A History of Zionism (7 page)

The new self-confidence and prosperity were reflected in the life and activities of the communities. The newly established synagogues were substantial and impressive buildings without being ostentatious. The extreme reform movement had made little further progress, but the religious services had been streamlined and shortened, and the sermons were in German. The synagogues became much more dignified, in contrast to the noise and disorder which had characterised the traditional ‘schul’. Those who aspired to become rabbis went to study Judaism scientifically in academic seminaries; the traditional
yeshivot
went out of fashion and ultimately out of existence. But the gain in dignity was accompanied by a further decline in religious belief. One went to the synagogue because this was part of the Jewish way of life as much as the family reunions on Sunday afternoon or particular dishes at weddings.

The ties between the communities were no longer close. According to antisemitic folklore, the
Alliance Israélite Universelle
, founded in Paris in 1860, was the secret Jewish world-government; in fact its main task was the establishment of schools in Morocco and the Balkans. The task of the Anglo-Jewish Association, established in 1870, was also largely educational, while the assignment of the German
Hilfsverein
(1901), the Russian ORT (1899), and the Jewish Colonial Association, established in Paris in 1891, was to help the immigrants from eastern Europe on their way to a new life in America and other parts of the world. A ‘Jewish International’ existed only in the imagination of paranoid antisemites. The newly acquired patriotism of the Jews in western Europe made any closer link between the different communities impossible, nor was there any need felt for a supra-national organisation. It was a cause of great satisfaction to German Jews that the delegation which offered the German crown to the King of Prussia in Versailles in 1871 was headed by Heinrich von Simson, a politician of Jewish origin, and that the group of young maidens
(Ehrenjungfrauen)
who welcomed the emperor upon his return to Berlin was led by a rabbi’s daughter. German Jews who emigrated to the New World maintained not only their customs but their language and cultural links with the old country; they still read Schiller and sang Schubert’s
lieder
; for what had America to offer that was remotely comparable? They were annoyed by the remaining anti-Jewish restrictions, but compared with their position only a few decades earlier the progress made seemed colossal. ‘Friedenthal is a Prussian minister’, Berthold Auerbach wrote to a close friend. ‘Who would have anticipated a generation earlier that a man of Jewish origin would become a minister?’ That this was nothing out of the ordinary was in Auerbach’s view ‘perhaps the most fabulous aspect’. These feelings of satisfaction were sometimes of short duration. ‘I have lived and worked in vain’, Auerbach wrote six years later, commenting on the new antisemitic wave. ‘It is a terrible fact that such brutality, mendacity and hatred are still possible.’ The swing of the pendulum between such extremes of hope and despair was typical of the state of mind of German Jewry during the last quarter of the century. After the great boom of the early 1870s there was a major financial crisis, and individual Jews who had played a prominent part in speculation were made responsible for it. The attack on them (the
‘Gründerschwindel’)
, culminating in a new antisemitic wave, was part of the general onslaught on liberalism, which had never taken deep root in Germany. The anti-Jewish campaign proceeded on various levels: agitation by street-corner rabble-rousers, petitions to limit Jewish influence in public life, the appearance of fresh revelations on the Talmud, the exclusion of Jews from student organisations. Treitschke, one of the leading German historians of the day, coined the phrase which was to gain wide currency: ‘the Jews are our misfortune’. He maintained that only the most radical assimilation would solve the Jewish question; there was no room for two nationalities on German soil. Stöcker, chaplain to the Imperial Court, admonished the Jews to desist both from attacks on Christianity and from their aspirations to amass great fortunes. Wilhelm Marr, who was the first to use the term antisemitism, argued that the penetration of Jewish influence had already gone too far and too deep; the Jews had made the Germans slaves and had become the dictators of the new empire. Marr concluded his observations on a pessimistic note: ‘Let us bow to the inevitable and let us say:
Finis Germaniae’.
Others preached activism and demanded a variety of measures ranging from excluding the Jews from certain professions to their wholesale expulsion from Germany. Various antisemitic leagues and parties were founded, and in 1893 in the elections to the Reichstag, sixteen deputies were elected on a specifically antisemitic platform.

