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The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

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The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES PERSECUTION PERPETUATED: THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF ANTI-SEMITIC VIOLENCE IN NAZI GERMANY Nico Voigtlaender Hans-Joachim Voth Working Paper 17113 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17113 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 June 2011 We thank Sascha Becker, Efraim Benmelech, Davide Cantoni, Dora Costa, Raquel Fernandez, Jordi Galí, Claudia Goldin, Avner Greif, Elhanan Helpman, Rick Hornbeck, Saumitra Jha, Matthew Kahn, Lawrence Katz, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Petra Moser, Nathan Nunn, Steve Pischke, Leah Platt Boustan, Shanker Satyanath, Kurt Schmidheiny, Andrei Shleifer, Yannay Spitzer, Peter Temin, Matthias Thoenig, and Jaume Ventura for helpful comments. Seminar audiences at CREI, Harvard, NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, UCLA, UPF, Warwick, and at the 2011 Royal Economic Society Conference offered useful criticisms. We are grateful to Hans-Christian Boy for outstanding research assistance, and Jonathan Hersh, Maximilian von Laer, and Diego Puga for help with the geographic data. Davide Cantoni and Noam Yuchtman kindly shared their data on year of incorporation and first market for German cities. Voigtländer acknowledges financial support from the UCLA Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). Voth thanks the European Research Council for generous funding. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. © 2011 by Nico Voigtlaender and Hans-Joachim Voth. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany Nico Voigtlaender and Hans-Joachim Voth NBER Working Paper No. 17113 June 2011 JEL No. N33,N34,N53,N54,Z1,Z10 ABSTRACT How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the 'Night of Broken' Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Nico Voigtlaender UCLA Anderson School of Management 110 Westwood Plaza C513 Entrepreneurs Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095 and NBER [email protected] Hans-Joachim Voth Economics Department UPF & CREI Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27 E-08005 Barcelona and CREI [email protected] I. Introduction From fertility to trust and corruption, there is a growing theoretical literature arguing that cultural norms are powerful determinants of individual behavior (Bisin and Verdier 2001, Tabellini 2008), and that they can persist over long periods (Acemoglu and Jackson 2011). There is also strong empirical support for parental investment creating long-term persistence of attitudes (Fernandez and Fogli 2009, Algan and Cahuc 2010), and for past events and institutional arrangements influencing norms and preferences today (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011, Guiso, Sapienza, Zingales 2008). What is less clear is how long cultural persistence can last, and if it matters for extreme forms of behavior, such as inter-ethnic violence. In this paper, we examine the historical roots of anti-Semitism in interwar Germany. When the Black Death arrived in Europe in 1348-50, it was often blamed on Jews poisoning wells. Many towns and cities (but not all) murdered their Jewish populations. Almost six hundred years later, after defeat in World War I, Germany saw a country-wide rise in anti-Semitism. This led to a wave of persecution, even before the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. We demonstrate that localities with a medieval history of pogroms showed markedly higher levels of anti-Semitism in the interwar period. Attacks on Jews were six times more likely in the 1920s in towns and cities where Jews had been burned in 1348-50; the Nazi Party’s share of the vote in 1928 – when it had a strong anti-Semitic focus – was 1.5 times higher than elsewhere.1 Germany’s persecution of Jews during the early 20th century has been a topic of intense research interest. While some have argued that it can never be rationally explained (Levi 1979), others have pointed to underlying economic and political causes (Glaeser 2005, Arendt 1994, Cohn 2007). That a deep-rooted history of anti-Semitism was ultimately responsible for a wave of hatred has been argued by Goldhagen (1996). He observed that “... the most telling evidence supporting the argument that antisemitism has fundamentally nothing to do with the actions of Jews, and … nothing to do with an antisemite’s knowledge of the real nature of Jews, is the widespread historical and contemporary appearance of antisemitism, even in its most virulent forms, where there are no Jews, and among people who have never met Jews.” Several mechanisms for the perpetuation of hatred have been emphasized, including the role of religion. Passion plays, for example, often portrayed Jews as engaged in deicide (Glassman 1975). Anti- 1 The NSDAP received 2.6 percent of the popular vote in 1928. It only developed into a mass movement after the onset of the Great Depression. 2 Semitic sculptures decorated churches and private houses, and book printing distributed these images widely.2 Several tracts of Martin Luther are strongly anti-Semitic (Oberman 1984). We explore the long-term persistence of inter-ethnic hatred by analyzing a new dataset consisting of a cross-section of more than 1,400 towns and cities in interwar Germany.3 The majority of them was small, with a median population of no more than 18,000 inhabitants in 1925, and a few thousand at most in the Middle Ages. Marriage across towns and migrations were rare, which should have facilitated the persistence of cultural characteristics at the local level. For all these towns, we record if pogroms took place at the time of the Black Death. Several indicators shed light on interwar anti-Semitism. We compile data on anti-Jewish pogroms during the 1920s, votes for the Nazi Party (especially during its early years, when it was not yet a mass movement), readers’ letters to a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper (Der Stürmer), attacks on synagogues during the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ (Reichskristallnacht) in 1938, as well as on deportations of Jews. All these indicators suggest that localities with a history of pogroms in the Middle Ages also showed higher levels of anti-Semitism in the years after 1920. We demonstrate the strength of the link using both standard regression analysis, and by comparing matched pairs of cities based on geographical distance. We also examine the circumstances under which persistence weakens or disappears altogether. Some aspects of culture can change quickly, such as in the case of gays, or of premarital sex (Fernandez-Villaverde, Greenwood, and Guner 2010). We demonstrate that in our sample, persistence disappears for a subset of locations where the costs of discriminating against outsiders was particularly high: Members of the Hanseatic League, which specialized in long-distance trade, show no persistence of anti-Semitism. The same is true for towns and cities that experienced high rates of population growth between the Middle Ages and the early 20th century. This suggests that economic incentives as well as migration can overwhelm the influence of local customs and beliefs. This paper contributes to the literature on the long-run effects of local culture. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) have argued that cultural and religious fragmentation is robustly associated with important outcome variables, such as civil wars, corruption, and public good provision. Bisin and Verdier (2000) build a model of the dynamics of cultural transmission, and show under what 2 Churches from Cologne to Brandenburg contained (and many still contain) a sculpture of a so-called ‘Judensau,’ the image of a female pig in intimate contact with several Jews shown in demeaning poses (Shachar 1974). The same type of sculpture can also be found in Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and the Low Countries. 3 We will not be able to distinguish between anti-Semitism and a hatred of minorities in general – Jews were the single largest minority in Germany at the time. 3 conditions heterogeneity of ethnic and cultural traits can survive over the long run.4 Tabellini (2008) examines interactions of individuals with different degrees of ‘morality,’ and shows how their proportion varies as a result of parental investment. Recently, the historical roots of present-day conditions have attracted attention. Fernandez and Fogli (2009) show that the fertility of immigrants’ children continues to be influenced by the fertility in their parents’ country of origin. Algan and Cahuc (2010) demonstrate that inherited trust is a powerful predictor of economic performance.
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