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Paths to Genocide Antisemitism in Western History

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Paths to Genocide Antisemitism in Western History PATHS TO GENOCIDE Also by Lionel B. Steiman FRANZ WERFEL: The Faith of an Exile, from Prague to Beverly Hills Paths to Genocide Antisemitism in Western History Lionel B. Steiman Professor ofHistory The University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Canada © 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 States, 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 British Library. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-25615 For Bonnie In Memory of Maxwell Steiman Contents Preface viii Introduction xi 1. Christianity and Crusades: The Saviour and the Jews 2. Segregation and Expulsion: The Devil 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: Liberalism, Nationalism, Racism 117 7. Imperial Gennany and Habsburg Austria: Ideology, Politics, Culture 143 8. Russia and France: Antisemitism, Zionism, the New World 179 9. Nazi Gennany: The Final Solution 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 the Holocaust 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 Soviet Union, to the resurgence of antisemitism in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, to Arab antisemitism in the Middle East after the establishment of the state of Israel, to black antisemitism in the United States since the civil rights movement 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 murder 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 histories. 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 Leon Poliakov. 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. Jew-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 Synagogue (1934) and numerous subsequent works delineated the role of the Church in the persecution of Jewry. More accusatory, polemical a.::counts began to appear after the war, 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 crime 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 New Testament. while Jeremy Cohen •. in The Friars and the Jews (1982). indicted the medieval friars for giving a practical twist to the more abstract snti·Judaism 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 God'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 Inquisition in Fifteenth Ceruury Spain (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 history of antisemitism" 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, Religion, 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 Prejudice to Destruction (1980), Jacob Katz showed how traditiona1 prejudices 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
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