The German Jews were not only deeply shocked but genuinely baffled by these events. The poison they had thought dead was in fact still very much alive, and they looked desperately for an explanation. Could it be that modern antisemitism was a socio-economic phenomenon? There is, no doubt, some connection between the ups and downs of the business cycle in the German economy and the antisemitic movement, from the commercial and agrarian crisis of the post-1815 period, through the boom of the 1870s and the depression of the 1880s, to the world economic crisis and the rise of Nazism in the 1920s. Sometimes the coincidence seems striking: antisemitism sharply increased with the slump of 1873, and it fell almost equally dramatically after 1895 with the opening of a new boom. But such explanations leave many question marks, for while certain anti-Jewish attacks were triggered off by economic crises, others were of different origin; nor does this theory explain the occurrence of antisemitism in pre- and post-capitalist societies. The competitive character of capitalism provided, no doubt, an excellent breeding ground for collective dissatisfaction and insecurity, but why was it that the Jews were singled out for attack? Perhaps they were more exposed than other minorities; perhaps their influence had grown too fast? Whatever the explanation, there were two ominous aspects to the new antisemitism. While the government behaved on the whole correctly, its attitude
vis-à-vis
the Jews was one of icy coldness; it certainly did nothing to denounce or combat antisemitism. Very few non-Jews spoke up for their Jewish fellow citizens; there was no new Lessing to preach humanity and tolerance. More dangerous yet was the changing character of Judaeophobia, the transition from religious to racial antisemitism. Racial theories had existed in an inchoate form since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and had acquired respectability with the spread, from France, of the new, quasi-scientific doctrine of Gobineau and his disciples. In earlier times the enemies of the Jews had put the blame on their religion and on the ritual law which, they claimed, had caused the corruption of the Jewish people. Racial antisemitism rejected these arguments as irrelevant, maintaining that it had discovered the real reasons underlying the ‘Jewish danger’. The antisemitism of Stöcker was a half-way house between the old and the new antisemitism; the Jewish question, he maintained, was not only religious in character; but as a prominent churchman he could not very well accept the materialist concepts of pure racialists such as Dühring, and he referred therefore to the ‘cultural-historical aspects’ of the problem. The transition from religious to racial antisemitism was not as abrupt, and the ties between the old and the new antisemite doctrine not as tenuous, as they subsequently appeared to be. The changing argumentation merely reflected the climate of opinion of the new post-religious phase and the growth of anti-liberal and anti-humanist ideologies in general. Racial antisemitism could spread only among peoples indoctrinated for many centuries with religious anti-semitism who had been taught that the Jews had killed Christ and rejected his mission.

For the German Jews the 1880s thus constituted a turning point, even though only a few realised it at the time. Carried to its logical conclusion, the new antisemitism meant the end of assimilation, the total rejection of the Jew. The magic circle was replaced by a new ghetto whose walls could no longer be scaled. For racial characteristics, according to the new doctrine, were unchangeable; a change of religion and the rejection of his own heritage did not make a Jew into a German, any more than a dog could transform itself into a cat. The antisemitism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century did not weaken the movement for assimilation among the Jews, but its limits became much clearer and even its extreme protagonists admitted that within the foreseeable future Jews would remain distinct from Germans.

