attitudes. Extraordinary power has been attributed to Jews ever since the New Testament called them 'the devil's brood'. The founders of the Christian Church added their own colourful curses, which were embellished and elaborated over the centuries by leading theologians, philosophers, and political figures. The word antisemitism (or anti-Semitism) is little more than a century old, but the ideas and attitudes to which it refers have belonged to Western history for two thousand years, and for the past thousand they have also been a cause of successive of Jews in Europe. There is an inherent consistency in Western attitudes toward Jews which justifies use of the term antisemitism for all stages in the varied history of Jew-hatred, despite the many differences between them.2 When some fifteen hundred years ago the crumbled, the Church remained the dominant force, exercising a determining influence not only on the religion of Europe but on its culture and political institutions as well. Medieval Christendom was united by one faith and one language oflearning; its universities and teaching orders were models of internationalism; the claims of its supreme pontiff were universal. As 'Christ-killers', Jews were eventually segregated and forced to wear identity badges. The Crusaders turned their swords On Jews before setting out for the Holy Land, thus initiating an enduring tradition of anti-Jewish . The Jew of Christian imagining was transformed into an abstract compound of fear and loathing, the quintessential other. Jews thought no better of Christians, but because they were a very small minority it was inevitable that they, not Christians, would bear the consequences of the total mutual hostility of these two mutually exclusive faiths.3 The Jewish people must also be understood in terms o,f their function as a socio• economic class in the historical process, as well as by their self-definition as a people with a distinct religious and cultural identity.4 Their function derived from the geographical environment of ancient Israel and the nature of the Jewish dispersion. The biblical homeland of the Jews had constituted a bridge between the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates rivers, between and Mesopotamia - the 'fertile crescent' or arable green belt in which Western civilization was born. This crescent served armies and agriculture, and it was a carrier of goods and ideas.

