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The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late 19Th-Century Germany

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The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late 19Th-Century Germany The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late 19th-Century Germany Weir, T. H. (2013). The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late 19th-Century Germany. Central European History, 46(4), 815-849. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938913001295 Published in: Central European History Document Version: Peer reviewed version Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2014 General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:26. Sep. 2021 Central European History 46 (2013), 1–35. © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2013 doi:10.1017/S0008938913001295 1 2 3 The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism 4 and the “Jewish Question” in Late 5 6 Nineteenth-Century Germany 7 8 Todd H. Weir 9 10 11 12 HEN asked to provide his own “solution to the Jewish Question” 13 for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner 14 responded, “I do not know how to give an answer to your question, 15 W because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is 16 posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every 17 location.”1 While untypical for its time, Mauthner’s viewpoint is shared by many 18 scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of “Jewish Questions” prolifer- 19 ated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas 20 they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the pur- 21 ported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and 22 thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this 23 excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and anti- 24 nomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative 25 antisemitism, they have examined the role of the “Jewish Question” in other 26 political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elab- 27 oration of the state, civil society, and the nation.2 Cast in ambivalent roles at once 28 powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a 29 lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared 30 31 32 Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Stroum Jewish Studies Program of the University 33 of Washington, Vanderbilt University, the University of Marburg, and at the conference “Beloved ” 34 Enemy: Philosemitism in History, at the Moses Mendelsohn Center, Potsdam. Thanks are owed to Michael Rosenthal, Helmut Walser Smith, Jochen-Christoph Kaiser and the other participants 35 at these events. I am also grateful to Ari Joskowicz, Uffa Jensen, and the anonymous reader of 36 Central European History for helpful suggestions. The essay is dedicated to the memory of my uncle 37 John McMillan, who read it and applied his skills as a longtime newspaper editor to indicate where I might rephrase overly stuffy sentences in plain English. He will be missed. 38 1Julius Moses, ed., Die Lösung der Judenfrage. Eine Rundfrage (Berlin: C. Wigand, 1907), 144. 39 2Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, NJ: 40 Princeton University Press, 1996); Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Wendy Brown, 41 Regulating Aversion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Lars Fischer, The Socialist 42 Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 1 2 TODD H. WEIR 43 common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the 44 nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something his- 45 torians have referred to as the “emancipation contract.”3 Generally speaking, it 46 was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from 47 conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the 48 nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the 49 “Jewish Question” not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a frame- 50 work through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.4 51 This essay concerns the “Jewish Question” of one modern movement— 52 worldview secularism—as it emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. 53 Secularism encompassed the anticlerical movements affiliated with the political 54 left, which sought not merely the separation of church and state, but also the 55 replacement of Christianity by an immanent, natural scientific worldview. In 56 the course of conducting research into the history of German secularism, I 57 found that the “Jewish Question” popped up in the sources in initially surprising, 58 but upon further inspection, quite systematic patterns. Antisemites regularly 59 spoke of “godless Judaism,” while liberal and Jewish secularists wrestled over 60 the issue of Jewish difference in a movement whose naturalistic worldview was 61 generally understood to be unitary and universal. By following these patterns, 62 this essay hopes to cast light on strong and hitherto relatively unexamined 63 dynamics at work within nineteenth-century German secularism, Jewish 64 liberalism, and antisemitism. It also calls into question assumptions found in 65 those theoretical models that have been put forward to describe changes to 66 nineteenth-century church-state relations in Germany and elsewhere. 67 68 Secularism and the Confessional State 69 Historians, literary scholars, and political theorists have recently appropriated the 70 term “secularism” to describe not the belief of the freethinkers who coined it in 71 the 1850s, but rather the modern liberal doctrine and governmental practice of 72 separation of church and state.5 Here the problem posed by the Jewish religious 73 74 75 3On the “emancipation contract,” see David Cesarani, “British Jews,” in The Emancipation of 76 Catholics, Jews, and Protestants: Minorities and the Nation State in Nineteenth-century Europe, ed. Rainer Liedtke and Stephan Wendehorst (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 77 1999), 33–55. 78 4Nadia Valman and Tony Kushner, eds., Philosemitism, Antisemitism and “the Jews”: Perspectives from 79 the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Uffa Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger. Bürgerliche Juden und Protestanten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); 80 Irene Diekmann, Elke-Vera Kotowski, and Julius Hans Schoeps, eds., Geliebter Feind—Gehasster 81 Freund. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: VBB, 2009); Jonathan 82 Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, eds., Philosemitism in History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 5Two texts that have anchored state secularism as a key issue in postcolonial theory are Rajeev 83 Bhargava, ed., Secularism and its Critics (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and 84 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University THE SPECTER OF “GODLESS JEWRY” 3 85 minority in a Christian nation has been highlighted as the paradigmatic case 86 through which this separation was achieved, but one that also reveals a chief anti- 87 nomy of liberal universalism. As scholars such as Dagmar Herzog and Aamir Mufti 88 have shown, liberal commitment to the full emancipation of Jews was the guar- 89 antee of the universality of the state, the nation, humanity, and the public sphere, 90 yet the persistence of Jewish difference posed a challenge to this very universality.6 91 In the resultant tension between assimilation of minority difference and ongoing 92 hostility to it, the modern state and civil society developed the concept of toler- 93 ance. Political philosopher Wendy Brown describes tolerance as a discursive prac- 94 tice that extended rights to Jews while it placed them on notice that these rights 95 could be withdrawn if they did not adhere to majoritarian expectations. A toler- 96 ated minority is thus one subject to regulation and the threat of intolerance.7 In 97 short, the tolerance of religious minorities has been described in this literature as a 98 necessarily contradictory, but ultimately successful means by which the nine- 99 teenth-century European states and liberal society extended their hegemony 100 over the nation. 101 This conclusion sits uneasily with developments in nineteenth-century Prussia 102 and the German Reich, where, at crucial junctures, the state resisted separation 103 from the church and modified rather than abandoned the classification of the 104 population according to religious affiliation.
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