Full legal emancipation had been achieved in 1869; no more than a decade later it could have been seen that assimilation would not work. To those who argued on these lines, a national revival among the Jews should have taken place there and then. But the great majority of German Jews did not see it that way, and in retrospect one can see many good reasons for not giving in to the forces of unreason. The
rapprochement
with German civilisation had come a long way; Ludwig Bamberger, the liberal politician, in a book published in the year of crisis stressed that the symbiosis, the identification of the Jews with the Germans, had been closer than with any other people. They had been thoroughly Germanicised well beyond Germany’s borders; through the medium of language they had accepted German culture, and through culture, the German national spirit. He and his friends thought there was obviously some affinity in the national character which attracted Jews so strongly to Germany and to the German spirit
*
. Raphael Loewenfels, in a pamphlet published in 1893, put the case in even blunter terms: were educated Jews not nearer to enlightened Protestants than to the fanatics who believed in the wisdom of the Talmud? Were they not closer to German Catholics than to French Jewry? Whoever still used in his prayers the old formula ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, Loewenfels maintained, should go where his heart drew him. But no educated Jew would be willing to leave his beloved fatherland for a country where in time immemorial his forefathers had lived. This was not just the belief of an individual; it expressed the convictions of a great many Jews. In the year this pamphlet was published, the Central Association (Zentralverein) of German Citizens of Jewish Persuasion was founded, to become later on by far the strongest organisation of German Jewry. The first point in its programme stressed its attachment to Germany: the ties between them and Jews abroad were similar to those between German Catholics and Protestants and their co-religionists in other countries. The Zentralverein stressed the need for Jewish pride and consciousness and rejected the extreme and undignified forms of assimilationism which had proved both ineffective and dangerous, while asserting that for German Jews there was no future but on German soil; in the modern world there were few if any totally homogeneous nations; everywhere different religions and nationalities existed side by side. Despite the particularities setting them apart from the rest, the Zentralverein thought that there was every reason to believe that there would be an honourable place for Jews in the broader framework of the German nation. It is tempting in retrospect to dismiss all this as so much wishful thinking. But the spirit of the age was still basically optimistic, and it was commonly assumed that the appeal of anti-semitism was bound to be restricted to the backward sections of society, in particular to those who had suffered from the consequences of industrialisation. The reaction against the Enlightenment and liberalism, the new cult of violence, and anti-humanism, were thought to be transient cultural maladies. Growing prosperity would help to restore both sanity and social stability. There were more than a few straws in the wind which seemed to justify such optimism: the antisemites, divided into several factions, lost much of their political influence after 1895, though they continued to exist as small sects bitterly fighting each other. The emergence of the new antisemitism had shown that there were grave problems and strains that had been ignored, or at any rate underrated, but there seemed to be no good reason to give up hope.

Nor was there any reason why German and Austrian Jews should regard their own position with special concern. In Russia and Rumania the situation was incomparably worse; from 1881 on eastern Europe was plagued by a series of pogroms. Even in France, which had a smaller Jewish community than Germany, their position was far more precarious. The French antisemitic movement predated Marr, Stöcker, and Dühring; it was more articulate and its influence more widespread. It was, in fact, the pioneer of modern anti-Jewish ideology; the German and Russian antisemites frequently imported their ideas from Paris. Later on, during the Dreyfus affair, antisemitism in France became a nation-wide issue to a far greater extent than in contemporary Germany.

The main attack on assimilation came from within the Jewish camp, from those who maintained that the perfect synthesis between Judaism and western civilisation had nowhere materialised. The assimilated German Jew, as his eastern co-religionists saw it, had lost his Jewish spontaneity and warmth and his inner peace; he had invested a great deal of effort in being like the others but had not achieved the recognition he so much desired, and as a result he was an unhappy being, suffering from a peculiarly painful and apparently incurable form of schizophrenia. This, for instance, was the impression young Chaim Weizmann gained when he came to Germany as a young teacher in the 1890s. German Jews, he found, did not believe in the existence of a Jewish people; they had no real understanding of the nature of anti-semitism; there was no real Jewish life - it was all stuffy, unreal, divorced from the people, lacking warmth, gaiety, colour, and intimacy. In one of his essays
(Avdut betoch Herut
- Slavery in the Midst of Freedom), Ahad Ha’am maintained that western Jews knew in their innermost heart that they were unfree because they lacked a national culture. To justify their existence they had to dispute the view that every people had an individual character and assignment.