XI xii Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History

The inhabitants of ancient Israel came to engage in commerce: arable land was limited and the population outgrew it, so a steady stream went abroad as merchants. As they extended their sphere of activity throughout the ancient world, they maintained traditional Jewish language, customs, and religion, and their dispersed communities developed contacts with one another. The resulting network proved an invaluable practical advantage in the nascent field of international trade. Jewish communities accompanied the conquering Romans into what was to become Europe, and when the Roman Empire fell, the subsequent trajectory of Jewish settlement paralleled that of Europe's political and economic development. The successive expUlsions of Jews from Western European countries reflected the emergence of non-Jewish commercial interests who were able to use political leverage to remove Jewish competition. By the end of the all the major states of Western Europe had expelled their Jews. They moved eastward, first to the German lands and then to Slavic lands, which became home to the majority of Europe's Jews. Wherever they went, Jews were preceded by accounts of the and other grotesque abominations attributed to them and their faith. The discovery of America, the Protestant , and the other harbingers of modernity brought no good for the Jews. One of the few Catholic traditions that Protestants did not reject was Jew-hatred. , the leading Protestant Reformer, denounced Jews as 'vermin' and called upon his countrymen to burn their and chase them from the land. As in his protest against Rome, so in Luther's hatred of the Jews was an economic as well as a religious element. Long before the Church Fathers had provided a theological foundation for popular prejudice against economic practices, commerce was equated with cheating. For the ancients, nobility was demonstrated in personal prowess in battle, not in the counting house but on what European war memorials still can the field of honour. For centuries, the Jews had served ancient and medieval societies as a pre-capitalist merchant class, and did so without being persecuted for it. Violent persecution began with the Crusades, which coincided with the transition from feudal to capitalist forms of production and exchange. Crusader violence against Jews was concentrated in the growing urban centres of the . Subsequent expulsions of Jews from England, France, Spain, and the German lands of Central Europe were linked to the rise of local commercial interests which conflicted with those of the Jews. In the the Jews expelled from Spain found a refuge that would serve them for centuries, while Jews expelled from Central Europe found a similarly enduring refuge in -. In the sixteenth century this vast feudal kingdom was a source of raw materials for the more dynamic West, and Jews were able to provide commercial and administrative services that locals could not. They were resented and, from the mid-seventeenth century, periodically massacred. In the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers in the West applied critical reason to all traditional beliefs and institutions, especiany those associated with religion. Less and less were Jews considered enemies of Christendom; philosophers Introduction xiii declared them to be part of humanity and demanded they be granted equality with other citizens. First France declared the 'emancipation' of its Jews, and by the middle of the nineteenth century most of Europe had followed its lead. But the transformation of legal emancipation into social reality was opposed by a variety of forces. The cause of Jewry was hampered by its association with Napoleonic France, which had imposed on the it conquered. In any case even proponents of emancipation believed it had not 'worked'. It was supposed to cure Jews of their allegedly undesirable character, and indeed had been conceived for that purpose. Now enlightened minds no longer regarded Jews as Christ-killers or allies of Satan, but continued to attribute to them all manner of detestable social qualities, which they ascribed to their culture or, more ominously, to their race. Religious anti-Judaism thus became secular antisemitism. The philosophers who undermined the theological foundations of Jew-hatred replaced them with a more durable material. With the onset of industrialism and its threat to agrarian and village life, critics of modernity gave to traditional anti-Jewish prejudices a more up-to-date social content, and a heightened urgency to demands that the influence of Jews be curbed. By the later nineteenth century the dynamic of these interrelated forces had given birth to political antisemitism. The few political parties devoted solely to rolling back the gains of emancipation did not survive the century, but by that time antisemitism had come to permeate the intellectual and cultural life of Europe: its assumptions were shared across the political spectrum; it was fashionable in society, and it was articulated at all levels of culture. The '' was also an issue in nationalism and racism, the two most powerful but least disciplined ideologies of the era. Nationalism had become a secular religion; religion had absorbed elements of nationalism; and both were affected by the increasingly racist emphasis given to national identity. The interactions of these forces played out variously. The chancellor of Imperial Germany took none of them seriously but manipulated them all in steering the state he had forged. To preserve the unity of their realm, the Habsburg rulers perforce opposed the national aspirations of their sundry peoples, whose frustrations were channelled into a shared antipathy toward Jews, to be exploited by in the political arena that schooled a young Hitler. In France the mix of nationalism and antisemitism became explosive when a Jewish captain was accused of high treason, and the birthplace of Jewish emancipation threatened to become its ground. Liberalism everywhere was losing the ideals which had made it the ideology of Jewish emancipation; and the collapse of liberalism left the Jews without any political insurance. In Eastern Europe Jews had lost such insurance long before. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, when Poland was home to possibly four-fifths of the world's Jews, that once great monarchy was partitioned by Russia, , and Austria. When Poland thus disappeared from the map, most of its Jewish popUlation xiv Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History fell under the rule of Czarist Russia, which had expelled its own Jews many centuries before. Far from emancipating their new Jewish subjects, the Czars imposed various restrictions, which they tightened repeatedly in the course of the next century. Jews were confined to a , whose limitations impoverished them and furthered the decline of their communal institutions. As earlier in the West during the Middle Ages, so in Russia Jews were forced into marginal occupations of a kind that provoked the animosity of the locals. Czarist policy destroyed the foundations of the Jewish merchant class while denying it entry into the capitalist class that was bringing about industrialization. During the nineteenth century the poverty of the Jews deepened, as did their attraction to revolutionary politics - and this alienated them further still from Russian society. Conservatives tried to discredit the growing revolutionary movement by blaming it on the influence of the Jews, who were already hated because of the role they had earlier played as agents of the landed gentry. This intensified traditional animosities rooted in religion, and fortified hateful legends perpetuated by the Church. In 1881 the of the Czar touched off explosions of anti-Jewish violence not seen for centuries. Over five million Jews lived in Russia, half the Jews in the world. Now a new era of began. The greatest migration in also began. Driven by poverty, vulnerability, and hope, well over two million Jews made their way to America in the three decades before 1914. This exodus also channelled great numbers of Eastern Jews into the growing urban centres of Central Europe. They arrived at the very time mass political parties were forming in response to crises of rapid social and economic change. The political use of antisemitism was perfected in Vienna in the 1890s by a who became the most popular mayor in that city's history, while in Paris, amidst what threatened to be the worst crisis since the revolution, enraged mobs were shouting 'Death to the Jews!' That cry was heard by a Viennese journalist working in the French capital. He had already concluded that there was no future for his people in Europe and now threw himself full force into the movement for a Jewish state in the Middle East. Zionism was born. As the New World, the United States and Canada exempt themselves from the historical burdens weighing upon the old, preferring instead to nurture myths of new beginnings and novel paths. In relation to the Holocaust they still tend to regard themselves as liberators, and their land a haven for its survivors, and not as part of the historical continuum that made this tragedy real. Jews in North America eventually did create the most prosperous, most assimilated Jewish communities in history. But that process was not completed for several generations. Until it was, anti-Jewish ideas and attitudes were an accepted and respectable fact of life. Their expression was largely limited to cultural products and exclusionary practices in employment, housing, and recreation. Antisemitism never became a serious political force in the New World because unlimited space and opportunity served to absorb or diffuse forces that in Europe gained power sufficient for . Introduction xv

Hitler's obsessive hatred of Jews was extreme and was not wholly representative of attitudes commonly accepted in Western societies. Antisemites desired the exclusion of Jews, not the annihilation of Jewry. While Hitler's murderous fantasies were exceptional, he was able to acquire the political power necessary to realize them. However extreme his mental constructions, their constituent elements were inherent in the culture that nurtured him; they represented an accumulation of centuries and permeated the air he, and his contemporaries, breathed. Throughout Europe, the German Nazis found ready accomplices in murder because their victims were Jews, the historical and quintessential 'other' of Western civilization. The Final Solution was not the product of the maniacal race-hatred of its individual perpetrators; it was the product of a pervasive antisemitism that placed the Jewish people outside the bounds of humanity and marked them for .